At all three Legacy sites, the scale of the racial terror caused by lynching was brought home to us. When three of her friends were lynched in Memphis in 1892, Ida B. Wells began to investigate lynchings nationwide. She discovered that many victims of lynching had committed no crime other than being too successful, and that racial terror was used as a mechanism to enforce second-class status on Black people. Lynching did not provide an opportunity for due process or a fair trial. 

While it seems like our criminal justice system today should protect people from being unjustly convicted, there are still systemic issues that allow injustice to persist. Death penalty convictions have a shockingly high error rate. Alabama is a particularly egregious example. Bryan Stevenson, founder of EJI, notes that "With 34 executions and seven exonerations since 1975, one innocent person has been identified on Alabama's Death Row for every five executions." We had the privilege of meeting Anthony Ray Hinton, who served 30 years on Alabama's Death Row even though he was completely innocent.  Racial bias persists in sentencing, jury selection, enforcement, and many other aspects of our criminal justice system.

"On my recent trip to Montgomery, Alabama on a Racial Justice Pilgrimage I was faced with the severity of the lynchings that happened in this country.

Our fellow black sisters and brothers who survived slavery were still not free and always in danger of their life being snatched unjustly. The lies and ideology of hatred continued on and found new ways of racial terror.

It struck me how even after all these years and tragedies, the same rhetoric is being used to rally up my people by ICE. It’s easy to snatch and ship away people when they are labeled as rapists, drug dealers, gang bangers and mentally ill.

As a Christian it is my duty to hold other Christians accountable to the Gospel. The trans Atlantic slave trade should have never happened had people actually followed the Gospel. But not much seems to change as we have Christians to this day using the Gospel to continue to oppress others.

By grace and the power of the Holy Spirit we can change things. Uphold the Gospel."  - Sergio

"It is troubling to see our government authorizing the bombing of boats in the Caribbean Sea, rather than arresting the occupants and bringing them to trial. Much like lynching, this seems like a way to instill terror. Without due process, how can we be sure that our government is acting justly on our behalf." - Heather

At the Legacy Museum, we encountered many accounts of families being ripped apart by slavery. Imagine having someone take your husband, or your wife, or your child from you and selling them hundreds of miles away. Imagine not having the freedom to try to find them, and knowing that you likely will never see them again. One heart-rending exhibit displayed newspaper ads after the Civil War where formerly enslaved people were trying to find family members who had been taken away from them.

"I was furious and heartbroken during the first Trump administration when immigrant children were being separated from their parents, often with no records being kept to be able to reconnect them. While this implementation was particularly cruel by design, I was disappointed to learn that family separation had been a feature of our immigration system throughout many administrations of both parties. It took me still longer to connect this policy with the family separation that occurred during slavery and to realize that this is not a new injustice, but one that has been practiced in this country from the beginning. It's happening again through the current immigration enforcement actions, which are sweeping up people with no criminal records, some of whom had their legal status suddenly stripped away." - Heather

The Transatlantic Slave Trade represented an enormous forced migration. Millions of African people were kidnapped, loaded onto slave ships under brutal conditions, and enslaved for life. 

In the 1900s, during what is known as "The Great Migration," millions of Black Americans moved from the South to cities in the North and West to escape racial terror and economic oppression. Although we call this a migration, many of the people who fled should be more accurately described as refugees. They were fleeing violence and persecution, just as many refugees are today. When they reached their new homes, they continued to face discrimination in housing and employment simply because of the color of their skin. They competed with immigrants from other countries, who were often fleeing poverty, violence, or persecution in their own countries. However, immigrants who were white were eventually accepted as fully American, while Black Americans and immigrants of color continued to face discrimination. 

We see this injustice continuing today as refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants have different experiences in this country based on the color of their skin. Think about the reception of refugees from Syria or asylum seekers from Central America compared to refugees from Ukraine. When politicians stoke fear of immigrants, they target brown and black immigrants, not white immigrants. The current administration has completely cut off admissions to the refugee program with one exception - white Afrikaners from South Africa.

Segregation was enforced through Jim Crow laws in the South as well as redlining and racially restrictive covenants in other parts of the country. All of these policies upheld a caste system that kept African Americans locked into second-class citizenship. Civil rights activists sought to overcome these segregation laws through nonviolent demonstrations and through the courts. They were met with economic intimidation and violence, including bombings and assassinations. After many years of faithful and courageous effort, the legal structures of segregation were toppled. However, the effects linger on into the present.

The racial wealth gap is a consequence of decades of discrimination in housing and loans. Today, the typical white family has 10 times the household wealth of the typical Black family. School funding models that depend on property taxes have perpetuated inequities resulting in education achievement gaps. Factories and other sources of pollution were typically sited near segregated neighborhoods resulting in poorer health outcomes for people living there. These and many other injustices share segregation as one of their root causes.

During Reconstruction, 2000 Black men served in elected office and by 1868, more than 80% of Black men had registered to vote. But this was only possible because Federal troops from the North enforced the new civil rights amendments to the Constitution. When the federal troops left, ending Reconstruction, white Southerners rolled back the clock, writing new laws to take the vote away from Black citizens. 

Those who are in power write the laws, and the right to vote ensures that each person has a voice in their government. Proverbs 31:8 instructs us to "Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves." During the years after Reconstruction, white Christians in the South should have been insisting on protecting the voting rights of their Black neighbors. Instead, they often led the efforts to deny those rights. Only those who have the right to vote can protect the rights of others with their vote. 

Today, voting rights continue to be under threat.  We are fortunate to live in a state that removes many of the barriers to voting, but that's not true in other states. In some areas, polling places are removed, causing people to have to travel farther and wait in long lines to vote. Some states make it difficult to register to vote and easy to remove people from the voting rolls. Although racial gerrymandering is not legal, political gerrymandering can be used to disenfranchise targeted groups of people. It is up to those who can vote to speak out against these types of policies and vote for lawmakers who will protect voting rights. One way we love our neighbors is by defending their rights.