Jennifer Rae Taylor, Senior Attorney

EQUAL JUSTICE INITIATIVE

MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA

A Tangled Legacy Documenting and Memorializing the

Historical Roots of Mass Incarceration

• EJI was founded in 1989 to represent men and

women on Alabama’s death row, at a time when the

state provided no legal assistance to people with

death sentences, and 1 in 4 executions nationwide

were happening in Alabama.

• EJI later launched project areas addressing excessive

sentences, children prosecuted as adults, parole

advocacy and re-entry services, and prison

conditions.

• Race and historical injustice was always a frame

through which EJI understood the work of

confronting mass incarceration, situating it as a

legacy of enslavement, lynching, and Jim Crow

segregation in the deep South. In the last decade it

has also emerged as an independent project area.

Racial History Project

A History of Racial Injustice Annual Calendar (2012-Present)

Slavery in America: The Montgomery Slave Trade Report (2013)Montgomery Slave Trade Historical Markers

Erected in Downtown Area (Dec. 2013)Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror Report

(2015) & LynchinginAmerica.eji.org Website (2017)

Lynching History Local to NKU

Kentucky – 169 Documented Victims

• 1 victim in Gallatin County

• Will Green, 1878

• 5 victims in Boone County

• Parker Mayo, 1877

• Theodore Daniel, 1879

• Charles Smith, 1880

• Charles Dickerson, 1884

• Sam Scales, 1885

Ohio – 15 Documented Victims

• Fifteen Different Counties

• An unidentified victim killed in Holmes County in 1892 was

reportedly “the only negro” in the

otherwise all-white county

• As of the most recent census, Holmes County remained over 99% white.

Lynching History Local to NKU

MARKER PROJECT

2015-Present

• Brighton, Alabama

• LaGrange, Georgia

• Oxford, Mississippi

• Austin, Texas

• Abbeville, South Carolina

• Tuscaloosa, Alabama

• Center, Texas

• Letohatchee, Alabama

• Selma, Alabama

• St. Augustine, Florida

• Gadsden, Alabama

• Kansas City, Missouri

COMMUNITY REMEMBRANCE PROJECT

Soil Collection Project

2015-Present

April 2018

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice

April 2018

The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration

Summer 2018

Segregation in America Report & Website

segregationinamerica.eji.org

Truth, Reconciliation, and Recovery

• “Truth and Reconciliation are Sequential” EJI’s Racial History Project is working to support Truth-

Telling efforts as our staff also continues its present-day legal advocacy

• Mass Incarceration is Inextricably Linked to America’s History of Racial Injustice Criminal

justice has long been a tool of racial control, but it was also the institution least targeted by civil rights reforms and

today produces some of our society’s most persistent racialized outcomes.

• Our National Discourse Fails to Comprehend or Address This History of Inequality and

its Legacy Supreme Court rulings signal a willingness to roll back legal protections created during the civil rights

era, and polarized political rhetoric impedes productive and honest dialogue.

• Reshaping the National Conversation on Race is Difficult and Long Overdue EJI invites the entire nation to undertake this journey by visiting The Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and engaging in the Community Remembrance Project to confront our history with honesty, courage, and hope for the future.

www.eji.org• Museumandmemorial.eji.org

• Lynchinginamerica.eji.org

• Segregationinamerica.eji.org

Jennifer Rae Taylor jtaylor@eji.org