Episode 66: Bringing Monuments Home (PRX’s Monumental)
Tamar Avishai: Okay, so, Ashley, I want you to close your eyes and just think about some of the monuments that you picture when you hear the word monument.
Ashley C. Ford: Hmm. I live in Indiana, born and raised. And one thing that's true about Indiana is you're going to get a war memorial. Okay, there's going to be a statue for a general. Okay. You're going to find some cannons. That was me from a conversation I had with one of our producers. I'm from Fort Wayne, so I literally grew up around memorials to war and conflict, and those have predictable forms, like an obelisk or a soldier on a horse. In this series, we've looked at monuments and memorials in various corners of the United States, and I've noticed that the newer attempts at grappling with our history look very different from the monuments I saw as a kid. Maybe it's because they're trying to tell a different kind of story. Sure, artistic styles change, but new kinds of stories ask us to stretch our assumptions of what a monument should look and feel like.
This is Monumental. A podcast series produced by PRX. I'm your host, Ashley C. Ford. This episode, we're focusing on the design choices that go into monument, making good design.
Tamar Avishai: You're not meant to notice. You're meant to kind of experience.
Ashley C. Ford: This is producer and art historian Tamar Avishai. She got me thinking more deeply about the challenges of creating monuments.
Tamar Avishai: My background is in Holocaust memorials and museums and the design elements that go into them, the different ways that these spaces have tried to tell a story, that have a scope and a magnitude of of tragedy and just kind of the unimaginable. Right. How do you represent that? It's very, very difficult.
Ashley C. Ford: I went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and when I got to the section with the shoes, the stacked shoes that were representative of some of the millions lost in the Holocaust, um, I was I was so affected, I had to sit down. And I sat there for a long time and wept. The shoes feel like a public memory that I am part of with others. I think it is really hard to figure out how to invite people into a conversation that leads to a reckoning. There is an internal process of emotion that's going on there. An invitation into yourself to ask yourself questions about what you think is right and wrong, what you value, who you want to be versus who you are now versus who you've been. A memorial or a monument can inspire the start of that process, but it can't do it to you. It can't put that in you home.
Tamar Avishai: It arrives back at the place that I think we're both so interested in, which is what happens when you are in a space. What does it do to you? And we approach these as visitors, but it's also really interesting to approach it from the mind of a designer, because they're not just artists, they're psychologists in a way, you know, they really have to understand how to speak to their audience in a way that is going to allow a unique individual visitor to wrestle with their own experience there and do that in a way that is productive.
Ashley C. Ford: To learn more about how they're doing this. Tamar Avishai began at a newer memorial in the American South, one that aims to represent the legacy of racial violence in this country.
Tamar Avishai (VO): I'm standing outside a wooden door that leads to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. It's a quiet spot near a suburban neighborhood with all the trappings of an official memorial. There's a stone walkway, [00:05:00] a tidy garden, a metal detector. From the entrance, you can see the heart of the memorial on a hill. Hundreds of rust tinged pillars hanging under a flat horizontal roof. This memorial only opened in 2018, although its oxidized pillars and the way it's built into the landscape make it feel like it's always been here. Its layout is spread over six acres, taking you along a path that climbs that hill, and as you ascend, you pass sculptures of human beings with graphic historical narrative written on the retaining wall. All of this culminates with the 805 abstract pillars at the top.
Tamar Avishai (VO): There's no one way to design a monument. Sometimes visitors feel more connected to seeing depictions of people or events, what we call representational art. And sometimes they just need a meditative space for reflection. This site offers both approaches. And you would think that this mix of styles would make the space feel like it contradicts itself. But Montgomery itself feels like a contradiction in this city. A sculpture of Rosa Parks stands kitty corner from a fountain in the middle of a plaza, where enslaved people were sold at auction. This was the first capital to the Confederacy and the proud city of the 1955 bus boycott, and the march from Selma a decade later.
Bryan Stevenson: I moved to Montgomery in the 80s. We do not have Martin Luther King Day. We have Martin Luther King slash Robert E Lee day.
Tamar Avishai (VO): This is Bryan Stevenson. He's the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, or the EJI. That's a nonprofit organization that's based in Montgomery, Alabama. And he's a visionary working to end inequality in our justice system. You may know his best selling book and the movie that was based on it, Just Mercy. The EJI, under his leadership, has created both the Legacy Museum and this site, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, although it's more commonly known as the Lynching Memorial. Over 4000 people were lynched in the United States during the late 19th century to the mid 20th century. More than 300 were from Alabama.
Bryan Stevenson: And it's not something that people learn about. Most Americans could not name a single lynching victim, not one.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Sometimes these stories are even buried within families.
Shirah Dedman: I'm Shirah Dedman. And I'm the great granddaughter of Thomas Miles senior, who was lynched in 1912.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Today, Dedman is a filmmaker in her early 40s. She grew up in California, and as a kid, she didn't know much about this history. Her mother had just a vague childhood memory.
Shirah Dedman: They found this clipping, and then they were like, hmm, what? But nobody in the family ever talked about it. It was like we found it. We read it. We know there's this, like, dirty secret, but we're never going to talk about it.
Bryan Stevenson: We've never been compelled to be honest about our history. There hasn't been that shift in power, which usually is the necessary condition for the kind of truth telling cultural spaces that have emerged in the world.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Speaking of other memorials, working to honestly confront history, that's my cue to explain what brought me here. My background is in Holocaust memorials. I lived in Germany. I've put a lot of professional and personal energy into studying them, and the way that they've attempted to tell the truth about a tragedy on a scale that could never possibly be captured. And the most recent large scale Holocaust memorial in the center of Berlin has changed that conversation because it's an abstract memorial thousands of concrete slabs of varying heights without text or signage. It looks like an undulating field of tombstones, if you want it to be metaphorical, or if you don't like nothing at all, nothing but a quiet five acre space to reflect on whatever it evokes for you. And that's a little unorthodox for a memorial to a genocide. Professor James Young was a member of the jury that chose that memorial.
James Young: I was invited to join in 1998, which I did, but only on the condition we be allowed to fail.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Young is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and author of several books on both Holocaust memory and the construction of memorials.
James Young: The other condition was that we not invite the artists and architects to articulate a particular kind of memory, but perhaps to articulate the problem of Holocaust memory in Germany. [00:10:00]
Tamar Avishai (VO): Germans have had the impossible task of memorializing their national crime. This isn't something that perpetrators usually do. It means that right out of the gate, you're not in the position to speak the voice of the victims to tell their story. Instead, it's a space of asking questions of your grandparents, of your country, maybe even of the darkest parts of yourself, and knowing that there are no definitive answers. And this was Bryan Stevenson's inspiration when he set out to design a memorial to the victims of lynching to hold American history accountable for a crime that's never even been formally adjudicated.
James Young: It's kind of interesting that the model we provided Germany was Jim Crow segregation laws...
Tamar Avishai (VO): Jung is referring to the Nazi Nuremberg Laws against Jews that were passed in 1935. Those drew directly from America's Jim Crow system of legalized racial apartheid that started in the 1890s.
James Young: ...and now we are learning from the Germans after the Holocaust, how to commemorate our national crime.
Tamar Avishai (VO): And so all of this has brought Stevenson and me to the entrance of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
Bryan Stevenson: Hi, I'm Bryan.
Tamar: It's so nice to meet you. I'm Tamar.
Tamar Avishai (VO): It's an outdoor site. All of it is uncovered. And yet when I walk in, it's like the volume of the city is immediately lowered. The retaining wall keeps the city outside. I can tell as soon as I start walking that my whole body is going to be processing this space, not just my head. Stevenson and I are on the path towards the suspended steel pillars that I could see from the outside. But before we get there, we're stopped in our tracks by a representational sculpture that I didn't see from the outside. It's by Ghanaian sculptor Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, and it's a harrowing depiction of a family being torn apart during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Bryan Stevenson: That's where the story begins.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Bryan Stevenson.
Bryan Stevenson: You know, nearly 13 million people kidnapped, abducted, transported across the Atlantic to the Americas.
Tamar Avishai (VO): The scene that this sculpture depicts is absolutely brutal. Captured in rough hewn bronze, enslaved people are shown in various states of panic and desperation with shackles around their necks. Everyone is connected with chains. Their faces are contorted with grief or with resignation. There are whips, scars on their backs. A crying woman clutches her baby, reaching out to a man whose hands are shackled. I looked at this scene at the small baby's hand, desperately gripping his mother, and felt the immediate need to look away.
Bryan Stevenson: And what I didn't anticipate when we opened was how many people would say, gosh, I've lived in this country my whole life. I've never seen a sculpture that is intended to depict the brutality of slavery and the humanity of the enslaved. We don't have sculptures in this country that speak to the institution of slavery, and without understanding slavery, you won't understand lynching.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Stevenson is drawing a line between two historical traumas slavery and lynching, both inflicted because its perpetrators denied the humanity of an entire race. And it's true. We don't have many realistic sculptures that show this history, and there are a few reasons for this. For a long time, people just resisted facing it. But for those who have started to tackle these subjects, another reason is aesthetic. There just isn't much representational sculpture in contemporary memorials, at least not since the art world embraced abstraction in the 20th century. Abstract art, by definition, is not about what can be represented. It's about everything else the feelings that are evoked, the associations that are created in the viewer's mind or body, the memories that are conjured the way the black granite of Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial reflects you back. The way the nine over 11 memorial draws attention to the buildings that aren't there, all experiences and reflections are invited in.
James Young: I think abstract design allows everybody to come to commemorate for their own reasons. So it allows these places to welcome competing constituencies, kind of competing visions. [00:15:00] It all gets remembered, uh, in these sites.
Tamar Avishai (VO): And that's the real value of abstract art and design. It's incredibly subjective. Whatever you bring to the space becomes what the space is about. This is what the designers of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial had in mind. But abstract art has its pitfalls, too. These spaces assume that visitors already know the history of what they're stepping into. And when it comes to both slavery and lynching, we can't underestimate the extent to which they don't. Which is why the painful directness of Akoto-bamfo sculpture of these enslaved figures feels so necessary. Bryan Stevenson again.
Bryan Stevenson: I think when you need representation, really very much depends on what's the level of understanding, what's the level of engagement. And if you just abstract the harm without challenging people to recognize the full humanity of the people who are being victimized, then you won't actually achieve the sort of engagement that's necessary.
Tamar Avishai (VO): It was really striking to me, this difference, walking into a memorial to lynching as compared to a Holocaust memorial. For now, at least, the horrors of the Holocaust are pretty well known. Even the English name for the Berlin Holocaust Memorial is the memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. You kind of know what you're in for, but this memorial is called the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. From the name, you'd almost expect to be walking into a botanical garden.
Bryan Stevenson: I want to invite people in. And so this space is open and it's green, and it looks beautiful and inviting, and that's intentional. And I contrast that with the you know, I've been to the Holocaust Memorial is a really powerful place and there are no words. I think they trust people to come into that space with a knowledge and an awareness of the Holocaust that allows them to have a deep and meaningful experience with that abstraction, with those structures that are abstract. I knew we couldn't do that here.
Tamar Avishai (VO): We continued on the path up the hill.
Tamar: Um, so we're approaching the pillars. Can you describe this walk that we're doing right now?
Bryan Stevenson: As you walk up the hill, you come into this first corridor, which is where we begin to present the monuments. And here you can see places at the top of each monument.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Wilcox County, Alabama, Polk County, Georgia, Montgomery County, Kentucky.
Bryan Stevenson: And what we want people to understand is that each of these monuments reflects a county where these horrific acts took place. And then you can see closer names, and we present the names of all of the victims of lynchings and the date that they were killed.
Tamar Avishai (VO): In this first quarter. The pillars aren't yet suspended. They stand on the ground at eye level, six feet tall, like human beings in formation. And you can read the names, the dates, the counties inscribed on them. You can even touch them. They're made of a kind of steel that oxidizes, going from a grey to brownish rust. They're imperfect and continually evolving. They almost feel alive.
Bryan Stevenson: And I like that because we didn't think that these monuments should be pristine and and, uh, clear and unblemished. Sterile. Yeah, that's a good word. We wanted them to literally bleed.
Tamar Avishai (VO): As you walk through the pillars, skirting and shifting your body as though to let them pass, you notice the dates. They're in chronological order, starting from the furthest into the past to the most recent. And you realize that the most recent is too recent.
Bryan Stevenson: That's what's chilling about this history, is that there's no official end date, and that absence of a committed end to this kind of violence is what makes some of this so haunting.
Tamar Avishai (VO): The pillars end at 1950, and that's just the arbitrary cutoff for the memorial. Emmett Till was murdered five years after that in 1955. On the walls. Further into the memorial, there are lists of reasons for the lynchings and their absurdly senseless. For example, a black man killed for walking behind a white woman in public. I want to believe that this couldn't happen in living memory, but the dates on these pillars are [00:20:00] unsparing.
Bryan Stevenson: You know, the Congress refused for a half century to pass a law banning lynching violence in the midst of all of this. They just had they just signed the law. They just passed a law that's just, you know, two years ago.
Tamar Avishai (VO): We enter the second quarter, where the monuments begin to lift slightly at the top eight inches a foot. Two feet by the bottom of this path, they're suspended over your head, and it's physically sickening to experience the hoist of these pillars alongside you. Suddenly, the bottom of one is next to your head, reminiscent of the dangling feet that the murderers would pose next to in grainy photographs. Shira Dedmon has visited this memorial.
Shirah Dedman: And you get to Caddo Parish, which is where my grandfather was lynched. And there are so many like just the names are so many. Um, and for me, looking at it above my head, it's like I started to get it. These are the people that are hanging from, let's say, a rafter or hanging from a tree hanging from wherever. And they're above you. You're looking up and you're watching them hang.
Tamar Avishai (VO): In her research, she found a clipping that described where and how her great grandfather was killed.
Shirah Dedman: They described it as a baseball field, which was very different than anybody else had described it. It gave me a new sense of the, um. Terror that these things were meant to instill, like the idea that you could. Hang a body to be seen by everyone in a space that is meant for like joy and entertainment and relaxation and community, you know? And so it's like, wow, this is even worse than I ever could imagine. And especially when we talk about. Intergenerational trauma, and we talk about the public manner in which lynchings were done. When the public, our black people themselves.
Bryan Stevenson: This was violence directed at a whole community, not just at an individual. We don't talk about thousands of victims of lynching. We talk about millions.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Bryan Stevenson and I walk deeper down another descent. But this is where something shifts. The pillars change again. They're higher overhead. They're almost protective. And incredibly, the darkness lifts, too. Light is streaming in. This is the space of reflection.
Bryan Stevenson: We did feel like it was important to create a place for people to just process all of this. We have these words on the wall that the memorial is for the hanged and beaten, for the shot, drowned and burned, for the tortured, tormented and terrorized for those abandoned by the rule of law. We will remember with hope because hopelessness is the enemy of justice. With courage. Because peace requires bravery, with persistence, because justice is a constant struggle with faith, because we shall overcome.
Tamar Avishai (VO): You're then invited into a space called Memorial Square. It's in the center of the four sections of the pillars, almost like a central courtyard. You walk up a path that ends at a small wooden square. It's big enough for one person to stand on it.
Bryan Stevenson: This part of the experience was really designed to create a space where you're looking at those who have been killed. You get to a place where you're now surrounded by their histories, their stories, and now you're the object. I mean, I've always felt this way. I think history is watching us.
Tamar Avishai (VO): I didn't have this experience. The podium felt to me like the platform of gallows. It made me feel queasy, and it made me think of another story of a lynching that I'd read about in the memorial a 15 year old lynched in front of a crowd of 10,000 people. A terrified kid surrounded and all alone. And these pillars surrounding me, which throughout the memorial had represented the victims of lynching, have now done a complete about face. They became the mob. I asked Stevenson if the pillars were meant to do that too.
Bryan Stevenson: I think it is intended to do both. I think we should feel what it's like to be surrounded by this mob.
Tamar Avishai (VO): When [00:25:00] I asked Dedmon about her experience, she had yet another reaction.
Shirah Dedman: I actually had a sense of happiness, feeling a sense of pride that my grandfather was now recognized, like he was more of like a person now. I felt that way for those people. It wasn't just about, oh, this. Like the photos that we see when we're younger. It's just like nameless black dude, uh, lynched. And so naming them as these people, as individual people was very powerful to me. And that's why for me, I just saw like, hope and a sense of happiness for all those people who were being named.
Tamar Avishai (VO): And again, this is why abstract art is so valuable, whether we're asking questions, whether we have diverse insights, it's all welcome on one single wooden platform. History is watching us and judging us and giving voice to the silence and inviting us to hear it all of us, all with different histories and different points of reference.
Tamar: I will say I have a lot more experience with Holocaust memorials. I'm used to walking around these spaces that are so powerful, but it's speaking to my history and it's it's new. Yeah. To walk around a space that I, I question, is it meant for me? And I'm curious who is this memorial for?
Bryan Stevenson: You know, I'm deeply moved when I go to Berlin and see the Holocaust memorial. It actually affirms something within me about how important it is to struggle for human rights across the globe, to protect the humanity and dignity of every person. And that's what we're hoping for, too. And in that respect, it's absolutely for everyone.
Tamar Avishai (VO): This universal humanity and dignity is reflected throughout the remainder of the site. Every memorial has to think about what visitors are going to take with them when they leave, and here that sense of we shall overcome became present in my body. I heard the sound of the waterfall, my lungs filled with rich, damp air. Justice felt like something that I could hold in my hands, like a deeply earned, even joyous thing. The gift of being able to reflect, finally, on the truth of this country's history and the individual stories that are now being told. And this feeling is carried through when you exit the abstract portion of the memorial and continue on the path where you're confronted with slightly larger than life size sculptures of six actual people. After the visceral experience of the pillars, they're a welcome sight.
Branly Cadet: We are humans, so when we see a human figure, we will have a response.
Tamar Avishai (VO): This is Branly Cadet, the sculptor who made them.
Branly Cadet: There is that reflection that we experience when we see the human form. That may be a little more challenging to access when it's purely conceptual or abstract form.
Tamar Avishai (VO): In contrast to the enslaved figures at the entrance, these figures embody hope. Life. Each of these models is a living descendant of a person who is lynched. Cadets spent hours with these people learning their stories, who they were. He asked each of them to find their own gesture or pose that came to them when they thought about their family history. Shirah Dedman modeled for one of these statues of an activist with a bullhorn.
Shirah Dedman: I think I would be like, hey, that's why I know you can't see me moving my hands to the people who are listening, but putting my hands up to my mouth and going like, hey!
Tamar Avishai (VO): And there are others. A man touching a marker to a lynching victim, almost as though touching the victim himself. An older woman looking to the sky, hands to her chest with tears streaming down her smiling face.
Branly Cadet: She had her hands on her heart and I asked her, what are you experiencing right now? And she said that she's experiencing her ancestor and she's feeling, you know, the connection to him. And one of the ways that I read this was that despite the horrific and almost anonymous way that this person was murdered, he is still seen, he is still remembered, and he is still loved. And that to me, represented the healing potential of remembrance, that there is a way that we can move from, you know, the grief to maybe not fully healing, but certainly to begin to heal. Um, just by acknowledging this person mattered. This person was here.
Tamar Avishai (VO): The healing nature of acknowledgment is seen [00:30:00] throughout the work done by the Equal Justice Initiative, both on site at the memorial and particularly in one of the Legacy Museum's best known initiatives, the Soil Collection Project. Eji staff and volunteers tirelessly track down the sites of lynchings and contacted descendants of the victims. The descendants were given both an address and two jars to fill with the freshly dug up dirt from these otherwise unremarkable sites, dirt that might very well still contain traces of their relatives DNA.
Shirah Dedman: Oh, so this is the foundation, I think technically his house would have been on that corner, I think.
Tamar Avishai (VO): That's Shirah Dedman in a film that the EJI plays at the Legacy Museum. She made the trip to collect the soil with her mother and her aunt to Shreveport, Louisiana, to where her great grandfather lived, to the tree where they believe he was killed.
Shirah Dedman: Based on sort of the descriptions I had read, it was this really big site of Foreboding Tree, so it just called me. I think it just called All of us where just this it, amongst all the trees, look like it would have been the one that could hold the weight of a body.
Tamar Avishai (VO): In the film, after digging into the earth and filling the jars, the three women pause for a moment and Dedmon stretches her arms around the tree and hugs it.
EJI Film: "Uprooted": Yeah. Breathe. Just breathe. Breathe, breathe. You. This is. Yeah. Are you breathing? Come on, baby, come on. I'm trying to.
Tamar: The scene in the film of you hugging that tree. What was going through your head in that moment?
Shirah Dedman: I don't know I the best way of putting it is I was just overtaken. I was just overtaken with images. Knowing that he was going to die. Knowing he had this, you know, small child that he was going to be leaving behind. And. Just how scary that was. Being hung up and being shot, you know, all of that. And my mom and my aunt were like, holding on to me. Because it was like. Like I was walking. But I wanted to stop walking because I, I literally couldn't breathe, like, I it was really hard to breathe.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Families like Shirah Dedman's, who take part in the Soil Collection project, get to keep one jar of this precious dirt for themselves. They send the other back to the museum to be displayed. This project gives that soil its proper respect. Finally, after all this time acknowledgement, a proper interment, and for the living a funeral. In the film we hear a eulogy.
EJI Film: "Uprooted": We pray that the sacrifice that he so involuntarily made strengthens us. Edifies us. And help us to move forward in a way that will prevent this ever from occurring again. Amen.
Shirah Dedman: Or, you know, it's not just dirt. There was greater meaning to the dirt when we got to the museum. And it was there on this wall alongside these other jars. And it was pretty amazing seeing these like these other families that got to experience, especially because you have to remember that there was so much, um, shame, so much hiding. You didn't really want to acknowledge your ancestor because there was almost like an assumption that they did something wrong. Um, and so, you know, I think all of us going through this project of, of soil collection are having this experience where we get to acknowledge our ancestors. But like with pride, not shame. The whole point is starting the process of healing. And so seeing that brought hope and happiness to me.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Seeing it all in one central place was extraordinarily powerful. But this project also showed how memorials can exist in multiple places.
Ashley C. Ford: When we come back, we'll look at the idea of bringing monument making into [00:35:00] our communities and how designers today are using the power of the unexpected to bring monuments to the past into the future. A heads up that there's a brief mention of suicide in this episode. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the suicide and crisis lifeline. This is monumental from PRX. I'm your host, Ashley C Ford. Let's get back to our story.
Tamar Avishai (VO): I used to think of monuments as places of learning and reflecting, but I'm realizing now how important they also are for healing. They're usually sites that people make pilgrimages to places where what is lost can be found because they are remembered. But remembering can happen anywhere. Because history does. History? Happened on this street corner. On that bridge. Someone was lynched on that tree, over that dirt. And it's important for the community around it to grapple with that truth. So the Peace and Justice Memorial doesn't limit remembering to this central site in Montgomery. It's dispersing this responsibility and returning it to its origin points. You might say the memorial is decentralized. In Montgomery, each of the suspended pillars is replicated next to the central memorial. They lie sideways on the ground like coffins, and they're supposed to disappear one by one, as each county named on it comes to claim it.
James Young: Part of the memorial process is actually carrying these monuments home for a kind of homecoming.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Professor James Young.
James Young: And allowing every county to figure out a way to reestablish these events in the mind of a particular community and makes makes them wrestle with it.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Counties have had the opportunity to claim these pillars since the memorial opened in 2018. Almost all still remain at the site.
James Young: Every community is going to have to figure it out for themselves and it's going to take time. It was a great piece by, uh, Clint Smith in the Atlantic in which he asked a lot of these questions.
Clint Smith: My name is Clint Smith. I'm an author and a staff writer at The Atlantic magazine.
Tamar Avishai (VO): In December of 2022, Smith wrote an extraordinary article on what Americans can learn from the way Germans have memorialized the Holocaust, and particularly in the spaces where history actually happened. And one project he talked about at length was the Stolpersteine.
Clint Smith: It's the largest decentralized memorial in the world. Part of the success is by making the story profoundly human.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Stolpersteine translates as stumbling stones. They're individual cobblestones on sidewalks, encased in bronze and stamped with the names of the individuals who lived at the home that you just walked by, the date that they were deported, and most often the concentration camp where they were murdered.
Clint Smith: And for me, it's this incredible example of enhance the proximity of myself to that period of time and almost sort of serve as a catalyst for like a radical sort of empathy.
Tamar Avishai (VO): It started as a grassroots project in 1992, initiated by the German artist Gunter Demnig. Now there are over 70,000 stones in more than 24 countries across Europe.
Clint Smith: For me, the experience of walking down the street and you pass two stumbling stones and you see the names, and then you pass four stumbling stones, and then you pass seven stumbling stones, and you look down and you see the names of these people, and you can tell how old they were. Uh, when you look down and see the birth date and the death date, and you look up and in front of you is the home where these folks were taken. And I look at those doors and imagine that family walking through those doors.
Tamar Avishai (VO): The Stolpersteine project complicates the role of the viewer. It's completely your prerogative to walk right by and carry on with your day, but you can also choose to stop and look. You can allow for the full weight of history, tens of thousands of these stones, or the loss of this one individual life. Both tell the story of the event.
Clint Smith: It is a reminder of the sort of arbitrary nature of birth and circumstance, you know, but for a host of factors, it could have been any of us who were subjected to what these people experienced. And and I think that that makes it real [00:40:00] for people rather than just simply an abstraction rather than a number like 6 million, rather than a sort of amorphous thing that doesn't feel real, that doesn't feel tactile. I do think there's something to be said for letting people see a single name and a single birthday, a single day of death in a specific place. That just takes an idea like the Chicago race riots. That's abstract. Like there was this big thing that happened and all these people died and and just makes it personal, makes it human, makes it singular.
Peter Cole: My name is Peter Cole and I co-direct the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration project.
Franklin Cosey-Gay: Franklin Cosey-Gay, I am the co-director of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project. This is volunteer work.
Tamar Avishai (VO): The project they're talking about is a memorial in Bronzeville on Chicago's South Side that is planned to open in 2024. It very intentionally borrows from the Stolperstein model, but instead of cobblestones, tempered glass markers will be embedded into the sidewalks, marking the deaths of people who were killed. Right on the very spot where we were standing outside the subway at 35th and Bronzeville and throughout the neighborhood. And so there are people who walk by and come in and out of the subway. Uh, how many of them know anything about this history?
Peter Cole: So the average person in Chicago and the average person outside of Chicago doesn't know the history of 1919, right? Um, it's simply not taught.
Tamar Avishai (VO): It's the story of the Chicago race riots begins in 1919 on a hot Sunday afternoon.
Peter Cole: Black kids went swimming in Lake Michigan. And when they were swimming, um, and their raft drifted southward, they crossed an invisible line in the water. And a white man on the beach around 29th Street beach started throwing rocks to these kids. And one of those children, Eugene Williams, was killed. Right? The police refused to arrest the killer. And over the course of a week, 38 people were killed, 537 were injured. Over a thousand were left homeless in what was and remains the largest episode of racial violence in Chicago history.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Of course, importing the Stolpersteine model from Berlin to Chicago presents challenges when you don't necessarily know the history of your own city. Can we really expect people rushing off the train to stop, look down and imagine the lives of people they never knew?
Tamar: Can America handle the subtlety of these monuments?
Franklin Cosey-Gay: Yeah, I mean, that's it's a great question.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Um, it's a constant challenge keeping this history relevant. These markers will have more text, more context than the stumbling stones do. Cole and Kosgei are also partnering with institutions who wrestle with contemporary issues around racial violence. These are the people who are blowing the glass and embedding it into the sidewalks. This is how they hope to bring the conversation into the present.
Franklin Cosey-Gay: So we thought it would be very important to tie this story over a century ago to current survivors of violence. We believe that it's a thread that needs to be uplifted. Omission does not lead to healing.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Every city has a history like this that its residents are probably totally unaware of. Every city needs the past pulled into the present. In a perfect world, they both said this project would be national.
Tamar Avishai (VO): In Bronzeville, I looked down at the unbroken sidewalk, and I squinted to imagine the markers to the racial violence that will be there. Like only once they're installed would a major event have happened there. But that history is always been there. It's just been invisible. The grandness of a lot of memorials feels like they're imposing memories of events and people. But now a new generation of monuments and memorials and their creators is approaching this on a smaller, more human scale. And they're doing this by identifying the individual stories that have historically gone untold. The aim is to make the invisible visible.
Tamar: Again, this is all with your phone, right?
Idris Brewster: Yes.
Tamar Avishai (VO): This is Idris Brewster. He's the founder of an app called Kinfolk, which uses augmented reality, or AR, to bring a viewer into what he calls invisible monuments. You do this by pulling out your phone in a designated spot. The app uses your camera, viewing the area as it is through your lens, except suddenly a landmark appears on your phone's screen. Think Pokemon Go, but you know, for a richer understanding of history.
Idris Brewster: We've actually been able to partner with the Pokemon [00:45:00] Go team to create the location based technology to add on to kinfolk.
Tamar: So what does that look like? What does that feel like?
Idris Brewster: Let's say you go to the Tourmaline monument downtown.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Tourmaline is an artist who created a virtual monument in the New York City location for the kinfolk app.
Idris Brewster: You go to 108 Greene Street, which is where the historical figure Mary Jones, who was one of the earliest records of a black trans woman in New York City. And you are at the place where she lived. You open up the camera in front of you. Uh, 75ft tall is a large monument to Mary Jones.
Tamar Avishai (VO): This real life space, as seen through your phone, now has a monument squarely in the middle of it, a monument to a history that never had one. Now, appearing on your phone as real as stone through the magic of AR.
Idris Brewster: It's sort of a guerilla activation. Um, I think that's the beauty of what we've built is the ability to activate where we want, when we want, without having to go through the red tape to make these monuments appear.
Tamar Avishai (VO): It's a testament to the era that we live in, where technology is able to recreate the past. And what's more, to new interpretations of the past more than a single static physical monument ever could. Brewster talked about realizing the history he learned in school was just one perspective.
Idris Brewster: What I found when I started diving through the archives is that a lot of my history wasn't recorded. The history that I'm receiving is a lot of oral history, a lot of family history that's been passed down. A lot of my community deals with myths and legends as history. And so I think part of the work I'm doing is trying to expand our notion of what history is and what it can be for us.
Kassie John: We really tried to challenge that history paradigm that it is not a monolithic story. That is something that's ever growing, ever changing.
Tamar Avishai (VO): This is Kassie John.
Kassie John: So for like minded peoples, we always try to introduce ourselves using our tribal language and just sharing a little bit of like that grounding space. So I'll just introduce myself in my traditional way.
Tamar Avishai (VO): John is a member of the Navajo Nation and a co-founder of walking with Dinetah, a community art and trail walking initiative that focuses on oral histories, map making, and what they describe as participatory art. By collecting stories from community elders, younger people are able to reclaim their histories, and these histories aren't in textbooks. They're passed down from generation to generation.
Kassie John: So how do we connect ourselves back to this space?
Tamar Avishai (VO): The space itself, that is to say, the landscape, the trails are the second key component to the project after the storytelling. Because while stories are invisible and the story tellers are ephemeral, the landscape is neither. These mountains and terrains have existed longer than this people.
Kassie John: Everything has been already. It's already made. It's something that is embodied by the community, is something embodied in the language, and then very much embodied by the individual as well, as we all bring different pieces to the landscape.
Tamar Avishai (VO): In a video of a storytelling session, 12 year old Kimberli ties her family's history to the land.
Kimberli: So I live near the three big rocks my great grandmother used to call these Sesange Sesenta, which means the three black, the three big black rocks. And then after here, I would always think from a young age that the big rock was my oldest sister and this middle one was my brother, and the youngest was me.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Walking with Dinatah shares Kinfolk's sense of a decentralized guerilla history. It also, like with Kinfolk, requires a kind of technology that would have been unimaginable to previous generations. Open the app, hold up your phone and then look around. Voices will point out the four points on the mountain in the distance, and how it connects to the tribe's mythological creation story, and also that this spot was where the storytellers baby niece first laughed. Another, smaller origin story that invites the same radical sort of empathy that Clint Smith was talking about.
Kassie John: So it tells a story of that space, because if we we didn't want to put ourselves into a fixed narrative where these spaces felt like, you can only talk about this in this lens. We really wanted it to be open ended for future [00:50:00] generations.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Open ended, unfixed narratives. They feel like the beating hearts that motivate those doing this work today, like Idris Brewster.
Idris Brewster: I mean, facts are definitely a part of this process. I'm not trying to say that's not the case, but it's also how do we have creative outlets for these facts? How do we tell stories around these facts? How do we just sheerly put forth multiple perspectives in these conversations?
Tamar Avishai (VO): These are critical questions. Storytelling just in the last generation has exploded into infinite parts. The public square has moved online. And so it makes sense that these monuments are reflecting this, creating history from a collection of infinite, subjective, even contradictory human stories. And these memorials have also moved further from sites and juries and towards small objects that are meaningless to anyone but their owner, objects that are all the more meaningful once their owner is gone. But those small objects could help us confront immense crises that we're still struggling with now.
Jha D Amazi: You ask, you know, what does it look like to create a memorial to an epidemic that is ongoing? It's certainly challenging.
Tamar Avishai (VO): This is Jha D Amazi. She's a principal architect at the MASS Design Group, the firm that worked with Bryan Stevenson to design the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. She's also the director of their Public Memory and Memorials Lab, as well as one of the lead designers of the Gun Violence Memorial Project. This is an installation that's been exhibited in Chicago and Washington, D.C., and will open in Boston at the end of 2024. The Gun Violence Memorial Project is composed of four houses, each made up of 700 glass bricks.
Jha D Amazi: 700 being the number of Americans that were killed on a weekly basis due to gun violence in this country. And the houses themselves are meant to be of a scale and of a size that is familiar to a visitor. So there are about a ten foot by ten foot by ten foot, uh, volume. You can stand inside of them and at the same time, they're meant to be small enough so that you can actually conceive of them and understand of them as a house.
Tamar Avishai (VO): This form was intentionally chosen. The house is where so much gun violence takes place. It's also where the tragic repercussions are most deeply felt, where loss hits home.
Jha D Amazi: We didn't necessarily want it to be something that was too abstract that you couldn't necessarily relate to, because ultimately, the purpose of the memorial is to invite family members of gun violence victims to contribute objects on behalf of their loved ones that are then encased in the bricks. It's really a moment and an opportunity to pause and reflect and think of the humanity of the individuals themselves.
Film: "The Glass House": My brother junior killed himself by suicide by gun. He'd been battling schizophrenia for five years. This driver's license is one of the few items I have left of my brother.
Film: "The Glass House": My daughter who was murdered by an ex-boyfriend. Your biggest fear is that your child is going to be forgotten. I don't want Maggie to ever be forgotten.
Tamar Avishai (VO): These are the voices of people who contributed objects to the memorial in a film made by Mass Design.
Film: "The Glass House": The drum is perfect. I mean, you couldn't have got more perfect than that. That's how he knocked on the door. Everything was a little beat, you know? So. So you knew it was him? Yes, I see, I see.
Tamar Avishai (VO): The project's goal is to build a glass house in every city in America. And a glass city on the National Mall, like a permanent Aids quilt. The four houses are exhibited together to express the enormity of the epidemic of gun violence. Again, each house represents a week of deaths. The four houses together make a month 2800 deaths. It grows exponentially. And yet, at any given time, you're staring at an object as small and subjective as a stumbling stone.
Film: "The Glass House": I brought my youngest niece's hat from the hospital. She was only six months old when she was killed.
Tamar Avishai (VO): Here, the individuals become statistics, and the statistics become individuals.
Jha D Amazi: And in that way, we are simultaneously representing both the infinite and the intimate.
Tamar Avishai (VO): This relationship between the intimate and the infinite that Amazi talks about, it feels like the cornerstone of what makes any memorial successful. You have to humanize statistics for people to care about them. And yet, when [00:55:00] the intimacy that's found in a single human story is repeated infinitely. This is history. It's abstract, but it's also something that we can understand. History is the story of what human beings have experienced and what we have lost. But when people are remembered, they're found again. There's an expression of condolence that Jews say to one another when someone has lost a loved one, zichrano livracha. May their memory be a blessing. And it is such a comfort to recognize the ways that lives continue to matter after death. If you think about all the memories we each contain, then we're all living memorials and monuments to the people that we have lost. As the sculptor Branly cadet said earlier, that's how they can still be seen, still remembered, still loved and still found over and over in objects, in reminders, in us. Shirah Dedman says her great grandfather lives on in this way.
Shirah Dedman: They killed him. But like, they didn't wipe him off the earth in a sense, because he had, you know, my grandfather went on to have, uh, 17 kids. So he has a gang of descendants, even though we know nothing about him except really his death. Uh, there's so much life that sprung from him. So they didn't succeed, really,
Tamar Avishai (VO): I think about the final words on the wall of the Peace and Justice Memorial. We shall overcome. What does that look like? It looks like Shira Dedman, who's creating monuments through her filmmaking and activism. She's made a documentary about the black food justice movement. Her work aims to instruct and inspire to shine an honest light on the dirty secret she grew up believing was a source of shame. She now knows her history. The work of monuments continues through her, through Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative and through countless others. Everyone who takes the time to be instructed, to be inspired, to be welcomed, to remember and to be moved towards truth.
Ashley C. Ford: I think what I've realized as we've recorded these episodes is how important it is for these memorials and monuments to be alive within their communities. It's not enough for them to just exist. They also have to be in conversation. They have to be engaged with. They have to be put into context, and it's on us to make that happen. Let's continue this conversation. We want to hear from you what monuments are important to you? What memorials would you like to see? Send us an email or voice memo. We're at monumental at npr.org. This episode was produced by Tamar Avishai. Special thanks to Lauren Francis to Vikki Merrick. Thanks also to Tania Cortez and Mia Taylor at the Equal Justice Initiative. Audio from the Gun Violence Memorial Project film The Glass House, which was produced by Karen Capotosto and Haroula Spyropoulos. Audio from the walking with Dinata series, courtesy of Kassie John. Audio from the Equal Justice Initiative. Films used with permission from the EJI. The senior editor for Monumental is Rosalind Tordesillas, and our senior producer is Nancy Rosenbaum. Jamie York is our writer and our production assistant is Perri Gregory. The show is recorded by Bryce Bowman and Ben Erickson at Earshot Audio Post and mixed by Tommy Bazarian with support from Terrance Bernardo, Emmanuel de Salm, Pedro Rafael Rosado, Morgan Flannery and Sandra Lopez Monsalve. Fact checking by Cristina Rebelo. Our theme was composed and produced by Jelani Bowman with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. Edwin Ochoa is our project manager and our executive producer is Jocelyn Gonzales. Monumental is produced by PRT productions and made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. For more on the show, visit us at prx.org/ [01:00:00]Monumental. I'm Ashley C. Ford. Thanks for listening.