A new exhibition seeks to ignite a painful conversation in the US about “racial terror” from the past by shedding light on the lynching of more than 4,000 African-Americans.
Inspired by post-apartheid reconciliation efforts in South Africa, memorials to genocide in Rwanda and German rehabilitation after the Holocaust, campaigners have said US reconciliation on slavery and its aftermath is long overdue.
The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America opened on Wednesday and is to run through Sept. 3 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York’s most populous borough, home to a large African-American population.
The exhibition showcases testimony from descendants of victims, contemporary African-American art in response to racism, photographs and an interactive map showing where lynchings took place, the bulk of them in the south.
More than 4,000 African-American men, women and children were lynched in 20 states from 1877 to 1950, according to research carried out by the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative, headed by internationally acclaimed Alabama lawyer Bryan Stevenson.
They were often targeted for innocuous offenses, or on little or no evidence. White communities complicit in the violence and torture were never held accountable. More than 6 million blacks migrated north and west to escape.
“We’ve really done a poor job in this country in confronting this history of racial violence, this era of terrorism that so profoundly shaped America,” Stevenson told reporters.
“We really haven’t talked about slavery and its legacy. We haven’t talked at all about lynching. So I’m hoping this exhibit provokes a conversation that is long overdue and is necessary,” he added.
“We have unarmed African-Americans being shot and killed by the police. There’s a lot of tension, there’s a lot of rage, there’s a lot of frustration about our lack of progress in achieving racial equality, and I think a lot of that stems from our failure to deal honestly with the roots of that,” he said.
Brooklyn Museum assistant curator of special projects Sara Softness said the team mounted the exhibition with “the utmost care and sensitivity.”
“Perhaps we need to intervene,” she told reporters. “Art at its very best has that power to make you question and to challenge certain notions, and in that way culture can really be a catalyst for change.”
Stevenson has helped to win reversals, relief or release for more than 130 wrongly condemned death row prisoners, and won a ruling that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for those aged 17 or younger are unconstitutional.
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