Cheers to the Equal Justice Initiative Campaign in Montgomery
December 16, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Ceremony to unveil one of the markers, outside the EJI building. Photo: eji.org.
Cheers to the Equal Justice Initiative for launching a campaign to post signs in the city of Montgomery, Alabama identifying locations where the slave trade was conducted in that city, as part of the brutal slave society that characterized the South before the Civil War. One sign says: “Warehouses used in the slave trade. There were more than 20,000 slaves in Montgomery, more than in New Orleans or Natchez, Mississippi, and Montgomery played a major role in the slave trade, with slave pens and depots for the sale or transfer of slaves to the plantations of the region.” Bryan Stevenson, the director of this project, made clear the reason for doing this: “If you don’t understand slavery you can’t possibly understand the civil rights movement and you certainly can’t understand the Civil War.” According to the New York Times, Equal Justice Initiative is also researching sites where lynchings of Black people took place, and plan to post signs at those sites as well. For the next phases, Stevenson is "considering ways to explore publicly the psychological consequences of the Jim Crow South, especially among those who experienced it, and then to focus on what he sees as an extension of this long history"—the mass incarceration of Black people today.
To learn more about this campaign, go to the Equal Justice Initiative website at eji.org.
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.