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Lynching memorial and museum in Montgomery open to public

By The Associated Press

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — The public is getting its first look at a lynching memorial and museum in Montgomery, Alabama.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, opening Thursday, is dedicated to 4,400 individuals who lost their lives in lynchings and other racial killings between 1877 and 1950. Their names are engraved on 800 steel rectangles, one for each U.S. county where lynchings occurred.

A museum is also opening in Montgomery, called The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration.

Launch events include a “Peace and Justice Summit” featuring celebrities and activists like Ava DuVernay, Marian Wright Edelman and Gloria Steinem.

The summit, museum and memorial are projects of the Equal Justice Initiative, a Montgomery-based legal advocacy group founded by attorney Bryan Stevenson. Stevenson won a MacArthur “genius” award for his human rights work.

America 250: Catherine Bauer’s vision for affordable housing continues to resonate today

By Linh Bui
Catherine Bauer devoted her life to improving housing for low-income families and has been called the "mother of public housing." "A brilliant woman who thought that we ought to treat housing as a public good, the way we treat the fire department or the police department," said Elizabeth Deakin, professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. "That doesn't mean there's not a big role for the private sector, but it also means that the public sector has responsibilities to make sure we're okay."
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