Museum and Memorial Our Work News About Donate Racial Justice We must truthfully confront our history of racial injustice before we can repair its painful legacy. EJI has been challenging racial injustice in criminal and civil cases for over 30 years. EJI believes we need a new era of truth and justice that starts with confronting our history of racial injustice. American history begins with the creation of a myth to absolve white settlers of the genocide of Native Americans: the false belief that nonwhite people are less human than white people. This belief in racial hierarchy survived slavery’s abolition, fueled racial terror lynchings, demanded legally codified segregation, and spawned our mass incarceration crisis. The dehumanizing myth of racial difference endures today because we don’t talk about it. EJI is working to change that. We’re exposing the myth and its toxic legacy in our reports and videos—and on this page. Our Community Remembrance Project is empowering communities to change the physical landscape to honestly reflect our history. And we’re using the power of place to inspire people to visit Montgomery, Alabama, to learn and reflect in our Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Enslavement Slavery in America did not end. It evolved. Related Report Slavery in America: The Montgomery Slave Trade Explore EJI’s report on Era 1: Enslavement and learn how mass incarceration is a legacy of slavery. Beginning in the 17th century, millions of African people were kidnapped, enslaved, and shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas under horrific conditions. Nearly two million people died at sea during the agonizing journey. For the next two centuries, the enslavement of Black people in the United States created wealth, opportunity, and prosperity for millions of Americans. As American slavery evolved, an elaborate and enduring mythology about the inferiority of Black people was created to legitimate, perpetuate, and defend slavery. This mythology survived slavery’s formal abolition following the Civil War. This animated short film by acclaimed artist Molly Crabapple, with narration by Bryan Stevenson, illustrates how the elaborate mythology of racial difference that was created to justify and sustain enslavement evolved after abolition. In the South, where the enslavement of Black people was widely embraced, resistance to ending slavery persisted for another century after the 13th Amendment passed in 1865. Today, 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, very little has been done to address the legacy of slavery and its meaning in contemporary life. In many communities like Montgomery, Alabama—which by 1860 was the capital of the domestic slave trade in Alabama—there is little understanding of the slave trade, slavery, or the longstanding effort to sustain the racial hierarchy that slavery created. In fact, an alternative narrative has emerged in many Southern communities that celebrates the slavery era, honors slavery’s principal proponents and defenders, and refuses to acknowledge or address the problems created by the legacy of slavery. Imprisoned men at Maula Prison in Malawi are forced to sleep “like the enslaved on a slave ship.” Joao Silva/The New York Times/Redux An enslaved man, Private Gordon, was beaten so frequently that the multiple whippings left graphic scars depicted in this 1863 photograph. Donated by Corbis Reconstruction After the Civil War, Confederate veterans, former enslavers, and other white leaders organized a reign of terror to enshrine white supremacy, nullify Black voting rights, and exploit Black labor. Related Report Reconstruction in America: Racial Violence after the Civil War, 1985-1876 Learn more about racial terror and mass lynchings in the post-war era. During Reconstruction, the 12-year period following the Civil War, lawlessness and violence perpetrated by white leaders created an American future of racial hierarchy, white supremacy, and Jim Crow laws—an era from which our nation has yet to recover. EJI has documented nearly 2,000 more confirmed racial terror lynchings of Black people by white mobs between 1865 and 1876. Thousands more were attacked, sexually assaulted, and terrorized by white mobs and individuals who were shielded from arrest and prosecution. White perpetrators of lawless violence against formerly enslaved people were almost never held accountable—instead, they were often celebrated. Emboldened Confederate veterans and former enslavers organized a reign of terror that effectively nullified constitutional amendments designed to provide Black people with equal protection and the right to vote. In a series of devastating opinions, the Supreme Court blocked Congressional efforts to protect formerly enslaved people. The Court ceded control to the same white Southerners who used terror and violence to stop Black political participation, upholding laws and practices that codified racial hierarchy and embracing a new constitutional order defined by “states’ rights.” Within a decade after the Civil War, Congress began to abandon the promise of assistance to millions of formerly enslaved Black people. Violence, mass lynchings, and lawlessness enabled white Southerners to create a regime of white supremacy and Black disenfranchisement alongside a new economic order that continued to exploit Black labor. White officials in the North and West similarly rejected racial equality, codified racial discrimination, and occasionally embraced the same tactics of violent control seen in the South. Reconstruction in America shows how the promises of Emancipation were betrayed by racial violence and terrorism. Racial Terror Lynching Lynching of African Americans was terrorism, a widely supported phenomenon used to enforce racial subordination and segregation. Related Report Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror Explore EJI’s report and microsite on Era 2: Racial Terrorism. Lynching emerged as a vicious tool of racial control in the South after the Civil War. Lynchings were violent and public events designed to terrorize all Black people in order to re-establish white supremacy and suppress Black civil rights. This was not “frontier justice” carried out by a few vigilantes or extremists. Instead, many African Americans were tortured to death in front of picnicking spectators for things like bumping into a white person, wearing their military uniforms, or not using the appropriate title when addressing a white person. Lynch mobs included elected officials and prominent citizens. White people were celebrated—not arrested—for torturing and killing Black people. Spectators bought body parts as souvenirs and posed with hanging corpses for picture postcards to mail to their loved ones. EJI collaborated with renowned artist Molly Crabapple on this animated video, which unflinchingly explores America’s brutal history of lynching and racial terror. EJI has documented 4,084 racial terror lynchings in 12 Southern states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950, which is at least 800 more lynchings in these states than previously reported. EJI has also documented more than 300 racial terror lynchings in other states during this time period. In addition, for all the documented lynchings covered in newspaper reports, many racial terror lynchings went unreported and their victims remain unknown. Related Work Community Remembrance Project EJI works with communities to confront their histories by collecting soil from lynching sites and installing historical markers. Lynching shaped the geographic, political, social, and economic conditions that African Americans experience today. Critically, racial terror lynching reinforced the belief that Black people are inherently guilty and dangerous. That belief underlies the racial inequality in our criminal justice system today. Mass incarceration, racially biased capital punishment, excessive and disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities, and police abuse of people of color reveal problems in American society that were shaped by the terror era. Watch the extraordinary journey of a family and community who overcame a century of silence to expose an American story about hard work and achievement, racial terrorism and exile, and the healing power of truth-telling. EJI believes it is critically important to confront America’s history of racial terror lynching. Our Community Remembrance Project is part of our campaign to recognize the victims of lynching by collecting soil from lynching sites, erecting historical markers, and creating a national memorial that acknowledges the horrors of racial injustice. Howard University students protest outside the National Crime Conference in Washington, D.C., 1934. Bettmann/Getty Images Mamie Lang Kirkland was seven when her family fled Ellisville, Mississippi, because her father and his friend, John Hartfield, were threatened by a lynch mob. Segregation In response to demands for equal rights, millions of white Americans made clear their determined, unwavering, and committed opposition to racial equality, integration, and civil rights. Related Report Segregation in America Explore EJI’s report and microsite on the mass opposition to racial equality during Era 3: Segregation. The story of the American civil rights movement is incomplete. We appropriately honor the activists who bravely challenged segregation, but we don’t talk about the widespread and violent opposition to racial equality. Opposition to civil rights and racial equality was a mass movement. Most white Americans, especially in the South, supported segregation. Millions of white parents voted to close and defund public schools, transferred their children to private, white-only schools, and harassed and violently attacked Black students while their own children watched or participated. Thousands of American children attend schools named in honor of Confederate leaders who fought to preserve slavery. Over the last 50 years, our political, social, and cultural institutions embraced elected officials, journalists, and white leaders who espoused racist ideas and supported white supremacy. White segregationists were not banished—they were elected and re-elected to prominent offices for decades after the civil rights movement. Today more than ever, we need to acknowledge that most white Americans supported segregation—only a small minority of white Americans actively dissented from this widespread opposition to civil rights. EJI’s online experience and our Legacy Museum use video footage from the segregation era to show how millions of white Americans arrested, beat, bombed, and terrorized civil rights demonstrators, including children. We profile the senators, governors, judges, writers, and ministers who led the movement to maintain segregation. And we expose the use of Confederate iconography to rally the opposition to racial equality with an interactive map showing thousands of Confederate monuments that were erected to maintain white supremacy long after the Civil War. Young children wave Confederate flags at a White Citizens’ Council meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, on November 16, 1960. Bettman/Getty Images Teenage girls scream obscenities at Black students entering their high school in Montgomery, Alabama. Flip Schulke/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images Presumption of Guilt Racial disparities in our criminal justice system are a legacy of our history of racial injustice. Related Resource Presumption of Guilt Learn more about the roots of the presumption that Black people are guilty and dangerous. Black men are nearly six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men; Latino men are nearly three times as likely. Native Americans are incarcerated at more than twice the rate of white Americans.1 The Bureau of Justice Statistics projected in 2001 that one of every three Black boys and one of six Latino boys born that year would go to jail or prison if trends continued. These racial disparities are rooted in a narrative of racial difference—the belief that Black people were inferior—that was created to justify the enslavement of Black people. That belief survived the formal abolition of slavery and evolved to include the belief that Black people are dangerous criminals. During the decades of racial terror lynchings that followed enslavement, white people defended the torture and murder of Black people as necessary to protect their property, families, and way of life from Black “criminals.” Bryan Stevenson advances a much-needed conversation about racial discrimination, police violence, and the tensions created by a society still corrupted by a narrative of racial difference that undermines justice and public safety. The presumption of guilt and dangerousness assigned to African Americans has made minority communities particularly vulnerable to the unfair administration of criminal justice. Numerous studies have demonstrated that white people have strong unconscious associations between Blackness and criminality.2 Implicit biases have been shown to affect policing and all aspects of the criminal justice system. So deeply entrenched is the presumption that people of color are dangerous and guilty that studies have found that Americans’ support for harsh criminal justice policies correlated with how many African Americans they believed were in prison: the more Black people they believed were incarcerated, the more they supported aggressive policing tactics and excessively punitive sentencing laws.3 Understanding how today’s criminal justice crisis is rooted in our country’s history of racial injustice requires truthfully facing that history and its legacy. EJI is challenging the presumption of guilt and dangerousness in our work inside and outside the courtroom to reform the criminal justice system. By criminalizing civil rights activists, opponents of civil rights shifted the public debate from segregation to crime. Charles Moore/Getty Images All of the 13- and 14-year-olds condemned to die in prison for nonhomicide offenses were children of color. Richard Ross Featured Work EJI is engaging with communities and encouraging all Americans to confront our history of racial injustice and its legacy. Bringing History Home EJI is partnering with communities across America to confront their history by collecting soil and installing markers at lynching sites through our Community Remembrance Project. Expanding Historical Perspective Our award-winning calendar and digital experience, A History of Racial Injustice, features people and events in American history that are critically important but not well known. Documenting Our History EJI’s groundbreaking reports on enslavement, racial terror lynching, segregation, and mass incarceration explore American history and its legacy. Visit EJI's Two Sites in Montgomery Legacy Museum Established in 2018, the Legacy Museum explores the history of racial inequality and its relationship to a range of contemporary issues from mass incarceration to police violence. National Memorial for Peace and Justice The National Memorial for Peace and Justice provides a sacred space for truth-telling and reflection about racial terrorism and its legacy. Explore EJI's research Follow EJI facebook twitter instagram youtube Home Museum and Memorial News About Contact Get Involved Donate Shop 122 Commerce Street Montgomery, AL 36104 (334) 269-1803 contact_us@eji.org Subscribe to our newsletter © Equal Justice Initiative 2021