When you have the time and freedom to circle the deep, that’s glorious. When you don’t have either the time or the freedom–when you’re draped over the edge by another hand–that’s dreadful. When someone else cuts your life short by lynching, angry questions burn the air. The Equal Justice Initiative is building the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, near the site of a slave auction block. (Montgomery has 59 sites commemorating the Confederacy.) The memorial will include a lynching museum to commemorate the 4000 racial lynchings that happened in the U.S. between the Civil War and World War II (1877-1950).

The Community Remembrance Project of the EJI is collecting soil samples from lynching sites and will incorporate them into the museum.

An historical view of the origins of lynching culture: