The Alabama National Memorial for Peace and Justice
As African Americans attempted to find freedom in the North by migrating there from the south, thousands of slaves were captured and lynched. Lynching was a common form of murder by punishment and torture that was carried out by people filled with hate for the community. Justifications by lynchers were often that the slaves were illegally trying to escape their enslavement, making it right to torture and kill them as they fled their oppressive conditions.
The memorial depicts slaves chained together by shackles around their neck and feet. They are all in positions of agony, expressing pain and suffering through their expressions. One of the statues is holding a reaching out to another slave. The monuments are all standing on a foundation of a single white rectangle adjacent to the grass and the concrete walkway.