The National Memorial to Peace and Justice

Mm.

And it makes me think back to November in 2019 when we were at Bryan Stevenson at the, um, at the Legacy Museum and the Lynching Memorial, and Bryan, who famously says that a person should not be judged by the worst thing they've ever done in their life, and that the work of this holy day is to expand our understanding of ourselves and our understanding of each other.

Mm.

And I think you went in there to get a bigger understanding of who she was because you very graciously wanted to give her a chance to live beyond the permanent stigma of what she had done to you.

New public artworks can show how a community's values have changed.

Like in 2018, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery, Alabama, a city that was once a center of the US slave trade.

The nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative commissioned the Abstract Memorial, which was designed by a team of artists and architects from the Mass Design Group.

The memorial consists of more than 800 individual steel slabs,

It serves as a reminder of the scale of racial violence honoring its victims.

And to viewers today, it's a solemn reminder of work left to be done.

While the National Memorial for Peace and Justice is a new monument, another approach is to create new meaning out of old art.

Let's shift our focus to Poland.

And then Nina Berman's photo of Maureen who was completely disfigured at his wedding is really just a profound image about the damage

And then in the final chapter of the book, you turn away from 9-11 memorials and you look at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, which focus on lynchings, lynchings of blacks in American history.

So why did you decide to have that as a chapter in the book? How does it relate to the content that's gone before?

I see it a bit as a bookend because I do think, especially since 2020, that a lot of memorial projects, we could say like the 9-11 project is really a national project, a pro-nation project.

Y'all know Clint.

He is a staff writer at The Atlantic where he's covered Colonial Williamsburg, the National Lynching Memorial, and many of Trump's attacks on American history.

His book, his amazing book.

How the Word is Passed, A Reckoning of the History of Slavery Across America, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism.