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Once the Site of Racial Terror, Alabama Now Takes 'First Step Towards Recovery and Reconciliation'

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Thursday marks the historic opening of the nation’s first museum dedicated solely to the remembrance of thousands of men and women who endured racial terrorism.

This painful stain on America’s history is being highlighted by the National Memorial for Peace and Justice where, according to its records, “More than 4,400 African-American men, women, and children were hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned and beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950.”

The finished project started in 2010 and is now a hallowed site in Alabama, a state with the infamous death toll of more than 300 lynchings.

The museum's website showcases six sprawling acres housing some “800 corten steel monuments, one for each county in the United States where a racial terror lynching took place.” 

The facility has had some mixed reviews from those who ask, 'Why dig up the horrors of the past?' But museum curators see this story as necessary in healing the country, stating on their website that “publicly confronting the truth about our history is the first step towards recovery and reconciliation.” 

Although the museum chronicles these murders-by-lynching until the 1950s, shocking racial violence is still a part of our world today. Just 20 years ago the brutal murder of James Byrd, Jr. at the hands of white supremacists captured headlines.

Byrd was hitchhiking home when two white men offered him a ride. The two assailants beat this father of one small son and subjected him to all manner of ill treatment before shackling him to the back of a pickup truck and pulling him through back roads until his limbs and head popped off.

What was left of his body was later dumped in front of an African-American church.

Police report they found pieces of Byrd strewn over 81 sites.

A more recent act of racial terror is the 2015 mass shooting that took place at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina.

The gunman, Dylan Roof, sat through 45 minutes of Bible study and, according to prosecutors, waited for the closing prayer before opening fire and killing nine churchgoers.

Roof, convicted on 33 federal charges and sentenced to death, was reportedly unrepentant, telling jurors, "I still feel like I had to do it."

Roof told FBI agents he specifically chose Emanuel AME, historically known as the South’s oldest black church, because he wanted to start a race war.

Meanwhile, modern-day racial terror is alive and well, although stemmed from small clusters of white supremacy groups and self-radicalized lone wolves.

Earlier this week, a few dozen Nazis gathered in a field to burn swastikas and spew hate-filled chants.

According to TheMaven.net and the Twitter universe, the “National Socialist Movement held a 'lighting' in Georgia.” Onlookers said it was just a handful of Nazis, far fewer than the Tennessee rally of 2017 which sparked waves of outrage.

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