Jeffrey Toobin has a long profile of Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer working in Alabama to provide legal counsel to inmates on death row. In addition to being a profile of a great man, it includes this description of an incredible memorial that’s planned for the victims of lynching.
There will be eight hundred and one columns, one for each county and state in which a lynching took place. The names of the victims and the dates of the lynchings will be inscribed on the columns.
The memorial also has a more provocative component. Adjacent to the colonnade will be another eight hundred and one columns, exact duplicates. Each county in which a lynching took place will be invited to remove its memorial column and display it in its own community. The columns that remain in Montgomery will stand in mute rebuke to the places that refuse to acknowledge their history of lynching.