CHARLEMONT — A museum and memorial dedicated to the victims of slavery, lynchings and racial injustice opened this year in Montgomery, Ala., in a former warehouse that once functioned as a marketplace for buying and selling slaves.
On Wednesday, Oct. 24, that museum’s founder and executive director, Bryan Stevenson, will give a talk that will be live-streamed from the Episcopal Divinity School in New York to the Charlemont Forum, beginning at 6:45 p.m. The event is free and all are welcome.
Stevenson, an author and lawyer, has argued five cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and has won reversal, release or relief for many wrongly convicted death row inmates. He is director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a Montgomery nonprofit dedicated to achieving racial and economic justice. He was a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant and author of the best-selling book, “Just Mercy,” which was one of Time Magazine’s 10 best nonfiction books of 2014.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened this spring, pays tribute to 4,400 black men, women and children who were hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned and beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950. Many of the memorials include the names of victims and, in some cases, the crimes for which they were killed. One such crime, for instance, was for drinking from a white man’s well.
In various interviews, Stevenson has said he feels people don’t understand how the cruelty and consequences of slavery have affected the nation.
“The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated and the condemned,” he wrote. “We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated.”
Stevenson has referred to the death penalty as “lynching’s stepson,” because of the higher rate of incarceration and death penalty sentences for black people than for white people.
“Everybody wants to think that if they were alive during slavery, they’d be an abolitionist,” Stevenson said in an interview for the website, Democracy Now. “If we’re not prepared to act today, then I don’t think we can claim that we would have acted any differently during slavery and lynching and segregation.”
Although sponsored by the Charlemont Forum, the live-stream presentation will be at The Academy at Charlemont on the Mohawk Trail. For more information, call 413-320-7010.