Proposed memorial is part of the re-visioning of Linn Park
Councilor Carol Clarke presented the Jefferson County Memorial Project during Tuesday’s Council meeting — which will be an interactive, spiraling memorial in Linn Park honoring the local victims of racial terror violence.
The JCMP is a diverse grassroots coalition fueled by a long list of individuals and community partner organizations from all across Jefferson County who have an interest in reckoning with this history and promoting our collective healing.
Councilor Clarke has served as volunteer chair of the design committee for the central memorial space, which was presented on Tuesday.
“This is our key project with the JCMP,” Clarke said. “The Equal Justice Initiative’s memorial in Montgomery largely consists of an array of hundreds of pillars, each listing the county, state, names and dates of each documented lynching victim. As you exit the memorial, you walked through a sort of graveyard of duplicate pillars. There was a call for action for each County to go back and do community remembrance project in coordination with EJI. The goal is to prominently display each duplicate pillar. So here we are five years later to share an approved concept for Linn Park.”
According to the presentation, this memorial’s landscape will present an inner and outer narrative. Each of which ultimately culminates at a single sculptural element; The Jefferson County Memory Jar. The path to the jar is marked by individual victims’ stories paralleling a timeline of interpretive moments.
The inner narrative will be a timeline of Jefferson County’s 33 documented victims of racial terror violence. Our centerpiece, The Jefferson County Memory Jar, will be the shape of a mason jar and decorated by ancient African Adinkra symbols chosen to reflect each of the 33 victims memorialized in this landscape.
The monument’s outer narrative will be a timeline depicting the historic periods of Slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and Mass Incarceration. Jefferson County’s marker from the National Memorial for Peace and Justice will be placed within the memory jar’s profile, directly in front of the entrance to the courthouse.
Linn Park is a historically significant location for the ongoing fight for civil rights. In 1883, Lewis Houston was lynched by a white mob, the first documented lynching in Jefferson County. In the decades that followed, Linn Park served as a rallying point for demonstrators demanding equal justice from the two seats of government that are connected by the park.
The proposed memorial is part of the re-visioning of Linn Park, and the Birmingham City Council proudly stands alongside the efforts of the Jefferson County Memorial Project as we continue to reckon with our history and continue the march towards justice for all people.
