Bringing Monuments Home

Okay, so Ashley, I want you to close your eyes and just think about some of the monuments that you picture when you hear the word monument. I live in Indiana, born and raised and One thing that's true about Indiana is you're gonna get a war memorial. Okay? There's gonna be a statue for a general. Okay? You're gonna find some cannons. That was me from a conversation I had with one of our producers.

I'm from Fort Wayne, so I literally grew up around memorials to war and conflict. And those have predictable forms, like an obelisk or a soldier on a horse. In this series, we've looked at monuments and memorials in various corners of the United States. And I've noticed that the newer attempts at grappling with our history look very different from the I saw as a kid. Maybe it's because they're trying to tell a different kind of story. Sure, artistic styles change.

But new kinds of stories ask us to stretch our assumptions of what a monument should look and feel like. This is Monumental, a podcast series produced by P. I'm your host, Ashley Seaford.

Good design, you're not meant to notice. Yeah. This is producer and art historian Tamar Avishai. She got me thinking more deeply about the challenges of creating monuments. My background is in Holocaust. memorials and museums and the design elements that go into them. the different ways that these spaces have tried to tell a story that have a scope and a magnitude of of tragedy and just kind of the unimaginable. Right. How do you represent that? It's very, very difficult.

I I went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and when I got to the section with the shoes, the stacked Yeah. lost in the Holocaust. Um, I was I was so affected I had to sit down. And I sat there for a long time and wept. shoes feel like uh a public memory that I am part of with others. I think it is really hard to figure out how to invite people into a conversation. leads to a reckoning. There is an internal process of emotion that's going on there, an invitation into yourself.

to ask yourself questions about what you think is right and wrong, what you value, w who you wanna be versus who you are now versus who you've been. A memorial or a monument can inspire the start of that process, but it can't do it to you. It can't put that in you. It arrives back at the place that I think we're both so interested in, which is what happens when you are in a space. What does it do?

to you. And we approach these as visitors, but it's also really interesting to approach it from the mind of a designer. Because they're not just artists, they're psychologists in a way. You know, they really have to understand How to speak to their audience in a way that to allow a unique individual visitor to wrestle with their own experience there and do that in a way that is productive.

To learn more about how they're doing this, Tamar Avi Shai began at a newer memorial in the American South, one that aims to represent the legacy of racial violence in this country. I'm standing outside a wooden door that leads to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. It's a quiet spot near a suburban neighborhood. With all the trappings of an official memorial, there's a stone.

A tidy garden, a metal detector. From the entrance, you can see the heart of the memorial on a hill. Hundreds of rust-tinged pillars hanging under a flat horizontal roof. This memorial only opened in 2018, although its oxidized pillars and It's built into the landscape, make it feel like it's always been here. Its layout is spread over six acres, taking you along a path that climbs that hill.

And as you ascend, you pass sculptures of human beings, with graphic historical narrative written on the retaining wall. All of this culminates with the 805 abstract pillars at the top.

There's no one way to design a monument. Mm-hmm. Sometimes visitors feel more connected to seeing depictions of people or events, what we call representational art. And sometimes they just need a meditative space for reflection. This site offers both approaches. And you would think that this mix of styles would make the space feel like it contradicts itself. But Montgomery itself feels like a contradiction. In this city, a sculpture of Rosa Parks stands Kitty Corner from a

Plaza where enslaved people were sold at auction. This was the first capital to the Confederacy, and the proud city of the 1955 bus boycott, and the march from Selma a decade later. I moved to Montgomery in the eighties. We do not have Martin Luther King Day. We have Martin Luther King slash Robert E. Lee Day. This is Brian Stevenson. He's the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, or the EJI. That's a nonprofit organization that's based in Montgomery, Alabama.

And he's a visionary, working to end inequality in our justice system. You may know his best selling book and the movie that was based on it, Just Mercy. The EJI, under his leadership, has created both the Legacy Museum and this site, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, although it's more commonly known as the Lynching Memorial. Over 4,000 people were lynched in the United States during the late 19th century to the mid-20th century. More than 300 were from L.

And it's not something that people learn about. Most Americans could not name a single lynching victim, not one. Sometimes these stories are even buried within families. I'm Shira Deadman and I'm the great-granddaughter of Thomas Miles Sr., who was lynched in 1912. Today, Deadman is a filmmaker in her early 40s. She grew up in California, and as a kid, she didn't know much about this history. Her mother had just a vague childhood memory. They found this clipping and then they were like What?

But nobody in the family ever talked about it. It was like, we found it, we read it, we know there's this like dirty secret, but we're never gonna talk about it. We've never been compelled to be honest about our history. There hasn't been that shift in power, which usually is the necessary condition. for the kind of truth telling cultural spaces that have emerged in the world.

Speaking of other memorials working to honestly confront history, that's my cue to explain what brought me here. My background is in Holocaust memorials. I lived in Germany. lot of professional and personal energy into studying them, and the way that they've attempted to tell the truth about a tragedy on a scale that could never possibly be captured.

And the most recent large-scale Holocaust memorial in the center of Berlin has changed that conversation. Because it's an abstract memorial, thousands of concrete slabs of varying heights without text or signage. It looks like an undulating field of tombstones, if you want it to be metaphorical, or if you don't, like nothing at all. Nothing but a quiet five-acre space to reflect on whatever it evokes for you. And that's a little unorthodox for a memorial to a genocide.

Professor James Young was a member of the jury that chose that memorial. I was invited to join uh in nineteen ninety eight, uh which I did, but only on the condition we be allowed to fail. Young is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and author of several books on both Holocaust memory and the construction of memorials.

The other condition was that we not invite the artists and architects to uh articulate a particular kind of memory, but perhaps to articulate uh the problem of Holocaust memory in Germany. Germans have had the impossible task of memorializing their national crime. This isn't something that perpetrators usually do. Yeah. It means that right out of the gate, you're not in the position to speak the voice of the victims to tell their story.

Instead, it's a space of asking questions, of your grandparents, of your country, maybe even of the darkest parts of yourself. and knowing that there are no definitive answers.

And this was Brian Stevenson's inspiration when he set out to design a memorial to the victims of lynching, to hold American history accountable for a crime that's never even been formally adjudicated. Yeah. It's kind of interesting that the model we provided Germany was uh Jim Crow segregation laws. Young is referring to the Nazi-Nuremberg laws against Jews that were passed in 1935. Those drew directly from America's Jim Crow system of legalized racial apartheid that started in the 1890s.

And now we are learning from the Germans after the Holocaust uh how to commemorate our And so all of this has brought Stevenson and me to the entrance of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

So nice to meet you on Tamar. It's an outdoor site. All of it is uncovered, and yet when I walk in, it's like the volume of the city is immediately lowered. The retaining wall keeps the city outside. I can tell as soon as I start walking that my whole body is going to be processing this space, not just my head. Stevenson and I are on the path towards the suspended steel pillars that I could see from the outside.

But before we get there, we're stopped in our tracks by a representational sculpture that I didn't see from the outside. It's by Ghanaian sculptor Kwame Akoto Banfo. And it's a harrowing depiction of a family being torn apart during the transatlantic slave trade. That's where the story begins. Brian Stevenson. you know uh nearly thirteen million people kidnapped, abducted, transported across the Atlantic, uh to the Americas. The scene that this sculpture depicts is absolutely brutal.

Captured in rough-hewn bronze, enslaved people are shown in various states of panic and desperation, with shackles around their necks. Everyone is connected with chains. Their faces are contorted with grief or with resignation. Amen. There are whip scars on their backs. A crying woman clutches her baby, reaching out to a man whose hands are shackled. I looked at this scene, at the small baby's hand desperately gripping his mother. and felt the immediate need to look away.

And what I didn't anticipate when we opened was how many people would say, Gosh, I've lived in this country my whole life. I've never seen a sculpture. That is intended to depict the brutality of slavery and the humanity of the enslaved. We don't have sculptures in this country that. speak to the institution of slavery. And without understanding slavery, you won't understand lynching.

Stevenson is drawing a line between two historical traumas, slavery and lynching, both inflicted because its perpetrators denied the humanity of an entire race. And it's true, we don't have many realistic sculptures that show this history. And there are a few reasons for this.

For a long time, people just resisted facing it. But for those who have started to tackle these subjects, another reason is aesthetics. There just isn't much representational sculpture in contemporary memorials, at least not since the art world embraced abstraction in the 20th century. Abstract art, by definition, is not about what can be represented. It's about everything else. The feelings that are evoked, the associations that are created in the viewer's mind or body.

The memories that are conjured. Vietnam Veterans Memorial reflects you back. The way the nine eleven memorial was there. Experiences and reflections are invited in. I think abstract design allows everybody to come to commemorate for their own reasons. So it allows these places to welcome competing constituencies, kind of competing visions. It all gets remembered uh in in these sites. And that's the real value of abstract art and design. It's incredibly subjective.

Whatever you bring to the space becomes what the space is about. This is what the designers of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial had in mind. But abstract art has its pitfalls too. These spaces assume that visitors already know the history of what they're stepping into. And when it comes to both slavery and lynching, we can't underestimate the extent to which they don't. Which is why the painful directness of Akoto Banfo's sculpture of these enslaved figures feels so necessary.

Brian Stevenson again. I think when you need representation really very much depends on what's the level of understanding, what's the level of engagement and if you just abstract the harm without challenging people to recognize the full humanity of the people who are being victimized, then you won't actually achieve the sort of engagement that's necessary.

It was really striking to me this difference walking into a memorial to lynching as compared to a Holocaust memorial. For now, at least, the horrors of the Holocaust are pretty well known. Even the English name for the Berlin Holocaust Memorial is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. You kind of know what you're in for. But this memorial is called the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. From the name, you'd almost expect to be walking into a botanical garden.

I wanna invite people in and so this space is open and it's green and it looks beautiful and inviting and that's intentional. And and I contrast that with the you know, I've been to the Holocaust Memorial is a really powerful place. And there are no words. I think they trust people to come into that space with a knowledge and an awareness of the Holocaust that allows them to have a deep and meaningful

experience with that abstraction, with those structures that are abstract. I knew we couldn't do that here.

We continued on the path up the hill. Um, so we're approaching the pillars. Can you describe this walk that we're doing right now? As you walk up the hill you come into this first corridor. which is where we begin to present the monuments. And here you can see places at the top of each monument. Wilcox County, Alabama, Polk County, Georgia, Montgomery County, Kentucky. And what we want people to understand is that each of these monuments reflects a county

where these uh horrific acts took place. And then you can see closer Names, and we present the names of all of the victims of lynchings and the date that they were killed. In this first quarter, the pillars aren't yet suspended. They stand on the ground, at eye level, six feet tall, like human beings in formation. And you can read the names, the dates, the counties inscribed on them. You can even touch them. They're made of a kind of steel that oxidizes, going from a gray to brownish rust.

They're imperfect and continually evolving. They almost feel alive. And I like that because we didn't think that these monuments should be pristine and and um clear and unblemished. Yeah, sterile, yeah, that's a good word. We wanted them to literally bleed. As you walk through the pillars, skirting and shifting your body as though to let them pass,

You notice the dates. They're in chronological order, starting from the furthest into the past to the most recent. And you realize that the most recent is too recent. That's what's chilling about this history is that there's no official end date. And that Absence of a committed end to this kind of violence is what makes some of this so haunting.

The pillars end at nineteen hundred years. And that's just the arbitrary cutoff for the memorial. Emmett Till was murdered five years after that in 1955. On the walls, further into the memorial, there are lists of reasons for the lynchings, and they're absurdly senseless. For example, a black man killed for walking behind a white woman in public. I w that this couldn't happen in living memory. But the dates on these

You know, the the Congress refused for a half century to pass a law banning lynching violence in the midst of all of this. Uh they just had they just signed the law, they just passed a law that's just You know, two years ago. We enter the second corridor, where the monuments begin to lift slightly at the top. eight inches, a foot, two feet. By the bottom of this path they're suspended over your head.

sickening to experience the hoist of these pillars alongside you. Suddenly the bottom of one is next to your head, reminiscent of the dangling feet that the murderers would pose next to in grainy photographs. Sheer Deadman has visited this memorial. And you get to Caddo Parish, which is where my grandfather And there are so many So many. And Looking at it above my head, I like I started to get it. These are

After hanging from a tree, hanging from wherever. And they're above you, you're looking up, you're watching them hang. In her research, she found a clipping that described where and how her great grandfather was killed. they described it as a baseball field, which was very different than anybody else had described it. It gave me a new sense of the um Terror. that these things were meant to instill. Like the idea that you could hang a body to be seen by everyone in a space

that is meant for like joy and entertainment and relaxation and community, you know? And so it's like, wow, this is even worse than I ever could imagine. And especially when we talk about Intergenerational trauma, and we talk about the public manner in which lynchings were done when the public are black people themselves. This was violence directed at a whole community, not just at an individual. We don't talk about thousands of victims of lynching, we talk about millions.

Brian Stevenson and I walk deeper down another descent. But this is where something shifts. The pillars change again. They're higher overhead. They're almost protective. And incredibly, the darkness lifts too. Light is streaming in. This is the space of reflection. We did feel like it was important to create a place for people to just process all of this. We have these words on the wall.

but the memorial is for the hanged and beaten, for the shot, drowned and burned, for the tortured, tormented and terrorized, for those abandoned by the rule of law. We will remember with hope because hopelessness is the enemy of justice, with courage because peace requires bravery, with persistence because justice is a constant struggle, with faith because we shall overcome. You're then invited into a space called Memorial Square.

It's in the center of the four sections of the pillars, almost like a central courtyard. You walk up a path that ends at a small wooden square. It's big enough for one person to stand on it. This part of the experience was really designed to create a space where you're looking at those who have been killed. You get to a place where you're now surrounded by their histories, their stories. And now you're the object. I mean I've always felt this way. I think history is watching us.

I didn't have this experience. The podium felt to me like the platform of gallows. It made me feel queasy. And it made me think of another story of a lynching that I'd read about in the memorial. A 15-year-old lynched in front of a crowd of 10,000 people. A terrified kid, surrounded and all alone. And these pillars surrounding me, which throughout the memorial had represented the victims of lynching, have now done a complete about face. They became the mob.

I asked Stevenson if the pillars were meant to do that too. I think it is intended to do both. I think we should feel what it's like to be surrounded by this mob.

When I asked Deadman about her experience, she had yet another reaction. I I actually had a sense of happiness, feeling a sense of pride that my grandfather was now recognized, like he was more of like a person now. I felt that way for those people. It wasn't just about, oh, this

like the photos that we're s we see when we're younger. It's just like nameless black dude uh lynched. And so naming them as these people, as individual people, was very powerful to me. And that's why for me I just saw like Hope and a sense of happiness for all those people who were being named. And again, this is why abstract art is so valuable. Whether we're asking questions, whether we have diverse insights, it's all welcome.

On one single wooden platform, history is watching us and judging us. And giving voice to the silence and inviting us to hear it. All of us. all with different histories and different points of reference.

I will say I have a lot more experience with Holocaust memorials. I'm used to walking around these spaces that are so powerful, but it's speaking to my history. And it's it's new. Yeah. to walk around a space that I I question. Is it meant for me? And I'm curious who is this memorial for? You know, I'm deeply moved when I go to Berlin and see the Holocaust Memorial. It actually uh affirm something within me about how important it is to struggle for human rights across the globe.

to protect the h humanity and dignity of every person. And that's what we're hoping for too. And in that respect it's absolutely for everyone. This universal humanity and dignity is reflected throughout the remainder of the site. Every memorial has to think about what visitors are going to take with them when they leave. And here,

That sense of we shall overcome became present in my body. I heard the sound of the waterfall. My lungs filled with rich, damp air. Justice felt like something that I could hold in my hands. like a deeply earned, even joyous thing. The gift of being able to reflect finally on the truth of this country's history and the individual stories that are now being told.

And this feeling is carried through when you exit the abstract portion of the memorial and continue on the path where you're confronted with slightly larger than life-size sculptures of six actual people. After the visceral experience of the pillars, they're a welcome sight. We are humans, so when we see a human figure, we will have a response. This is Branley Cadet, the sculptor who made them.

There is that reflection that we experience when we see the human form that may be a little more challenging to access when it's purely conceptual. In contrast to the enslaved figures at the entrance, these figures embody hope. Each of these models is a living descendant of a person who is living. Cadet spent hours with these people, learning their stories, who they were. He asked each of them to find their own gesture or pose that came to them when they thought about their family history.

Sheer Deadman modeled for one of these statues, of an activist with a bullhorn. I think I would be like, hey! You can't see me moving my hands. But putting my hands up to my mouth and going like hey And there are others, a man touching a marker to a lynching victim, almost as though touching the victim himself. An older woman looking to the sky, hands to her chest, with tears streaming down her smiling face.

She had her hands on her heart and I asked her, What are you experiencing right now? And she said that she's experiencing her ancestor. And she's feeling, you know, the connection to him. And one of the ways that I read this was that. despite the horrific and almost anonymous way that this person was murdered, he is still seen, he is still remembered, and he is still loved.

And that to me represented the healing potential of remembrance. That there is a way that we can move from, you know, the grief to Maybe not fully healing, but certainly to begin to heal just by acknowledging this person mattered, this person was here.

The healing nature of acknowledgement is seen throughout the work done by the Equal Justice Initiative, both on site at the memorial and particularly in one of the Legacy Museum's best-known initiatives, the Soil Collection Project. EJI staff and volunteers tirelessly tracked down the sites of lynchings and contacted descendants of the victims.

The descendants were given both an address and two jars to fill with the freshly dug-up dirt from these otherwise unremarkable sites. Dirt that might very well still contain traces of their relatives' DNA. Oh, so this is the foundation. I think technically his house would have been on that corner. That's Sheera Deadman in a film that the E. J. I plays at the legacy museum.

She made the trip to collect the soil with her mother and her aunt to Shreveport, Louisiana, to where her great grandfather lived, to the tree where they believe he was killed. based on the sort of the descriptions I had read It was this really big side of foreboding tree. So it just called me. I think it just called all of us where it's just this it amongst all the trees looked like it would have been the one that could hold the weight of a body.

In the film, after digging into the earth and filling the jars, the three women pause for a moment, and Deadman stretches her arms around the tree and hugs it. It's breathe, breathe, breathe. This is yeah, keep breathing. The scene in the film of you hugging that tree, what was going through your head in that moment? I don't know. I the best way of putting it is I was just overtaken I was just overtaken with images.

Knowing that he was gonna die, knowing he had this, you know, small child that he was gonna be leaving behind and Just how scary that was. being hung up and being shot you know All of that. Then my mom and my aunt were like holding on to me. Families like Shira Dedmonds, who take part in the soil collection project. get to keep one jar of this precious dirt for themselves. They send the other back to the museum to be displayed. This project gives that It's proper respect.

Finally, after all this time, acknowledgement, a proper interment, and for the living, a funeral. In the EJI film, we hear a eulogy. We pray that the sacrifice that he so involuntarily Strengthens us. edifies us and helps us too. in a way that will prevent this ever from occurring again. You know, it's not just dirt. There was uh greater meaning to the dirt when we got to the museum. And it was there on this wall.

alongside these other jars and it was pretty amazing seeing these like these other families I got to experience, especially because you have to remember that there was so much uh So much. Hiding. You didn't really want to acknowledge your ancestor because there's almost like an assumption that they did something wrong. Um and so You know, I think all of us going through this project of of soil collection are having this

Experience where we get to acknowledge our ancestors, but like with pride and not shame. The whole point is starting. And so seeing that. brought hope and Happiness to me.

Seeing it all in one central place was extraordinarily powerful. But this project also showed how memorials can exist. When we come back, We'll look at the idea of bringing monument making into our communities and how designers today are using the power of the unexpected to bring monuments to the past.

A heads up that there's a brief mention of suicide in this episode. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text nine eight eight to reach the suicide and crisis lifeline. This is monumental. TRX I'm your host C. Ford. Let's get back to our story. I used to think of monuments as places of learning and reflecting, but I'm realizing now how important they also are for healing.

They're usually sites that people make pilgrimages to, places where what is lost can be found because they are remembered. But remembering can happen anywhere, because history does. History happened on this street corner, on that bridge. Someone was lynched on that tree over that dirt. And it's important for the community around it to grapple with that truth. So the Peace and Justice Memorial doesn't limit remembering to this central site in Montgomery.

It's dispersing this responsibility and returning it to its origin points. You might say the memorial is decentralized.

In Montgomery, each of the suspended pillars is replicated next to the central memorial. They lie sideways on the ground, like coffins. And they're supposed to disappear, one by one, as each county named on it comes to claim it. Part of the memorial process is actually carrying these monuments home. Yeah. Professor James Young and um allowing every county to figure out a way to reestablish these events in the mind of a particular community and makes makes them wrestle with it.

Counties have had the opportunity to claim these pillars since the memorial opened in 2018. Almost all still remain at the site. Every community is going to have to figure it out for themselves, and it's going to take time. There was a great piece by uh Clint Smith uh in The Atlantic in which uh he asked a lot of these questions. My name is Clint Smith. I'm an author and a staff writer at The Atlantic magazine.

In December of twenty twenty two, Smith wrote an extraordinary article on what Americans can learn from the way Germans have memorialized the Holocaust, and particularly in the spaces where history actually happens. And one project he talked about at length was the Stopelsteiner. It's the largest decentralized memorial in the world. Part of the success is by making the story profoundly human.

Stolpelsteine translates as stumbling stones. They're individual cobblestones on sidewalks, encased in bronze, and stamped with the names of the individuals who lived at the home that you just walked by. The date that they were deported. Most often the concentration camp where they were murdered. For me, it's a this incredible example of enhanced the proximity of myself to at that period of time and and almost sort of serve as a catalyst for like a a radical sort of empathy.

It started as a grassroots project in 1992, initiated by the German artist Gunter Demnig. Now there are over 70,000 stones in more than 24 countries across Europe. For me, the experience of walking down the street and you pass two stumbling stones and you start. four stumbling stones. And then you pass seven stumbling stones and you look down and you see the the name of these people and you can tell how old they were.

Uh, when you look down and see the birth date and the death date and you look up and in front of you is the home where these folks were taken. And I look at those doors and imagine that family walking through those doors. The Stolpelsteiner project complicates the role of the viewer. It's completely your prerogative to walk right by and carry on with your day.

But you can also choose to stop and look. You can allow for the full weight of history, tens of thousands of these stones, or the loss of this one individual life. Both tell the story of the event.

It is a reminder of the sort of arbitrary nature of birth and circumstance, you know. But for a host of factors, it could have been any of us who were subjected to what these people experienced. And and I think that that Makes it real for people rather than just simply an abstraction, rather than a number like six million, rather than a sort of amorphism.

thing that doesn't feel real, that doesn't feel tactile. I do think there's something to be said for Letting people see a single name and a single birthday, a single day of death in a specific place. that just takes an idea like the Chicago race riots that's abstract, like there was this big thing that happened and all these people died and and just makes it personal, makes it human, makes it singular.

My name's Peter Cole and I co direct the Chicago Race Right of nineteen nineteen commemoration project. Franklin Cozy-Gay. I am the co-director of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project. This is volunteer work. The project they're talking about is a memorial in Bronzeville, on Chicago's South Side, that is planned to open in It very intentionally borrows from the Stopperstein. Cobblestones, tempered glass markers.

Embedded into the sidewalks, marking the deaths of people who were killed, right on the very spot where we were standing. Outside the subway, at 350,000, Bronzeville and throughout the neighborhood. And so there are people who walk by and come in and out of the subway. How many of them know anything about this history?

So um the average person in Chicago and the average person outside of Chicago doesn't know the history of nineteen nineteen, right? Um it's simply not taught. It's uh The story of the Chicago race riots begins in nineteen nineteen on a hot Sunday. Afternoon, five black kids went swimming in Lake Michigan and um when they were swimming um and their raft drifted southward they crossed an invisible line in the water.

And a white man on the beach around 29th Street Beach started throwing rocks at these kids, and one of those children, Eugene Williams, was killed. The police refused to arrest him. The killer and over the course of a week, thirty eight people were killed, five hundred and thirty seven were injured, over a thousand were left homeless, um, in what was and remains the largest episode of racial violence in Chicago history.

Of course, importing the Stoppersteiner model from Berlin to Chicago presents challenges. When you don't necessarily know the history of your own city, can we really expect people rushing off the train to stop, look down, and imagine the lives of people they never knew? Can America handle the subtlety of these monuments? Thank you. Yeah, I mean that's a it's a great question. Um

It's a constant challenge keeping this history relevant. These markers will have more text, more context than the stumbling stones do. Cole and Cozy Gay are also partnering with institutions who wrestle with contemporary issues around racial violence. These are the people who are blowing the glass and embedding it into the sidewalks. This is how they hope to bring the conversation into the present.

So we thought it would be very important to tie this story over a century ago to current survivors of violence. We believe that it's a a thread that needs to be uplifted. Omission does not lead to healing. Every city has a history like this that its residents are probably totally unaware of. Every city needs the past pulled into the present. In a perfect world, they both said, this project would be national.

In Bronzeville, I look down at the unbroken sidewalk, and I squinted to imagine the markers to the racial violence that will be there. Like only once they're installed would a major event have happened there. But that history's always been there. It's just been invisible. The grandness of a lot of memorials feels like there Imposing memories of events and people. But now, a new generation of monuments and memorials and their creators.

is approaching this on a smaller, more human scale. And they're doing this by identifying the individual stories that have historically gone untold. The aim is to make the invisible visible. Again, this is all with your phone, right? Yes. This is Idris Brewster. He's the founder of an app called Kinfolk, which uses augmented reality, or AR, to bring a viewer into what he calls invisible monuments.

You do this by pulling out your phone in a designated spot. The app uses your camera, viewing the area as it is through your lens. Except suddenly a landmark appears on your phone's screen. Think Pokemon Go, but you know, for a richer understanding of history. We've actually been able to partner with the Pokemon Go team to create the location-based technology to add on to So what does that look like? What does that feel like? Let's say you go to the Tourmaline Monument downtown.

Tormaline is an artist who created a virtual monument in the New York City location for the Kinfolk app. You go to one oh eight Green Street, which is where uh the historical figure Mary Jones, who was one of the earliest um records of a black trans woman in New York City, and you are at the place where she lived. You open up the camera. In front of you, uh 75 feet tall, is a large monument to Mary Jones.

This real-life space, as seen through your phone, now has a monument squarely in the middle of it. A monument to a history that never had one, now appearing on your phone as real as stone through the magic of AR. It's sort of a gorilla activation. Um, I think that's the beauty of what we've built is the ability to activate where we want, when we want, without having to go through the red tape to make these monuments appear.

It's a testament to the era that we live in, where technology is able to recreate the past. And what's more, to new interpretations of the past, more than a single static physical monument ever could. Brewster talked about realizing the history he learned in school was just one perspective. what I found when I started diving through the archives is that a lot of my history wasn't recorded. The history that I'm receiving is

a lot of oral history, a lot of c family history that's been passed down. A lot of my community deals with myths and legends as history. And so I think part of the work I'm doing is trying to expand our notion of what history is and what it can be.

For us, We really tried to challenge the history paradigm that it is not a monolithic story, that it's something that's ever growing, ever changing. This is Cassie John. So for like my DNA peoples, we always try to introduce ourselves using our tribal language and just sharing a little bit of like that grounding space. So I'll just introduce myself in my traditional way.

John is a member of the Navajo Nation and a co-founder of Walking with Dinata, a community art and trail walking initiative that focuses on oral histories, mapmaking, and what they describe as participatory art. By collecting stories from community elders, younger people are able to reclaim their histories. And these histories aren't in textbooks. They're passed down from generation to generation. So how do we connect ourselves back to the space?

The space itself, that is to say, the landscape, the trails, are the second key component to the project after the storytelling. Because while stories are invisible and the storytellers are ephemeral, the landscape is neither. These mountains and terrains have existed longer than this people.

Everything has been already it's already made. It's something that is embodied by the community, it's something embodied in the language, and then very much embodied by the individual as well, as we all bring different pieces to the landscape. In a video of a storytelling session, 12-year-old Kimberly ties her family's history to the land. So I live near the three big rocks. My great-grandmother used to call these sezent segentah, which means the three.

bla the three big black rocks. And then after here, I would always think from a young age that the big rock was my oldest sister and this middle one was my brother and then the youngest was me. Walking with Dinata shares Kinfolk's sense of a decentralized guerrilla history. It also, like with kinfolk, requires a kind of technology that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.

Open the app, hold up your phone, and then look around. Voices will point out the four points on the mountain in the distance. And how it connects to the tribe's mythological creation story, and also that this spot was where the storyteller's baby niece first laughed. Another smaller origin story that invites the same radical sort of empathy that Clint Smith was talking about.

So it tells a story of that space because if we we didn't want to put ourselves into a fixed narrative where these spaces felt like you can only talk about this in this lens, we really wanted it to be open-ended for future generations. Open ended, unfixed narratives. They feel like the beating hearts that motivate those doing this work today, like Idris Brewster.

I mean facts are definitely a part of this process. I'm not trying to say that's not the case, but it's also how do we have creative outlets for these facts? How do we tell stories around these facts? How do we just surely put forth multiple perspectives in these conversations?

These are critical questions. Storytelling just in the last generation has exploded into infinite parts. The public square has moved online. And so it makes sense that these monuments are reflecting this. creating history from a collection of infinite, subjective, even contradictory human stories. And these memorials have also moved further from sites and juries and towards small objects.

that are meaningless to anyone but their owner. Objects that are all the more meaningful once their owner is gone. But those small objects could help us. crises that we're still struggling with now. you ask, you know, what does it look like to create a memorial to an epidemic that is ongoing? It's certainly challenging This is Ja Di Amaz. She's a principal architect at the Mass Design Group, the firm that worked with Brian Stevenson to design the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

She's also the director of their public memory and memorials lab, as well as one of the lead designers of the Gun Violence Memorial Project. This is an installation that's been exhibited in Chicago and Washington, DC, and will open in Boston at the end of 2024. The Gun Violence Memorial Project is composed of four houses, each made up of 700 glass bricks.

700 being the number of Americans that were killed on a weekly basis due to gun violence in this country. And the houses themselves are meant to be of a scale and of a size that. Familiar. Visitor. So they're about a ten foot by ten foot by ten foot. uh volume you can stand inside of them and at the same time small enough so that you can actually conceive of them and understand of them. Um as a house. This form was intentionally chosen. The house is where so much gun violence is.

It's also where the tragic repercussions are most deeply felt. Where loss hits home. We didn't necessarily want it to be something that was too abstract. That you couldn't necessarily relate to because ultimately the purpose of the memorial is to invite family members of gun violence victims to contribute objects on behalf of their loved ones. that are then encased in the bricks. It's really a moment and an opportunity to pause and reflect and think of the humanity of the individuals themselves.

My brother Junior Yeah. Killed himself by suicide by gun. He'd been battling schizophrenia for five years. This driver's license is one of the few items I have left of my book. Brother. My daughter was murdered by an ex boyfriend. Your biggest fear is that your child's going to be forgotten? I don't want Maggie to ever be forgotten. These are the voices of people who contributed objects to the memorial in a film made by Mass Design.

The drum is perfect. I mean You couldn't have got more perfect than that. That's how he knocked on the door. Everything's a little beat. The project's goal is to build a glass house in every city in America. on the National Mall, like a permanent aids quilt. The four houses are exhibited together to express the enormity of the epidemic of gun violence. Again, each house represents a week of deaths.

The four houses together make a month, 2,800 deaths. It grows exponentially. And yet at any given time, you're staring at an object as small and subjective as a stumbling stone. I brought my youngest niece's hat from the hospital. She was only six months old when she was killed. Here, the individuals become statistics and the statistics become individuals. And in that way, we are simultaneously representing both the infinite and the intimate.

This relationship between the Infinite that Amazi talks about, it feels like the cornerstone of what makes any memorial successful. And yet when the intimacy is a very good thing. human story is repeated infinitely. This is history. But it's also something that we can understand.

History is the story of what human beings have experienced. But when people are remembered, they're found again. There's an expression of condolence that Jews say to one another when someone has lost a loved one. Zichranolcha. May their memory be a blessing. And it is such a comfort to recognize the ways that lives continue to matter after death.

If you think about all the memories we each contain, then we're all living memorials and monuments to the people that we've lost. As the sculptor Branley Cadet said earlier, that's how they can still be seen. Still remembered, still loved, and still found, over and over, in objects, in reminders, in us. Shera Dedmond says her great grandfather. lives on in this way.

They killed him, but but like they didn't wipe him off the the earth in a sense because he had you know My grandfather went on to have Ah, 17 kids. So he has a gang of descendants, even though we know nothing about him, except really his death. There's so much life there. spring from you. So they didn't succeed, really. I think about the final words on the wall of the Peace and Justice Memorial, we shall overcome. What does that look like?

It looks like sheer deadman, who's creating monuments for the She's made a documentary about the Black Food Justice Movement. Her work aims to instruct and inspire, to shine an honest light on the dirty secret she grew up believing was a The work of monuments continues through her. Everyone who takes the time To be inspired. To be welcome to remember. I think what I've realized As we've recorded these episodes. Memorials and memory. to be alive within their community. It's not enough for them.

engaged with. Memorials would be We're at Monumental. This episode was produced by Tamar Avichai. Special thanks to Lauren Francis. to Vicky Merrick. to Tanya Cordez and Mia Taylor at the Equal Justice Initiative. Audio from the Gun Violence Memorial Project film The Glass House, which was produced by Karen Calvin. Irulla Spyropolis. Audio from the walking Audio from the Equal Justice Society. The senior editor for Monumental is Rosalind Tortesilius and our senior producer is Nancy Rose.

Jamie York is our writer and our production assistant is Perry Gregory. The show is recorded by Bradley. Ben Erickson at Earshot Audio Post, and mixed by Tommy Bazarian, with support from Terrence Bernardo, Emmanuel Desarme, Pedro Rafael Rosado, Morgan Flannery, and Sandra Lopez Monsalve. Fact checking by Christina Rebel. Hello.

Our theme was composed and produced by Jelani Bowman with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. Edwin Ochoa is our project manager and our executive producer is Jocelyn Gonzalez. Produced by PRX Productions. made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. For more on the show, visit grx.org slash monumental. I'm Ashley C. Ford. Thanks for listening. From P R X.