Re-Membering Black Geographies of Lynching through the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project’s Soil Collection Program and Implications of Interpretive Multiplicity

Keywords: black geographies, lynching, memorialization, memory-work
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper examines the Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) Community Remembrance Project’s soil collection from hundreds of lynching locations of mostly Black persons in the U.S. Providing process and guidance, EJI, then permanently displays the soil collected at one of the three sites of memory in Montgomery at The Legacy Museum, The National Memorial Peace and Justice and its Center. Sometimes, soil collected is also displayed at local sites of memory in communities. This material and embodied memory-work is meant to be an avenue to access scales of geographies of racial terror, thereby reconstituting public memory. While the soil collection project has been widely celebrated, it is not universally accepted as contributing to truth telling of the past. Instead, EJI’s process as well as the material manifestation of the public displays of collected soil are sometimes understood as exclusionary and reductive. Relying on interview data, EJI documents, press releases, and participant observation, I explore the politics of memory and the implications of multiple interpretations of excavating, preserving, and re-presenting Black experiences of lynching horror. I consider in which ways the soil collection project may be a form of regenerative memorialization, expanding and nuancing the mobilities of formally omitted historical narratives. Additionally, I explore how the soil collection may foreclose those same narratives, impeding a greater understanding and reckoning with the past.