In April 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) opened a groundbreaking memorial in Montgomery dedicated to African American victims of racial terror lynchings called the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The Jefferson County Memorial Project (JCMP) was created in June 2018 shortly thereafter. 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 Memorial will be placed in historic Linn Park, anchored in the municipal center of downtown Birmingham.

JCMP’s mission and holistic approach for readying the Birmingham and Jefferson County community to thoughtfully and intentionally engage in a process of creating a site of memorial and remembrance for our county’s victims of racial terror is driven by our county’s need for understanding of past and present issues of racial injustice.

Reconciliation Spiral, designed with community input by Birmingham-based architecture and engineering firm, Goodwin Mills Cawood, will present an inner and outer narrative. Each of these ultimately culminates at a single sculptural element; The Jefferson County Memory Jar decorated by ancient African Adinkra symbols chosen to reflect each of the victims memorialized in this landscape. The jar not only immortalizes the memory of the victims held sacred but serves as a point of physical engagement for the visitors. The path to the jar is marked by individual victims’ stories paralleling a timeline of interpretive moments. The timeline depicts the following historic periods: Slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction Era, Jim Crow Laws, Civil Rights, and Mass Incarceration.

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A Place of Acknowledgement for  Social Justice Warriors

JCMP is proud to offer the chance to add acknowledgments to the brick path at our Jefferson County Memorial. This sense of permanence will be honorably designated for those who support our four-pronged mission of memorializing victims of racial terror violence and expanding our county’s understanding of past and present issues of racial injustice. Beautifully engraved bricks inscribed with names chosen by donors will be tastefully included in our outer narrative – a timeline depicting Jefferson County’s historic periods of Slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and Mass Incarceration. This space will welcome visitors to reflect on how far we’ve come and who leads the fight for a more just community.  All donations are tax-deductible.

Re-Visioning Linn Park

Based on the outpour of community support, a space for our monument will be accounted for in Rev Birmingham’s Re-vision Linn Park master plan. JCMP is working closely with the initiative as a stakeholder in the overall planning of the redesign of Birmingham’s Linn Park. Linn Park’s community-oriented planning and design process will result in a fresh park design and brand identity, a plan for ongoing park programming and activation plan, and a governance model for sustained maintenance and capital investment.