Bryan Stevenson, author, lawyer, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, was interviewed on WNYC today. The second segment covers the new memorial to lynching victims that he started. He said that 400,000 visited the memorial in its first year.
This got me to thinking about a tedious set of facebook posts I endured a month ago claiming that there is a declining interest in history. I wondered how 400,000 people visiting a site in Montgomery squares with the idea that “people today don’t care about history.”
Here in New York we are remembering the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. There are a host of commemorative activities, oral history projects, news features on this historic anniversary. Once again, the popular reaction to this important milestone in LGBT civil rights is hardly one of passing it over. It is both being commemorated and celebrated, and being examined using traditional historical methodologies.
Finally, as anyone who has tried to get into the new African American history museum in D.C. knows, the place is always full.
Anyway, you can listen to Bryan Stevenson talk about incarceration and lynching, historic and modern, on the player below.
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