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Hi friends. This is a letter from Travis about his non-profit organization for his hometown  marching band.

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Hi friends. This is a letter from Travis about his non-profit organization for his hometown  marching band.

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file:///var/mobile/Library/SMS/Attachments/88/08/46EE64AA-B44D-41F5-8C54-827F79774A04/FILE_5259.docx

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By request, just sharing a moment from our first full day together... coming down for breakfast, we shared the elevator with a woman and a girl in a wheelchair. Woman was very Southern friendly - ie too chatty for me so early in the morning so I let Maurice engage in the pleasantries. However, once at the food display, she persisted and asked where I was from. So, I let go and engaged. She then shared that they were locals but stayed at hotel to be near the immigration office - the girl in the wheelchair was her adopted daughter from Ukraine and they were going to get her citizenship papers! Divine intervention to provide an uplifting way to start the day.

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Another word from the Bishop

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“I ain’t afraid of your jail.”

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History of Rock and Roll Playlist (Based on Scott's Talk, with additions and marginalia)

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Also including Sun Studios tracks

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History of Rock and Roll Playlist (Based on Scott's Talk, with additions and marginalia)

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The Beloved Community Talks: Former KKK Member Breaks The Cycle of Hate

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The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change

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The Beloved Community Talks: Former KKK Member Breaks The Cycle of Hate

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I posted the top two pieces ; sorry anonymous

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In a short documentary, a former KKK leader reconnects with the African American woman who helped raise him.

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https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/reformed-racists-white-supremacists-life-after-hate/amp/

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Read More About Reformed Racists: Is There Life After Hate for Former White Supremacists?

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Remarkable stories of redemption for former white power leaders who changed their racist ways, including Scott Shepherd, seen in Accidental Courtesy.

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From Jenn: "Thank You, Ma'am," by Langston Hughes (short story)

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From Jenn: "Thank You, Ma'am," by Langston Hughes (short story)

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Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice | TED

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Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice | TED

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Opinion | The Superpredator Myth Did a Lot of Damage. Courts Are Beginning to See the Light.

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Shared by Matt.

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Credit... Jamiel Law

James Forman Jr. and

Mr. Forman is the faculty director of Yale's Law and Racial Justice Center, where Ms. Vinson is the executive director.

Over the past decade, many Americans have come to agree that we lock up too many people, for too long, in miserable conditions. But despite a growing political movement against prisons, imprisonment rates remain stubbornly high, and the United States is still the world leader in incarceration. To meaningfully shrink the prison system will require states to do something few have wanted to do: reduce some of the extremely long sentences imposed in the 1990s.

Revisiting lengthy sentences, especially for people who committed acts of violence, has always been considered one of the third rails of criminal justice reform. But two recent developments in Connecticut - one from the State Supreme Court, the other from the Board of Pardons and Paroles - offer important examples of state officials overcoming this reluctance.

In January the Connecticut Supreme Court reversed the 60-year sentence imposed on Keith Belcher, a Black teenager, for sexual assault and armed robbery committed when he was 14. Mr. Belcher was sentenced in 1997, at the height of the superpredator panic. The brainchild of a political science professor, John J. DiIulio Jr., the superpredator theory argued that America in the 1990s faced an unrivaled new crime threat: a large and growing generation of unusually violent teenagers. Tapping into the country's long history of racialized fear, he argued that these superpredators would disproportionately be Black boys.

His claim quickly found a ready audience. The media, police and politicians lapped it up. Unfortunately for Mr. Belcher, so did Judge Michael Hartmere, who said this at Mr. Belcher's sentencing hearing:

Professor DiIulio of Princeton University has coined the term "superpredator," which refers to a group of radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters who assault, rape, rob and burglarize. Mr. Belcher, you are a charter member of that group. You have no fears, from your conduct, of the pains of imprisonment, nor do you suffer from the pangs of conscience.

Judge Hartmere then imposed a sentence that could have kept Mr. Belcher incarcerated until his mid-70s. This is where the story might have ended, as it too often does. The convicted person goes to a prison cell, appeals and loses. The system moves on.

But Mr. Belcher got lucky. Because the trial judge explicitly cited a theory that had been proved wrong (in 2001, Professor DiIulio acknowledged as much), Mr. Belcher's court-appointed attorneys, Natalie Olmstead and Alexandra Harrington, challenged the sentence on the grounds that it was based on "materially false information." What could be more false, they asked, than a theory widely disavowed, including by its own author?

The Connecticut Supreme Court agreed and, to its credit, addressed the racist underpinnings of the superpredator theory. The court pointed out that "at the time that adolescence was being recognized as a distinct developmental stage for white children, many Black children remained enslaved and were viewed as subhuman." Racism's logic was that Black children didn't need to be protected; they needed to be worked, disciplined and punished. Mr. Belcher's 60-year sentence, the court concluded, could be understood only in the context of that history and its long afterlife.

The superpredator myth infected our legal system even when judges didn't invoke it openly. Kristin Henning, a law professor at Georgetown and the author of "The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth," told us: "Looking back to cases from the 1990s, you won't see too many judges use the word 'superpredator,' but it was definitely in the air. You can see it in the juvenile transfer laws that allowed young people to be tried as adults and in the long sentences many teenagers got. They all stem from that same idea that Black children must be feared and controlled. The Belcher opinion rejects that way of thinking."

As extreme as Mr. Belcher's punishment was, it fits into a larger pattern: Excessively long sentences are pervasive in the American criminal justice system. In 2015 one in six prisoners in state prisons - more than in any other country - had been incarcerated for at least 10 years. In 2020 the Sentencing Project reported that more than 200,000 U.S. prisoners were serving life sentences, exceeding the entire prison population of 1970. Almost half of those lifers were Black. What are the pathways to relief in those cases?

In a few jurisdictions, prosecutors can review excessive sentences; in some others, judges can. But for most prisoners, the only source of relief is the state parole board.

That's why it's notable that even as the Belcher decision repudiated an ill-founded, punitive approach to teenage crime, Connecticut's parole board adopted a humane alternative. The board considered the emerging brain science research showing that teenagers and young adults often lack the ability to weigh the long-term consequences of their actions yet are capable of change with age. In December 2021 and January 2022, the board commuted the sentences of 12 men who had committed crimes before they turned 25.

The first one to get relief was Michael Cox, a Black man serving a 75-year sentence for his role in two murders, aiding and abetting a manslaughter and an assault with a firearm that occurred when he was 19 years old. The teenage Mr. Cox was impulsive and quick to resort to violence. The 49-year-old Mr. Cox, appearing before the parole board, was a man eager to be involved in anti-violence work with young people after leaving prison.

What happened in the intervening decades? Mr. Cox signed up for every rehabilitative program he could find, earned his high school diploma and college credits, worked as a certified nurse assistant taking care of other incarcerated people and mentored younger men in his prison.

Like Mr. Cox, the 11 other men to receive commutations committed violent crimes as teenagers or young adults; most were in for murder. Like Mr. Cox, most had spent more years behind bars than they had lived before their crime. And like Mr. Cox, most had grasped at whatever rehabilitative or educational opportunities came their way.

Why are such commutations so rare? While some state legislatures constrained or eliminated parole in the 1990s, in most states the parole board still has enormous power to offer second chances to incarcerated people. But most parole boards - including for many years, Connecticut's - have refused to do so. As the criminal justice scholars Kevin R. Reitz and Edward E. Rhine note, parole board members are risk-averse political appointees with little job security. "Members or entire boards," they write, "have been forced to resign after a single high-profile crime committed by a released prisoner." Typically, parole boards are most hostile toward those who have committed crimes of violence, often refusing to consider anything other than the offense itself during rote hearings that morph into decades of denials.

That's why it matters so much that the Connecticut parole board has begun to chart a new course. Since more than 50 percent of people in state prison are serving sentences for violent crimes, we will never end the scourge of mass incarceration if we write off this group. Since decades of research have proved that older people are rarely violent, extremely long sentences can almost never be justified on public safety grounds. And since some incarcerated people have found ways to change and thrive in conditions few of us could tolerate, the system should have pathways to recognize their efforts.

The decisions of Connecticut's Supreme Court and its Board of Pardons and Paroles offer hope to a generation locked up during the hyperpunitive 1990s. They remind us that nobody should be sentenced to death, whether by execution or death in prison. If we are ever to undo the ravages of mass incarceration, we will need many more decisions like them.

James Forman, Jr., (@jformanjr) is a law professor at Yale and the faculty director of the Law and Racial Justice Center there; Kayla Vinson is the center's executive director.
The Times is committed to publishing Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | The Superpredator Myth Did a Lot of Damage. Courts Are Beginning to See the Light.

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James Forman Jr. and Mr. Forman is the faculty director of Yale's Law and Racial Justice Center, where Ms. Vinson is the executive director. Over the past decade, many Americans have come to agree that we lock up too many people, for too long, in miserable conditions.

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Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I-it” relationship for an “I-thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and awful…

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Boker Tov
My quote of the day
Paul

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Too much text to be inclusive of all exemplars of this trip.
# 1 idea to do it thank you Tara and TBE
#2 ETGAR and organization.
#3 Scott Fried as our tour guide
#4 is itinerary
#5 people on trip
#6 mind body and spirit to absorb the history of our past relate to our present and future
With gratitude for time to be here to my work and colleagues
From alice and fern

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https://www.selmatemple.org

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Your gift will help the Selma Temple realize its vision of restoring and revitalizing a historic Jewish sanctuary for worship - and reopening the Temple doors as a venue and community gathering space for all Selma residents and visitors to Selma.

We accept donations via PayPal or check payable to Congregation Mishkan Israel of Selma, Alabama (tax ID 63-0858492). Checks may be mailed to PO Box 510, Selma, AL 36702.

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Your gift will help the Selma Temple realize its vision of restoring and revitalizing a historic Jewish sanctuary for worship - and reopening the Temple doors as a venue and community gathering space for all Selma residents and visitors to Selma. We accept donations via PayPal or check payable to Congregation Mishkan Israel of Selma, Alabama (tax ID 63-0858492).

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As New Lynching Memorial Opens, A Look Back On America's History Of Racial Terrorism

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DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. Last Thursday, a memorial dedicated to thousands of victims of American lynchings opened in Montgomery, Ala. The national memorial for peace and justice sits on a 6-acre site overlooking the Alabama state Capitol. It features 800 weathered steel columns hanging from a roof, each one etched with the name of an American county and victims of racial violence who died there - some simply recorded as unknown.

The memorial and a companion museum are the work of the Equal Justice Initiative whose founder and executive director, Bryan Stevenson, is a public interest lawyer who led a team that spent years combing through records to document more than 4,000 cases of lynchings.

We're devoting most of today's show to this dark period in American history. We begin with a story from the great jazz bassist Milt Hinton, known as the dean of bassists, whose career spanned the history of jazz. He died in 2000 at the age of 90. Hinton played with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman and Dizzy Gillespie just to name a few. He spoke with WHYY's Marty Moss-Coane in 1988 when Marty was filling in for Terry on FRESH AIR. Milt Hinton was born in 1910 in Vicksburg, Miss.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

MARTY MOSS-COANE, BYLINE: What kind of a place was Vicksburg?

MILT HINTON: Well, for a black guy like me, it wasn't too easy. It wasn't too good. I don't remember too many bad things about it except one lynching that I really saw once that was very frightening to me.

MOSS-COANE: When you were about 7 or 8 years ago.

HINTON: Seven years old - yeah, I saw this and...

MOSS-COANE: What did you see?

HINTON: I saw this great mob of people there. And they were carrying - a lot of noise. And there was guns shooting. And being inquisitive like any little boy, I just walked up to it. My aunt was trying to pull me away. And there was this black man hung up on a tree, and they put a drum of gasoline under him. And the gasoline - the fire was burning. He was running like a piece of bacon. But the guy had long been dead because he had been accused of looking in some window or something at somebody undressing. And...

MOSS-COANE: What kind of impression did that leave on you?

HINTON: Well, I couldn't really understand it. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It didn't leave me with the impression that this was a human being. It was just a body here. But the sad part - when I got home, my grandmother and all of the black ladies in the neighborhood were getting their children - their boy children together, and they would put black pepper in the socks of the children...

MOSS-COANE: Why?

HINTON: ...In the boys. So that if a dog came to smell them, the dog wouldn't - would go away. So they would be - in case the dog came and barked or whatever. But if they had black pepper in their socks, that dog wouldn't come near them.

DAVIES: Milt Hinton speaking with Marty Moss-Coane in 1988. Many lynchings were actually commemorated at the time with picture postcards, showing black men and women hanging from trees, lampposts and bridges while white spectators watched in approval. More than a hundred of those postcards were collected by James Allen and reprinted in his book "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography In America." Terry interviewed James Allen in 2000. He told her about one of the postcards he found particularly disturbing.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

JAMES ALLEN: One of the postcards that - and the incident - that has really disturbed me with time is the image of Jesse Washington of Waco, Texas. Particularly disturbing is the mass of people - 15,000 people - that came to relish the torture that day. Some of the photos were taken from the mayor's office window. A particular image is Jesse Washington hanging from a recently raised telephone pole. This is after he was tortured and burned alive at the stake.

They dragged him six miles to Robinson, Texas, and hung him up for a crowd to see. They put a loincloth around him. And a man by the name of Joe Myers purchased this card, put an X over his head, sent it home to his mother and wrote on the back, this is the barbecue we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your son, Joe. Another thing about this card, which I forgot to mention, is that it was used as an advertisement for - the photographer has a stamp on the back called Katy Electric Studio. Temple, Texas. H. Lippe Proprietor.

TERRY GROSS, BYLINE: So you're supposed to call him and ask him to do your family photos after seeing this lynching?

ALLEN: Exactly. Fifteen thousand people would have been a tremendous amount - percentage of the population of that county to be there at that incident. The mayor's main concern during the incident was that the tree - the central oak tree that they used to chain him to and to raise him in and out of the fire so they could prolong his death - would not be harmed.

GROSS: What was the function of these lynching postcards? Was this supposed to, like, commemorate the hanging that you attended?

ALLEN: They were - besides the obvious function of sensationalism and the profitable nature of these images for photographers - many of them were sold on the streets in drug stores, through the mail - they served to bond the white community together in supremacy. They also were news events that were highly covered by the press. So these images were small newspapers that people posted through the mail and sent to their relatives to say, this is what happened in our hometown.

GROSS: You feel really awful looking at these lynching photographs because they're so brutal. They're so grotesque. It's the ultimate violation of the victims. Why do you want them on exhibit?

ALLEN: Well, to begin with - to respond to your question, you hit it right on the head. It isn't just the ultimate violation. It was every violation possible. There wasn't any way that was ignored. They were as creative as possible in just - in torture and in domination of African-Americans.

GROSS: Do you think that we can learn a lot about the history of lynchings - who was lynched, who was responsible for the lynchings - by looking at these photographs?

ALLEN: Oh, absolutely. The people who were ashamed of these lynchings left. The people who were disgusted with the theater and the painful torture, brutality - they're not in these photos. The people who are left are the people who were proud. They gloried in the event, just like a dog that rolls around in dirt. They wanted to be there, and they wanted people to see them. They are very informative because Americans - white and black - have never had an opportunity to see these images.

So we don't have a visual vocabulary of what this type of hate and violence really is. It's not something we see in ourselves as a nation. We promote ourselves on a higher plane - moral plane. So this is a reality check and also a new chance to think things over - to stop discounting African-Americans' complaints and consider the fact that - yes, racial profiling does happen.

Yes, there is a disparity of black and white people - men and women on death row. And that - those things are a direct outcome of this period where the law in the communities sanctioned violence against African-Americans. It wasn't just a few people. This would not have happened without the participation of all branches of government.

GROSS: There's one photograph from January of 1916, the lynching of John Richards. And Richards is hanging from a tree with his pants pulled down. And several of the guys responsible for the lynching are smiling over an open coffin that is waiting for Richards. And this is a photograph from Goldsboro, N.C. There's pictures of victims who have been burned or shot before or after the hanging. In fact, you say, I think, that shooting the dead body was a common sport.

ALLEN: Absolutely. Some of the bodies were so full of lead that they were difficult to move. Everyone wanted to participate. In one lynching in Kentucky, they actually sold tickets. I can't remember. It was 5 cents or 50 cents a ticket, and that got you a seat in a theater and a shot of the victim.

GROSS: Most of the pictures of lynchings are pictures of men being lynched.

ALLEN: Mm-hmm (ph).

GROSS: But there are a couple of women. One of them is a picture of Laura Nelson and her son hung side by side from a bridge over a river and the spectators are all lined up on top of the bridge looking down at the swinging bodies. This is from May of 1911 in Okemah, Okla. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right.

ALLEN: That's right, Okemah.

GROSS: What do you know about this particular lynching?

ALLEN: Lauren Nelson and her son and her husband had a little farm outside of Okemah. A sheriff's posse came to their cabin. The sheriff, the deputy sheriff, went inside and - looking for stolen meat. And somehow during this process, the son shot the deputy sheriff with a squirrel rifle. He crawled outside the cabin. A gun battle ensued in which Laura and her son kept the posse away for a couple hours. And the deputy sheriff died outside because the posse couldn't reach to help him.

They took Laura and her son to jail. Laura claimed that she did the shooting. She desperately tried to protect her son. She begged them to kill her in the prison. He was only 14 years old. They came in the middle of the night and took them by wagon, 40 men, and wagon them 12 miles over this shiny new bridge over the Canadian River and raped Laura Nelson and hung them from this bridge.

The saddest thing - and this is really what motivated us to go out and really seek out these images - is that what Laura Nelson represented was the finest qualities that we would look for in a person. And the white community, the majority, turned those into the worst qualities. They called her a small, very black, vicious woman, and her son they called yellow and cowardly.

GROSS: How did you find out this story? Was it reported in a newspaper? Were you able to find it there?

ALLEN: In this case we were lucky because the card had Okemah, Okla., on it, so we could do the research easily. These were widely reported in the press. They sold a lot of newspapers.

GROSS: What do you know about what happened to the bodies of the people who were lynched after they were cut down?

ALLEN: We've tried to find evidence of this. It seems at the present that many of these victims can be found in unmarked graves with some effort by the communities. Several communities in the United States have sought out the grave sites now and are trying to build memorials for those victims. In one case, the victim's body - The New York Times wrote that the victim's body was a pink elephant on the hands of the townspeople because nobody would come to claim it. People were scared.

DAVIES: James Allen spoke with Terry Gross in 2000. After a short break, we'll hear more about the dark history of lynching in America with historian Philip Dray. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOLLAR BRAND AND ARCHIE SHEPP'S "FORTUNATO")

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened last week in Montgomery, Ala., honors the victims of lynchings and documents this period of racial terror. Today on FRESH AIR we're listening back to interviews about this dark chapter of American history. Historian Philip Dray is the author of "At The Hands Of Persons Unknown: The Lynching Of Black America." Terry Gross interviewed Philip Dray in 2002.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

GROSS: What do you think is the importance of understanding the place of lynching in American history?

PHILIP DRAY: I had suspected of course that it was a very powerful influence on black Americans in the years after the Civil War and into the 20th century. But what I found was that it was not only a very intense psychological influence on black families - for instance, the way they would raise their children. You wouldn't want to raise your son to be particularly ambitious or bold for fear that he would attract the attention of a lynch mob.

Secondly, it forced families to migrate. Lynching was so endemic in various parts of the South around the turn of the century that it contributed to the northward migration of about 1 1/2 to 2 million blacks. Of course that's a famous thing in American history, the great migration.

It also created a lot of reform efforts that things that are very familiar to us like the NAACP, which was for many years of course the largest and really only black civil rights organization in America, really got off to a start because of lynching. It was in reaction to a riot in Springfield, Ill., in 1908 that was - had started because of a lynching that progressive whites and blacks came together and said, we have to get together and do something about this. And indeed the NAACP made fighting lynching one of their top priorities for many years well into the 1940s.

GROSS: What were the justifications that white people in the South used for hanging black men? I mean, it's not only taking justice into your own hands, but it's doing it in an incredibly cruel and hideous way.

DRAY: Right. And it wasn't only hanging. It was - some of the more spectacular lynchings were actually immolations. But of course hanging was also common, as was just shooting. The chief justification or the most sensational one was the rape of white women. In other words, this was a very - obviously a very hot-button sort of issue, and it was one that would never fail to inspire a lynch mob to form. That reason was often given as to why the men of the South had to protect white women and, you know, therefore protect the white race, really. It had to do with a kind of destabilizing atmosphere that came in the 1890s.

It's a little mysterious because it was - lynching was a kind of a mass hysteria, really. And so it's hard to really point to the reasons, except it was a period in which the first generation of blacks who had not been slaves or born in slavery were coming of age. And the white South was under assault, really, in many ways from not really knowing how to deal with this minority population in its midst.

At the same time, white women were entering the workforce, working in textile mills and that sort of thing. And so there was a kind of pressure placed on white men to kind of hold onto the status quo. And many scholars feel that that is what triggered this kind of hysteria of seeing black rapists lurking behind every tree, basically.

GROSS: What have you found out about who participated in lynchings, who organized them?

DRAY: That's a very difficult thing to say. As the title of my book, "At The Hands Of Persons Unknown," implies, at the hands of persons unknown was almost invariably the coroner's verdict when a lynching victim was found. It was a euphemism that basically meant to suggest that no persons had really committed the crime of lynching, but rather it had been an expression of the community's will.

So this researching who the perpetrators of lynchings were is very difficult because the purpose of lynching was to obfuscate things that ordinarily in a trial would come out, say in a trial transcript or lawyers' arguments or an interrogation that was recorded, that sort of thing. So you're left really with a lot of just kind of reading the tea leaves. Generally, from just anecdotal evidence mostly provided by newspapers, most lynchings you get the sense that it was - they were led by a - sort of a inner circle of firebrands who were rousing everyone up. There were usually many, many young men involved, boys from the age of 10 up.

And then beyond that you had sort of the rest of the community that might not really approve but didn't want to miss out on it. So really - they really were like community events. It's not uncommon to read newspaper accounts of lynchings in small towns where it's reported that every citizen in the town was there.

DAVIES: Philip Dray is the author of "At The Hands Of Persons Unknown: The Lynching Of Black America." He spoke with Terry in 2002. We'll continue their conversation after a break, and writer Mat Johnson will tell us how his great-grandfather narrowly escaped being lynched. I'm Dave Davies and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STRANGE FRUIT")

BILLIE HOLIDAY: (Singing) Southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root. Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. Pastoral scene of the gallant South, the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth. Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, then the sudden smell of burning flesh. Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck, for the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, for the sun to rot, for the tree to drop. Here is a strange and bitter crop.

(SOUNDBITE OF WYNTON MARSALIS' "ELVEEN")

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. Last Thursday, a national memorial honoring the victims of American lynchings opened in Montgomery, Ala. We're focusing most of today's show on this troubled period of American history. Let's get back to Terry's 2002 interview with historian Philip Dray, author of "At The Hands Of Persons Unknown: The Lynching Of Black America."

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

GROSS: Is there anything like this that you can find in American history? Like the kind of lynchings that became public spectacles and public events where everybody showed up, maybe brought a picnic lunch and, you know, watched it like it was a movie or a theater event.

DRAY: I can't really think of anything. Probably the closest thing is a religious revival, you know, an outdoor religious revival in the South. For instance, you know, we've all seen these kind of things depicted in films where, you know, the families show up, and it's a daylong event and people get very carried away. It's a very emotional experience. I mean, that's - it's important to point out to that lynching itself was, in many - essentially with spectacle lynchings, was a kind of quasi-religious experience because it was so ritualized. And it seemed to suggest a kind of expiation on the part of the lynch mob.

In other words, often lynchings would follow a period in which white and black relations in a particular community were - had become very tense. And so the lynching served as almost a kind of a release - like a sacrifice. Meanwhile, of course you had the Southern white population still sort of reeling from the Civil War and lashing out at the people, namely blacks, who they saw as the cause of this dilemma. So it was a kind of catharsis, a sense of release.

And it was important to completely destroy the victim because it was believed that if you completely destroyed a person and left really no part of them extant, they wouldn't go to heaven. And so you'll find that in most lynchings, not only was the person killed or immolated, but then what remained of them was cut up and handed out as souvenirs.

GROSS: Let's look at some of the opposition to lynching. You write a lot about Ida B. Wells and how she became an anti-lynching activist. And you quote something very eloquent that she said. (Reading) No other nation, civilized or savage, burns its criminals. Only under the stars and stripes is the human Holocaust possible. What was her approach to trying to stop lynching?

DRAY: Just as the quote you read suggested, she was outraged about lynching. And she was really the first anti-lynching crusader to appear. She got involved in 1892. She was a journalist in Memphis. And three of her friends who ran a grocery store were lynched because their business was threatening the business of a competing white grocery store. And so when that occurred, she realized that the rationale about the black rapists threatening white women was really just that. It was just, like, a rationale or an excuse because these friends of hers had been perfectly legitimate businessmen.

She began editorializing about lynching and researching lynchings herself in the South. And for her trouble, she was driven away. Basically, a mob trashed her newspaper office and warned that if she ever came back, she herself would be lynched. So she moved to New York and went on a - kind of a - about a 15 or 20-year international crusade both in Britain and the United States lecturing and writing about lynching. All she could do, really, was try to bring it to people's attention.

In other words, at that time, many of these events occurred in the South where news of these events didn't necessarily always come out. Or by the time it did, it was so shaded against the person who had been lynched that there wasn't a great deal of sympathy in America for the victims. So what Ida Wells was trying to do was basically call attention to what an outrage this was and get some coverage of it, get people alarmed about it, and try to sort of change the dynamic so that the lynchers were the criminals, not the victims.

GROSS: The NAACP began an anti-lynching campaign in 1909, shortly after it was founded. You write that James Weldon Johnson, the writer, led their anti-lynching legislative effort. How did the NAACP decide that they should try to get federal legislation that would outlaw lynching?

DRAY: I believe it was probably inspired to a certain degree by the success of both the women's suffrage movement and also Prohibition, both of which came in around 18 - I'm sorry - 1919, 1920. And so James Weldon Johnson and the NAACP believed that if the federal government could get involved in people's lives to the extent that they would tell them what they could drink, that they could surely get involved to stop people from burning other human beings alive. So they went ahead with the help of a white congressman named Dyer from St. Louis. And both in the '20s and the '30s, the NAACP mounted several very powerful campaigns in Congress to get a federal anti-lynching law passed.

GROSS: Now, what approach did Congressman Dyer take in his bill to defining and trying to prevent lynching?

DRAY: The - well, as I said, before the sense was that this was not murder. In other words, there was a constitutional issue in that the Southern states pointed out that - first of all, the federal government had no right to involve itself in criminal - local criminal affairs in the South. And that these were just murders, and that the states were perfectly able to take care of them. The federal government, those advocating the federal bill, insisted that this was a different type of crime. That it wasn't just murder but rather a form of anarchy in which laws were ignored.

And so that was really the basis that they used. They felt - it really boiled down to this age-old argument in this country between federal and states' rights. In other words, that - were Americans federal citizens who were entitled to protection from the federal government, or were they citizens of the states and thus criminals were to be dealt with on a local level?

GROSS: This - I think this is interesting. You write that one of the reasons why Congress was finally ready to really listen to this anti-lynching bill was that there was a lot of fear in the North that lynching would follow the black migration to the North and that the North would have trouble.

DRAY: Yes, that's right. There was a very famous case in 1911 in a town called Coatesville, Pa. Coatesville was a very typical northern mill town in that it had sent agents into the South to recruit black workers, telling them conditions are much better in Pennsylvania; we have electric lights on the street; and there's no Jim Crow and et cetera. What happened, though, is that one of these workers got in a fight with a policeman in Coatesville one night and shot and killed him.

What happened basically was that the town of Coatesville behaved just like any other - any Southern town. This man was taken to a field, set afire. A large crowd watched. Afterward, the North - you know, New York, Washington, Baltimore - were outraged because this had happened so close by. And there - you know, there was a flood of editorials and demands that, at least here, justice will be done. We're not going to be like the South.

Well, instead the exact same thing happened, which was the locals all stuck together, wouldn't inform on one another. And basically, the case was never - they were never able to prosecute it. So it was very shameful and very - kind of a wake-up call for the North, really, that this form of violence would follow the migration north. And there were other instances, too. There was a famous lynching in Duluth, Minn., actually at one time, one of the northernmost cities in the country.

GROSS: So what legislation - what federal legislation was finally passed?

DRAY: There never was an anti-lynching law passed, actually. They tried many times through the '20s, '30s. The last attempt was during the Second World War. What basically happened is that efforts in Congress eventually just ran out. The Southern bloc was just too strong, and on several occasions they filibustered bills to death. One of the most well-known instances is during the '30s, when Franklin Roosevelt, who, of course - he and Eleanor Roosevelt both were very sympathetic to the work of the NAACP and about lynching - but basically wound up telling the NAACP that they just could not put the important congressional agenda at risk for this one issue because the Southerners would just block all other movement. So that was pretty much the end of it.

After the - during the Second World War, what you see is the federal judiciary kind of picking up the battle. And indeed, that's where it eventually really made more progress. They call that the Due Process Revolution, the - all during the 20th century, a series of Supreme Court decisions that incrementally restored to the federal government the right to mandate what constituted a criminal trial and what levels of due process were owed to citizens.

GROSS: So we can't really credit federal legislation with stopping lynching. What were the main factors that brought that to an end?

DRAY: Well, lynching was diminishing slowly all along, partly, I believe through pressure. The NAACP was very successful, really, in the - from 1911 or so on. They were publicizing lynchings. They would always do a very thorough job of investigating lynchings so as to get out what they believed was the actual story. In other words, their effort was meant to correct the myths that would surround a lynching, typically, and try to put out a story that made the victim seem at least somewhat sympathetic and to make the lynch mob appear gross and, you know, out of control, essentially - and irresponsible. So this did take effect on popular opinion. You also see in the '20s, for instance, after the First World War, a sense that - in other words, like, world events were casting lynching in a different light after what people felt was this barbaric foreign war and, you know, the Bolshevik Revolution.

The idea of anarchy was a really - meant a lot to people in America then. The idea that lynch mobs represented anarchy was this thing that could get people very excited. Similarly, in the '30s, you had with the rise of fascism in Europe - you could place lynching sort of in that context. And so people naturally had this reaction to it that, well, that's not us, that's something that's going on over there. And, of course, this was accentuated by the fact that the Nazis would publish pictures of U.S. lynchings and distribute them to kind of - to show, like, well here, you know, what are you talking about? Basically, you know, this is what you're up to.

So you have this kind of larger world influence. Other things, too. In the '30s - a big hot-button crime in the '30s was kidnapping after the famous Lindbergh kidnapping. There was a sense of unease on the part of people that criminals had become mobile, that - you know, that there were these gangster syndicates and people being abducted. And so in that context, too, lynching then became seen as this kind of atrocious event that just could not be allowed to continue.

DAVIES: Philip Dray is the author of "At The Hands Of Persons Unknown: The Lynching Of Black America." Terry spoke to him in 2002. Coming up, FRESH AIR commentator Mat Johnson recounts a story from his own family's experience with racial terror. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF BILLIE HOLIDAY SONG, "STRANGE FRUIT")

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As New Lynching Memorial Opens, A Look Back On America's History Of Racial Terrorism

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DAVE DAVIES, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. Last Thursday, a memorial dedicated to thousands of victims of American lynchings opened in Montgomery, Ala. The national memorial for peace and justice sits on a 6-acre site overlooking the Alabama state Capitol.

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The Powerful New Lynching Memorial: Why Now Is the Time to Visit Montgomery, Alabama

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Courtesy of the Equal Justice Initiative

The new monument consists of 800 rusted steel columns, one for every county or jurisdiction where a lynching occurred during 1877 to 1950.

A long-awaited monument to victims of racial terror has finally opened to the public. If you've never visited historic sites of the civil rights movement, and even if you have, it's time to head to Montgomery.

Shirah Dedman didn't know how she'd react when she saw her great-grandfather's name memorialized in Montgomery, Alabama.

Then she found it etched on a coffin-shaped marker and labeled on a jar of soil recovered from Shreveport, Louisiana. That's where in 1912, a mob grabbed him, strung his body from a tree, and mutilated it with bullets.

"It was so hurtful. I was crying," said the 36-year-old from Oakland, California. "I felt a lot of anger. I felt frustration. I wanted to talk. I wanted to be quiet. There were so many emotions looking at that."

But she's certain about one thing: The public acknowledgment of the racial terror white Americans perpetrated on African Americans is long overdue. The Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice documents more than 4,000 victims of lynching from 1877 to 1950, public killings that have been largely ignored and publicly unacknowledged. Until now.

"Our memorial will become a report card about which communities have owned up to their history and which haven't."

The site, which opened April 26, has already made a big impression and is spurring a long overdue national conversation. Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Philip Kennicott calls it the most important new monument in a generation and compares it to Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. It makes Montgomery, already a key site in civil rights history, an even more essential stop for anyone seeking to understand the country's relationship with race.

The monument, located on a hill overlooking the city that was briefly the capital of the Confederacy, consists of 800 rusted steel columns, one for every county or jurisdiction where a lynching occurred. Each is inscribed with the names of victims, like Dedman's relative. The rectangular monuments hang from an open canopy, first at eye-level. But as visitors walk through the site, the wooden floor slopes down. Eventually the six-foot-tall columns suspend from above.

Some victims were accused of rape or murder, others of petty infractions. Dedman's great-grandfather, for example, was grabbed after a court found him not guilty of passing a note to a white woman, which was then a crime. At times, the mob violence attracted thousands of spectators. Bodies were torn apart, with pieces taken as souvenirs. Commemorative postcards were printed.

"We're burdened by this history-I hope our institution and memorial motivates people to say never again."

"We're burdened by this history," says Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, which planned the $15 million, privately funded project. He said designers were inspired by the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg . "I hope our institution and memorial motivates people to say never again."

The project also presents a challenge to U.S. communities whose histories include documented lynchings. Outside the main pavilion, duplicates of each steel column line a courtyard. Organizers are urging each jurisdiction to claim their monument for public display. "Our memorial will become a report card about which communities have owned up to their history and which haven't," Stevenson says.

A companion museum, located several blocks from the memorial, is set in a warehouse that once imprisoned enslaved people. Through interactive exhibits and first-hand accounts,it makes the argument that slavery led inevitably to lynchings as white Americans tried to maintain power over newly freed former slaves and that lynchings gave way to Jim Crow-era segregation, which transformed into our current era of mass incarceration.

The Legacy Museum's exhibits also reveal largely forgotten history, like the Red Summer of 1919, which saw race riots and dozens of lynchings across the country.

At one exhibit, built to resemble a prison interview booth, visitors pick up a phone to hear videotaped comments from former convicts like Anthony Ray Hinton, who spent 30 years on Alabama's death row until he was exonerated in 2015 with the help of the Equal Justice Initiative.

The memorial and museum join Montgomery's already significant collection of civil rights sites. With this monumental new addition to the city, now is an ideal time to explore its crucial history.

Alabama's capital was home to two of the movement's most well-known activists. A young reverend from Atlanta, Martin Luther King, Jr., entered the public spotlight in 1956 after Rosa Parks, a seamstress, refused to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger. At the Rosa Parks Museum, located at the site of her arrest, interactive exhibits show how that moment of defiance sparked the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott, the first major confrontation of the modern civil rights movement.

King's carefully preserved home, the Dexter Parsonage Museum, takes visitors back to the era. Perhaps the most moving spot is the kitchen, where after a bomb threat, King famously had a moment of doubt about the sacrifices he was making to fight racial injustice.

The Freedom Rides Museum preserves the Greyhound Bus station where young protesters were attacked in 1961 as they traveled across the South to fight the continued segregation of interstate transportation.

Other significant Montgomery sites include King's church, Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist, and nearby First Baptist Church, where the Freedom Riders and a crowd of 1,500 supporters were surrounded by a white mob. There's also the state capitol, where King addressed thousands after the 54-mile voting-rights march from Selma.

From Montgomery, it's simple to drive the National Historic Trail that retraces the route from Selma. At the halfway point, a visitor center explains how the denial of voting rights and the police shooting of civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson prompted the protest. From there, it's a 25-minute drive to Selma, site of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where marchers, including current U.S. Representative John Lewis, were beaten by police on what became known as Bloody Sunday.

For many visitors, walking the span over the muddy Alabama River is a pilgrimage. And now too, so is a visit to Montgomery's haunting-and necessary-memorial to victims of racial terror.
>>Next: 10 Border Walls That Artists Have Turned Into Powerful Protests

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The Powerful New Lynching Memorial: Why Now Is the Time to Visit Montgomery, Alabama

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Courtesy of the Equal Justice Initiative The new monument consists of 800 rusted steel columns, one for every county or jurisdiction where a lynching occurred during 1877 to 1950. A long-awaited monument to victims of racial terror has finally opened to the public.

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Opinion | Kids can handle learning about civil rights. So teach them.

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Op-Ed by the artists who worked with John Lewis on the graphic novel March.

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Op-Ed by the artists who worked with John Lewis on the graphic novel March.

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Nate Powell and Andrew Aydin, with the late Rep. John Lewis, created the illustrated "March" trilogy about the history of the civil rights movement.
Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript for the best experience.

Not too long ago, a southern poverty law center report described what it called the "nine word problem" - that most u.s. high school graduates had learned only these few words about the civil rights movement:

Rosa parks,

Martin Luther King,

"I have a dream."

With just those nine words, you can't make a coherent picture of the civil rights movement- especially how change was actually achieved, who was involved in that change, and what ideas were central to it.

And that's the entire point of limiting Americans' understanding of the movement: it won't make sense.

I believe there is a deliberate and systematic effort to exclude the civil rights movement from U.S. schools - and we cannot let that happen.

So we made the "march" trilogy to fix the "nine word problem.

It was my obligation to bear witness, to tell the story...

To teach young people the philosophy, and discipline of nonviolence.

To show young people (and people not-so-young), how another generation was able to stand up - to fight back.

In just a few years, "March" became one of the most widely taught graphic texts in America.

There are forces at work in America trying to take us back to another dark period -

And that is why we three created "March."

It is my hope that it will be a guide, a roadmap, for a new generation to carry us forward.

Right now, there are dozens of laws working their way through legislatures in Texas, South Dakota, New Hampshire, and other states - as well as in local and statewide school boards in Florida, Virginia, and elsewhere - that would eliminate "March" (and historical accounts like it) from curricula and school libraries.

Several have already been signed into law.

How do new laws threaten these books? By labeling the often uncomfortable truths of our nation's history as "divisive concepts" - especially history centering black people's experiences - and by outlawing the teaching of historical perspectives outside of a patriotic feel-good framework of "progress".

Last month, the Georgia house of representatives passed its own version -

In the same state John Lewis represented in congress for over 30 years and where "March" has been taught in public schools since 2016.

"Any curriculum, classroom instruction, or mandatory training program, whether delivered or facilitated by school personnel or a third party engaged by a school... shall not act upon, promote, or encourage divisive concepts"?!

We've come so far -

We can't go back.

John lewis knew this day would come.

We spent years on the road, speaking about these books together because he believed so deeply that "March" was a way out -

A way to ensure every young person knew their power to shape the fabric of our society - the same power wielded through the civil rights movement.

Young people ask questions.

It's what they do.

These pressure and intimidation campaigns are intended to ease the "discomfort" of white parents who wish to avoid answering these questions -

Mom, who's John Lewis?

By avoiding having questions asked in the first place.

It has nothing to do with the discomfort of students.

Why were they protesting in selma?

Kids can handle it. They already do.

Now it's up to us to speak up. In defense of young people's capacity to learn true history, to handle a little

discomfort and to ask the important questions -

And why were the police beating them?

In more than just nine words.

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Opinion | Kids can handle learning about civil rights. So teach them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Nate Powell and Andrew Aydin, with the late Rep. John Lewis, created the illustrated "March" trilogy about the history of the civil rights movement. Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript for the best experience. Not too long ago, a southern poverty law center report described what it called the "nine word problem" - that most u.s.

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Letter from a Birmingham Jail, MLK Jr., 1963

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Letter from a Birmingham Jail, MLK Jr., 1963