D.L. Mayfield writes the cover story for September's Christianity Today, focusing on a memorial that is being put together by a group called the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), which is led by Bryan Stevenson. Mayfield writes about lynching, the focus of the memorial:
"More than 4,000 African Americans were lynched between 1877 and the rise of the civil rights movement in the early 1950s. Lynching was a brutal public tactic for maintaining white supremacy, frequently used with the tacit blessing of government authorities. It was a part of my heritage I had never been taught, despite my homeschool community's heavy focus on American history and despite brave efforts by Ida B. Wells, perhaps the 19th century's most famous anti-lynching voice, to draw attention to the epidemic." (37)
She describes how Stevenson came around to the idea of the memorial:
"Stevenson became enamored with the idea of creating spaces for truth telling. "We don't have many places in our country where you can have an honest experience with lynchings and racial terror," he said...So Stevenson decided to make one. Next summer, EJI will unveil a memorial where visitors will be confronted with large tablets hanging from a square structure, visual reminders of more than 800 counties where lynchings took place. The visual - so many markers engraved with so many names - will transform a hill overlooking downtown Montgomery, Alabama, into a place of mourning and remembrance, a place to lament and perhaps even to corporately confess.
"The Memorial for Peace and Justice, as it will be called, will also encompass a field spreading next to the main structure. In that field, each hanging tablet will have an identical twin resting on the ground, invoking an eerie similarity to headstones. These markers will be for counties themselves to collect. Stevenson dreams of groups journeying to Montgomery, collecting their rightful part of lynching history, and displaying it prominently back in their towns and cities. If people from a particular locale choose not to claim their piece, it will sit in stark relief on that Montgomery hilltop, a conspicuous token of unowned sin." (38)
Mayfield cites many scripture passages that emphasize communal sin and corporate confession. In Daniel 9, Daniel confesses to another generation's sins and includes himself in them. In Luke 11, Jesus claims that a particular generation will hold particular responsibility for the blood of prophets shed in the past.
She continues to explore the topic of confession in conversation with work by sociologist Michael Young. As she cites him, Young demonstrates that twin emphasis on both individual sin and corporate sin led Christians to contribute to the temperance and anti-slavery movements in the 19th century:
"Take, for example, the concluding statement of an anti-slavery resolution passed by the First Church of West Bloomfield, New York, in 1837: "And in this we pledge ourselves as individuals and as a church." Sentiments like these, common among abolitionists, obligated both institutions and worshipers to confess as a way to end national sins and spare their own souls from the fallout." (41)
To conclude this post, I was struck by a point Young made about protests:
"That is the key similarity Young sees between confessional movements of old and what Stevenson hopes to accomplish through EJI and the lynching memorial: an element of personal transformation that goes deeper than the moral outrage of so many modern protests. "The crucial idea at the heart of 'confessional protest' is that it doesn't have the same self-righteous component to it," Young said. "The person bearing witness is sort of implicating herself as part of the problem." (41)
This is very insightful. Can protests and memorials be confessional? I hope so. The person who has known the grace of Christ and how it has touched and transformed sin will continue to own this confessional spirit - that 'I' am a big part of the problem - as a vision is articulated for what a city could be, what it means to be a citizen, and what is the reconciliation we yearn for. It will lend to protests a mournful spirit, and to memorials a sense that it's important not only to remember events of history which depict us as we like to think of ourselves, but also events of history which depict us at our worst. We will confess individually, but also understand the power of confessing corporately, like Daniel, on behalf of others, regardless of whether history would absolve us individually. Despite tragic history, a spirit of confession will build bonds that will not be easily broken.
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