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 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.

While we continue our work to build deeper local understanding of past and present issues of racial injustice, we feel that the time has come for the Jefferson County Memorial Project to move forward in memorializing Jefferson County’s victims of racial terror violence by designing and placing a JCMP-designed memorial in collaboration with our local community.  As we begin this process, please follow us on social media and sign up for our email newsletter to hear about opportunities to engage in the design and construction process.

More information on the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Community Remembrance Project can be found at www.eji.org. For questions regarding EJI’s Memorial retrieval process for counties, please contact memorialmonument@eji.org.

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.