Civil Rights Memorial

Of the many things we did yesterday, one that really struck me was the memorial at the Southern Poverty Law Center. The memorial was a wide, black cone made of granite, turned so the point was going into the ground and the circular face pointed towards the sky. There were names and dates carved into it in a circular fashion like a timeline wrapped the face of a clock. These events were major points in the civil rights movement or the dates that people were killed in the movement for equality, including Jimmy Lee Jackson and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This memorial was also a fountain so a thin layer of water moves from the center of the circle to the ground, creating a visual of the quote "...until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."

However what stood out to me was not the names carved into the stone, but the space left in the circle for those who will never be recognized. We keep hearing the phrase "there are people who died who will never be remembered" and I'm not surprised because I know that so many people died and it would be difficult to remember all of them. But the reason there are so many unknown martyrs is not just because of numbers, it's often because so many lynchings and deaths were not recorded and their killers were never punished, because black lives were seen as less important. Then, in contrast, we visited a confederate cemetery where so many individual soldiers are recognized to this day, with fresh flowers and clean confederate flags on their graves. I have been struggling with how to process everything we've seen, but this just made me very very sad.

It's devastating that so many martyrs of the civil rights movement, so many people killed from senseless violence, have to be lumped together and represented by an empty space. It just goes to show the huge sacrifices made by so many people and reminds me that we must honor them and remember their goals, even if we don't know their names. It also shows the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement and making sure that people who are killed are given both justice and remembrance.

Julia Bainum, Baltimore City College