And the winner is...

Ed Ayers: In that spirit, thinking about what defines BackStory. In some ways, it is the discovery of people and stories and perspectives that are not otherwise heard. If we were making that sort of criteria, what’s in the spirit of the 10 years of the work that we’ve done? It is surprise and for rubbing against the grain with these [inaudible 00:26:51].

Brian Balogh: In the end, after a four-hour, that’s four-hour, meeting, it was the unanimous decision of the BackStory Prize jury that the winner of the first BackStory Prize should be the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

Ed Ayers: You know, Brian? This is so immediately powerful. It’s a monument to lynching, to the hidden, obscured history of men who were taken and illegally hanged from trees and light poles and street lamps, all these terrible things. The monument evokes the horror of that in a symbolic way. For every lynching victim, there is a heavy stone monolith hanging from the ceiling of the building with the name of the place where it happened inscribed like a tombstone on it. Then, outside of that building, they have the slabs with the same inscriptions laying on the ground waiting, people from those counties to come claim them, to take them back home, and to acknowledge their counties complicity in these crimes.

Ed Ayers: The project began by collecting dirt in jars from all the places where the lynchings had taken place. So, not only were we impressed by the bravery of acknowledging this history, which is deeply researched, which has years of historical examination behind it, but also by the vision that America could be better by acknowledging this history.

Brian Balogh: Yeah, it’s that interactive nature, Ed, that I was so struck by. In this digital age, this is a way of taking the concrete, mingling it with our historical memory, and pretty much shouting out to much of America, “You need to own this. You need to take responsibility for this. You need to take these slabs back to your own community to remember them forever.”

Ed Ayers: You can start seeing the impact of this. Here in Charlottesville, really just a few hundred yards from where we record, a lynching from the early 20th century was discovered, and there’s an effort here to acknowledge, to memorialize that lynching. This is not merely a monument that’s in one place that does the work of one place but radiates out across the country. It seems that as much as we admired all the acts of history this last year, this one emerging in April of 2018 seemed to be a landmark in the ways that we might think about parts of history that we thought could never be memorialized. Now, we see that they can.

Brian Balogh: In fact, Ed, a group from Charlottesville visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in 2018. While they were there, they heard from Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the equal justice initiative.

Bryan Stevenson: We’re not free in America. We’re burdened by a history of racial bigotry and bias that’s created a kind of smog that’s in the air. It doesn’t matter where you live, whether you live in Charlottesville or Montgomery or New York or Los Angeles and Oakland, it’s in the air and we’ve all been infected and compromised and contaminated by this legacy, this history, of racial inequality that our parents and our grandparents and our great-grandparents should have done more. I’m not blaming anybody. Should have done more. You deal with it. Because of that, we have inherited this legacy.

Bryan Stevenson: What’s exciting to me about what you’re doing is that a year ago, Charlottesville was a sight of something ugly and painful. It was the place where that legacy, that history showed itself in some difficult ways. What you’re doing this week is modeling what every community in America needs to do, which is to talk more honestly about what this history has to do. That’s where this begins. We’re going to have to talk about some things in this country that we haven’t talked about before.

Bryan Stevenson: We have to talk about the fact that we are a post-genocide society. What happened to native people when Europeans came to this continent was a genocide. We slaughtered millions of native people. Half the states in America are native words. We don’t ever talk about that. Native words, but we made the people leave and we killed them by the millions but we didn’t call it genocide. We said, “No, those native people, they’re savages.” We came up with this narrative of racial difference to justify the violence that we perpetrated on those souls. We didn’t even feel bad about what we did.

Bryan Stevenson: That narrative of racial difference was cooked into the very culture, the economy, the social systems, the political systems that formed our nation. We, from the very beginning, got indifferent to what racial bigotry can do to other people. It’s that narrative of racial difference that I believe made us comfortable with two and a half centuries of slavery. I really don’t think that the great evil of American slavery was involuntary servitude and forced labor. I am persuaded that the true evil of American slavery was the narrative of racial difference that we perpetuated. It was the ideology of white supremacy.

Bryan Stevenson: We created this idea that somehow black people aren’t like other people. They’re not fully human. The courts said that they’re three-fifths human. It said, “Black people can’t do this. They’re not evolved. They can’t do that. They can’t do this,” and that ideology, that narrative of racial difference, that was the true evil of American slavery. If you read the 13th amendment it talks about ending involuntary servitude, ending forced labor, but it doesn’t say anything about ending this narrative of racial differences, this ideology of white supremacy.

Bryan Stevenson: Because of that, I don’t think slavery ended in 1865. I don’t. I think it just evolved. It turned into decades where we had lynchings and violence and terrorism. That’s how this man in Charlottesville could be pulled from a train and hanged and then brutalized and shot and no one was ever held accountable. It had to do with this reign of terror that we were tolerating in this country. We haven’t talked about what that did to us.

Ed Ayers: That was Bryan Stevenson, founder at the Equal Justice Initiative and creator of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, winner of the first annual BackStory Prize.

Brian Balogh: That’s going to do it for us today. If you’re interested in looking at the long list for the BackStory Prize, it’s on our website, backstoryradio.org. You can keep the conversation going online by sending an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter, @backstoryradio.

Brian Balogh: Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Ed Ayers: Funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is helping Virginia Humanities and BackStory change the narrative of race and representation.

Nathan Connolly: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Johns Hopkins University. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

David Stenhouse: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is a Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University.

David Stenhouse: BackStory was created by Andrew Windham of Virginia Humanities.