Hi, I'm Jonathan Cape Heart, and welcome to Cape Up.

Thanks to the racist photo on Virginia Governor Ralph Northam's Medical School Yearbook Page, the nation is engaged in another

halting conversation on race.

One man pictured is in Blackface, the other in KK-K-Garb.

The former, a dehumanizing stereotype, the latter a symbol of domestic terror against

African Americans, conversation with Brian Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative,

and the visionary behind the Powerful Memorial

for Peace and Justice, also known as the Linching Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.

Hear him talk about social justice, racial justice, and how the history of racial

terror lynching still casts a pall over American life right now.

Brian Stevenson, thank you very much for being on the podcast and for having us down here in your offices at the Equal Justice Initiative here in Montgomery, Alabama.

Thank you. It's great to be with you.

So, before we get to the reason why we're actually down here, I want you to define a term that you see when you go to the Legacy Museum, when you go to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and that is racial terror lynchings.

Do I have that right?

Yes, that's right.

So what we're talking about are lynchings that were designed to terrorize people based on their race.

And I think popular culture we have a notion that lynchings were what happened when someone was hanged and of course lots of lynching

victims weren't actually hanged they were drowned they were beaten to death they were

shot they were burned alive and so when we talk about lynchings, we're talking about a category of crime committed by groups of people and racial terror lynchings are murders, crimes committed by groups of people of African Americans to terrorize the African American

community.

There was mob violence, there was frontier justice in many parts of this country where there was no functioning criminal justice system.

If someone did something violent or broke the law, a group might come together to exercise punishment against that person.

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