National memorial for peace and justice

National Memorial for Peace and Justice Alabama, 2018

The Equal Justice Initiative developed a National Memorial to victims of lynching in Montgomery, Alabama.

A classical structure was designed for the Memorial, consisting of 805 columns - one for each county where EJI documented racial terror lynching.

When visitors enter the memorial, the ground drops and perception shifts as visitors realize that the columns that appeared to be holding up the structure are actually monuments suspended from above, which evoke the lynchings that took place in the public square. Over 4,000 names of lynching victims were inscribed on these monuments.

"The biggest design challenge for the memorial modules was/and is the handling of data. There are a total of 1,610 unique modules - 805 memorial columns and 805 memory bank modules and there are over 8,000 victim's names inscribed on those modules. The font selection, font layout and spacing, the fabrication process to inscribe the names, the review process to make sure that the names were accurately transferred from the graphic designer to us for fabrication, and the tracking of all this from design to fabrication completion is a daunting task that we’re proud to be a part of.“ Eric Simonsen. VP of Project Management

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