About a year ago, I read an article about a tireless and intrepid civil rights leader named Bryan Stevenson.
And Bryan had a bold architectural vision.
He and his team had been documenting the over 4,000 lynchings of African-Americans that have happened in the American South.
And they had a plan to mark every county where these lynchings occurred,
and build a national memorial to the victims of lynching in Montgomery, Alabama.
Countries like Germany and South Africa and, of course, Rwanda, have found it necessary to build memorials to reflect on the atrocities of their past,
in order to heal their national psyche.
We have yet to do this in the United States.
So I sent a cold email to info @equaljusticeintiative.org : "Dear Bryan," it said,
"I think your building project is maybe the most important project we could do in America and could change the way we think about racial injustice.
By any chance, do you know who will design it?"
Surprisingly, shockingly,Bryan got right back to me, and invited me down to meet with his team and talk to them.
Needless to say, I canceled all my meetings and I jumped on a plane to Montgomery, Alabama.
When I got there, Bryan and his team picked me up, and we walked around the city.
And they took the time to point out the many markers that have been placed all over the city to the history of the Confederacy,
and the very few that mark the history of slavery.
And then he walked me to a hill.
It overlooked the whole city.
He pointed out the river and the train tracks where the largest domestic slave-trading port in America had once prospered.
And then to the Capitol rotunda, where George Wallace had stood on its steps and proclaimed, "Segregation forever."
And then to the very hill below us. He said, "Here we will build a new memorial that will change the identity of this city and of this nation."
Our two teams have worked together over the last year to design this memorial.
The memorial will take us on a journey through a classical, almost familiar building type, like the Parthenon or the colonnade at the Vatican.
But as we enter, the ground drops below us and our perception shifts,
where we realize that these columns evoke the lynchings, which happened in the public square.
And as we continue,we begin to understand the vast number of those who have yet to be put to rest.
Their names will be engraved on the markers that hang above us.
And just outside will be a field of identical columns.
But these are temporary columns, waiting in purgatory, to be placed in the very counties where these lynchings occurred.
Over the next few years, this site will bear witness, as each of these markers is claimed and visibly placed in those counties.
Our nation will begin to heal from over a century of silence.
When we think about how it should be built, we were reminded of Ubudehe, the building process we learned about in Rwanda.
We wondered if we could fill those very columns with the soil from the sites of where these killings occurred.
Brian and his team have begun collecting that soil and preserving it in individual jars with family members, community leaders and descendants.
The act of collecting soil itself has lead to a type of spiritual healing.
It's an act of restorative justice.
As one EJI team member noted in the collection of the soil from where Will McBride was lynched,
"If Will McBride left one drop of sweat, one drop of blood, one hair follicle -- I pray that I dug it up, and that his whole body would be at peace."
We plan to break ground on this memorial later this year, and it will be a place to finally speak of the unspeakable acts that have scarred this nation.
When my father told me that day that this house -- our house -- had saved his life,
what I didn't know was that he was referring to a much deeper relationship between architecture and ourselves.
Buildings are not simply expressive sculptures.
They make visible our personal and our collective aspirations as a society.
Great architecture can give us hope.
Great architecture can heal.
Thank you very much.
