The Jefferson County Memorial Project (JCMP) was created in June 2018, after the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a groundbreaking memorial in Montgomery dedicated to African American victims of racial terror violence. The memorial structure is centered around over
800 steel monuments, one for each of the more than 800 counties in the United States the counties where EJI documented racial terror lynchings. EJI has invited these counties to participate in their Community Remembrance Project, retrieve their monuments, and facilitate a local reckoning.
The Community Remembrance Project is part of EJI’s work to partner with communities to recognize the victims of racial terror lynching through efforts such as educational events, collecting soil from lynching sites, erecting historical markers in communities where racial terror lynchings occurred, and placing their corresponding memorial monuments that acknowledges the horrors of racial injustice.