So, it appears, do Memphians Howard and Beverly Robertson of Trust Marketing, who this week, at the National Civil Rights Museum, were to unveil a campaign on behalf of the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis, described in their press release as "a nonprofit Tennessee organization formed to locate and mark known lynching sites."
To be sure, we write this in advance of their scheduled press conference and cannot vouch for all the details of the Lynching Sites venture. As we see it, memorializing the places where such public horrors took place during the era of Jim Crow is akin to the concept of remembering the Holocaust at the various worldwide ceremonial sites that do so. And not much different from the memorials to Pearl Harbor or 9/11, for that matter.
Tragedies and misprisions of the past require our attention quite as much as do the heroics of history, real or imaginary, and it is hard to conceive of anything more directly counter to the pomp and self-deception of the numerous monuments to the Confederacy that remain.
How does that famous quote from George Santayana go? "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Memphis Flyer