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A Pilgrimage to Montgomery Stanford education scholars visit a new memorial chronicling the history of lynching in America

A group of students led by Stanford Graduate School of Education professor Ari Kelman journeyed to Alabama for the opening of the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

Thousands traveled from around the world to Montgomery, Ala., in April for the opening of the nation’s first memorial honoring victims of racial terror lynchings in the American South. Four graduate students from Stanford GSE joined Professor Ari Kelman as part of a contingent organized by the GLIDE Center for Social Justice in San Francisco.

"I'm very interested in how people learn in spaces outside of school," said Kelman, whose courses at Stanford include a seminar, Curating Experience, exploring the power and politics of museums. "When I heard that GLIDE was organizing a trip to Montgomery for this, I knew I wanted to go, and I wanted to bring students."

He put out the word through email lists and invited students to apply, choosing four by lottery. The group, whose travel was supported by the GSE Dean's Fund and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies, shared reflections about their experience at a panel discussion on May 14.

Nearly 80 travelers joined the contingent organized by GLIDE, including Professor Ari Kelman and four GSE students

The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice document and commemorate the lives of nearly 4,400 black Americans who were killed during an era of rampant public lynching between 1877 and 1950.

Together they reveal a long history of state-sanctioned violence against African Americans, said Kelman, the Jim Joseph Chair in Education and Jewish Studies.

"The memorial has made a powerful contribution to the story of civil rights in the United States," he said. "It's not a story of progressive triumph, a steady march toward equalityit's one that clearly implicates the state in violent efforts to maintain segregation and inequality."

The memorial features more than 800 steel monuments, representing thousands of racial terror lynchings that took place between 1877 and 1950. Each is marked with the name of a county where lynchings occurred.

Xavier Monroe, a doctoral candidate at GSE whose research focuses on improving access and equity in STEM education for underrepresented minorities, was one of the four students who traveled with Kelman to the opening.

He saw the Florida county where he was raised named on one of the columns at the memorial, indicating that it was one of many where lynchings had been documented. He was well aware of this aspect of the community's history when he was growing up, he said, and echoed remarks made by speakers at the memorial’s opening events that the prejudice at the root of the lynchings reveals itself in many forms of racial oppression today.

Seeing the current incarnations of this painful history has pushed him toward research to address racial injustice, including educational inequity, he said. "If educators and educational researchers are supposed to be change agents, we need to engage in the harsh realities of the past and the present.," he said. "I think of the Faulkner line, 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' "

Clockwise from top left: Professor Ari Kelman, Christine Bora Lee, Xavier Monroe, Dallis Fox and Sarah Mirza

For Sarah Mirza, a master's student from Pakistan enrolled in the International Comparative Education (ICE) program at GSE, the experience opened her eyes to the complicity of local leaders at the time, the magnitude of the brutality and its ongoing persistence.

“Many people are under the illusion that our society has moved away from organized violence and discrimination,” said Mirza, whose research at GSE explores how textbooks and curricula in Pakistan influence students' tolerance towards others.

Her experience in Montgomery made it clear to her that far from being eradicated, the violent history of lynching in America has only evolved. “Mass incarceration, police brutality—they're all modern-day forms of racial terror," she said. "The museum made that connection very explicit.”

Christine Bora Lee, a master's student in the Policy, Organization and Leadership Studies (POLS) program at GSE, plans to pursue a role in higher-ed administration working with low-income, first-generation students after she leaves Stanford.

She said the experience in Montgomery, in part, reinforced for her the need to be conscious of the impact cultural history can have on power dynamics between administrators and students. "It's made me more curious to hear stories from students that aren't being heard," she said, "and more aware of the harm I could do without realizing it."

At the memorial: "Raise Up," a sculpture by Hank Willis Thomas

Dallis Fox, another master's student in the POLS program, taught first grade before coming to the GSE and plans to help open a new charter elementary school in the Seattle area after she finishes the program.

"I think a lot about how we can talk about race and justice with kids, how we create foundations for that at an early age," she said. "Of course it needs to be developmentally appropriate, but what does that look like? As educators, we need to be prepared and courageous enough to be able to talk about these issues with them."

Reading the stories documented at the site—many made public for the first time—strengthened her commitment to ensure that future generations grow up with an honest understanding of the past and how it shapes the world today.

"In education, we have the privilege and power of being in control of a lot of the narratives that kids hear about history," said Fox. "We have a huge responsibility to speak truth to everyone's experience."

Sculpture by Kwame Akoto-Bamfo

Photos of the memorial by Shawn Calhoun

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