Speaking Out Through Art
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice
Few of us ever enjoy going to a wake or a funeral. No matter your religious persuasion or that you might not have one, standing before sorrowing people who have lost a parent, child, husband, wife, best friend is never easy. What to say? Or it could be you standing there, greeting people, feeling terrible loss. But we are meant to communicate about our feelings when we soar with good news or when we crash with bad.
My mother was brave at wakes. She always found time to hold the hands of the grieving, to share words of encouragement. Her actions leapt from her own loss of my father when she was young and had children to raise. BRAVE. That’s what she was, always speaking to those grieving, raising it to a kind of art form.
WHAT WE SHARE AS HUMANS
Being brave almost always requires that we step out of our own protective shells and say something. Make a point. Often the receiver of the words or the reader of the book or viewer of the art–is taken aback. Shocked. But as moments pass, understanding can form. We all share one thing: our human bodies, alike in so many ways; our human nature, propensity to laughter and sorrow. There isn’t one of us on earth that doesn’t understand physical and psychic pain. YES, there are many degrees. But with empathy, we can go to the deepest depths, even if we have been favored with a life that did not bring us horrible pain or mental desperation.
ART AND ALL ITS FORMS
One other thing we might say about humanity is that it likes to forget. That’s why wars continue to plague our planet. But during such times ART rises up. People create. After every war there are nonfiction and fiction books, poetry and visual arts in its many forms awakening the world AGAIN, to the horrors of war. And in our culture today, we have museums to help us remember.
These buildings become hallowed and sacred ground as they present the stories of the dead and those that survived. All the lives of humans on this earth have a story. And so if you walk through the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., you remember, even if you didn’t live during that time but only read about it. History teaches. So does art. The presentation of a real railroad car used by the Nazis has power. So do all forms of art that shake us, remind us. The power might be quieter, but it is there.
A NEW MUSEUM, A POWERFUL REMINDER
Washington D.C. is memorial city. There’s the Viet Nam and Korean War Memorials; the Martin Luther King and Franklin Roosevelt Memorials. These shine alongside the Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and World War II memorials. (I’m sure I’m forgetting some!)
And now there are even more. The National Museum for Peace and Justice recently opened in Montgomery, Alabama. Attorney Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, is credited with its creation. Quoting here from an article by Larry Bleiberg: “The six-acre outdoor memorial features 800 weathered rectangular steel boxes hanging beneath an open canopy. Each box represents a county or jurisdiction with a documented lynching between 1877 and 1950 and lists the names of largely forgotten victims in each county, such as Henry Smith of Lamar County, Texas, who was accused of killing a white girl, and then tortured with hot irons and set on fire in front of a crowd of 10,000 in 1893.There’s also Elizabeth Lawrence, lynched in Jefferson County, Ala., in 1933 after scolding children for throwing rocks. And thousands more.The information comes from the Equal Justice Initiative’s multiyear study that documented more than 4,000 lynchings, which the researchers call racial terror killings.”
MORE STATISTICS
victims were usually grabbed by mobs, hung or drowned;
hawkers sold refreshments
gawkers claimed sections of clothing or body parts
often postcards were printed
WHAT YOU WILL EXPERIENCE
As you enter, the steel boxes at first hang at eye level. But as you proceed through the monument, the wood floor slopes down, so that soon the monuments are suspended above, forcing you to look up. Eventually you are looking at a vista of hundreds of rusted slabs hanging overhead, like bodies. You are now a witness of this brutality.
Bryan Stevenson states: “Our memorial will become a report card about which communities have owned up to their history and which haven’t.” A half-mile away you can visit a small Legacy Museum which has been built in a former slave warehouse. There it presents a hologram on slavery and argues that lynching took place to control and terrorize African Americans after the emancipation.
Such a legacy also involved Jim Crow laws that legalized segregation and continues to this day with the mass incarceration and police brutality toward African Americans.
A final moving display features an interview with Anthony Ray Hinton who was exonerated in 2015 after 28 years on death row. Last month Oprah Winfrey selected his autobiography for her book club. Winfrey is also involved with a second museum in her native Mississippi, The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, MI. Information here.
A TESTAMENT TO THE PURPOSE OF ART
I recently exchanged messages with a fellow writer, Natalia, who struggles like me and many other writers to share our ideas and to find people who are eager to read them. I responded to her post, writing this:
When we write our stories, our novels, we write about the people we know, the joys and sorrows that color our words and ideas. I want to know about your life, the stories you are able to share. If I am published, I would hope you would read how my life filters through my characters and the lives they are leading. We are human beings and our stories speak of struggle that leads to victory or change; sometimes decisions that lead to disappointment. But all stories are presented to our readers in the hope that our words will touch their minds and hearts. EMPATHY. But as you say, we must feel that human bond whether there are tears or many smiles. I write and read fiction to connect with others. It fills me up. Some people? They haven’t opened their eyes yet. They refuse to see. So—we keep writing.
FINAL THOUGHT
I hope in your travels you might stop at a museum, discover the lives of others, contemplate history, use what you learn to make this a better world.
Remember what Pat Conroy wrote in THE PRINCE OF TIDES: My wound is my geography. It is also my my anchorage, my port of call.
PHOTO CREDIT: LA TIMES
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