In the American South,
we don't talk about slavery,
we don't talk about lynching,
we don't talk about segregation.
We've actually littered the landscape
with the iconography of the confederacy,
which we romanticize, we honor.
And I think that has left us
vulnerable to replicating those
features of white supremacy
that we've actually never repudiated.
This is the entrance of
the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement
to Mass Incarceration.
And we have this icon
to just talk about
this uniquely American challenge
of being a nation
that's recovering
from the legacy of slavery
and also being the nation
with the highest rate
of incarceration
in the world.
Montgomery, a city shaped by slavery,
because in fact that is the history
of this community.
It's almost overwhelming
how many of these people
are represented.
It's ...
It's sobering.
And I'm thinking about
how I'm glad my family ...
Maybe glad is not
a word I should use ...
I'm grateful
that our story ended differently.
Because all of these people,
their story is much more tragic.
People in this country were acculturated,
socialized into seeing
black people mistreated,
abused, brutalized, tortured
and that optic becomes
key to how we can sociologically
get comfortable with
the phenomenon of lynching.
I think for African Americans
who were forced
to remain silent about
this violence,
that's what terrorism can do, it can ...
You know, many people were lynched
because they complained
about a loved one being lynched.
It would get them lynched too.
And it creates a kind of weight,
a kind of burden.
I was not aware
of my uncle's story.
I was actually a grown woman
when I talked to my dad
and I was visiting at home
and we were just having one of our chats,
and he told me the story of
my uncle Fred and how he
actually was sent away
as a young boy
and never came back.
That's how he migrated
eventually to New York.
Fred was about 15
and he was away
working that morning.
A little girl said someone
pushed her off of her back porch.
So her dad wanted to find out
who pushed her off the back porch.
And they said: "Well, we know it was Fred."
She was with them, it was a group of men,
she said it was not Tom's boys.
But the group wanted it to be my uncle Fred.
And my granddad,
he had more than likely seen a hanging.
He knew how that would end.
So he had my daddy to run downtown
to tell Fred to not come back,
and from there my granddad
took Fred to Chattanooga.
And from Chattanooga
he eventually ended in New York
and that is where he's buried today.
There was 11 children
in all but my dad is the only one
buried in Gadsden.
You know, the black people,
that fled this region by the millions,
in response to this terror,
didn't go to Cleveland
and Chicago and Detroit
as immigrants, they went there
as refugees and exiles from terror
in the American south.
Henry Smith, 17,
is a very famous lynching in Paris,
Texas, in 1893
because 10,000 people
showed up
to watch this lynching.
We had several of these
public spectacle lynchings.
John Hartfield was lynched
in Aliceville, Mississippi.
They actually advertised
the lynching in the newspaper.
And this accommodation
of violence and terror
was something that was frequent,
which is why you would sometimes
have hundreds or thousands of people
celebrating their ability to exercise
this kind of control over black people.
And whether you were the person
cutting off the fingers and mutilating the bodies
or you were the person
enjoying your devilled eggs and lemonade
while this spectacle of violence took place,
something tragic is happening to you.
People brought their children,
they made their little kids watch
human beings be burned
or drowned or beaten
and I think that creates
a kind of injury.
And it has certainly
created a disease
where we become indifferent
to the victimisation
of black or brown people.
And we have to treat that disease.
Last month, when I got off work,
there were two men in a black pickup
with two huge confederate flags
flapping in the night, following me home.
They pulled over to the side
and just looked at me
and I just looked at them.
I guess it was
an intimidation tactic maybe.
I pulled off and I hauled down
that street and they were behind me.
This is in Gadsden, 2018.
I have very good neighbours,
I just wanted to make it to my street.
Went on past,
once I turned off onto my street
that was it.
The African American community
has lived this pain
and lived with it even still.
When black visitors leave this space,
they're going to go places where
they're going to be presumed dangerous
and guilty and have to navigate that.
You know, even when they get their coffee
at a Starbucks,
recent events tell us you can be ...
you can be targeted.
And so, I think for people of color
who have to live with this reality,
experiencing it for a moment
should be something we're
all willing to do.