African Americans, Lynchings and Memory: Equal Justice Initiative Project or the Dreadful Gift of Pity

Abstract

Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved suggests that it is being present before us that makes it possible to feel pity for a “co-human” sufficient to make us act on our feelings. We care about others in inverse relation to their distance from us. I want to suggest that in the case of the dead who, on the other side of a seemingly unbridgeable chasm, are immeasurably further from us that even the most distant of the living. It is art –broadly understood– that teaches us to feel for them and that makes a narrative in which their bodies and bones matter. It is art that makes the dead live again in culturally important ways. This article takes as its case study the new National Lynching Memorial in Montgomery Alabama.