The National Memorial for Peace and Justice

The memorial was designed not just as a site of mourning but as a framework for national participation. It began with Equal Justice Initiative's important community reconciliation work, with communities collecting soil from lynching sites across the country, each jar preserving remnants of place and spatializing the memory of these individuals. A duplicate set of the corten monuments lies in the surrounding landscape, intended to be claimed and installed by counties willing to confront their history. Together, these elements establish a distributed system of memory, connecting local histories to a broader national narrative.

Since opening in 2018, the memorial has welcomed over half a million visitors annually. It has been published on the cover of the New York Times, featured in The New Yorker, Architectural Digest, and Wall Street Journal. Mark Lamster of the Dallas Morning News called it the “single greatest work of American architecture of the 21st century”. Its presence has also contributed to cultural and economic renewal in the region, transforming Montgomery into a cultural destination recognized nationally. The long-term vision is for this work to embed acknowledgment into the fabric of American civic life. As soil archives grow, county monuments are claimed, and communities engage their own historical projects, the memorial's reach expands.