Facing America's History of Racial Violence
A new exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, "The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America" examines the history of racial violence in the U.S. The exhibition features artistic works, as well as videos, photographs and an interactive map detailing over 4,000 incidents of violence against African Americans from 1877 to 1950.
The show, which runs through Sept. 3, is a partnership between the Brooklyn Museum and the Equal Justice Initiative.
"The first thing visitors will see is this argument that slavery didn't end in 1865, it evolved," Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, told WNYC's Jami Floyd. "We purposefully do not include a lot of the graphic imagery that is associated with the pictures of lynchings. We really wanted to focus the attention on the community, the people who were culpable, the people who were responsible and the rest of us who had been silent."
