The pontoon boat cut through the murky brown water of the Alabama River as it motored past the former port where enslaved Black people were once unloaded as cargo in downtown Montgomery. Aboard the watercraft were American and German academics, museum curators and leaders of memorials and nonprofit foundations.
They had traveled to Alabama searching for memories of a sordid past and an understanding of how the stories we tell ourselves can shape how a nation reckons with its past — or doesn’t.
“Building a Critical Memory: Transitioning from Denial to Collective Responsibility in Germany and the United States” is a joint project organized by the Southern Poverty Law Center and several organizations and institutions in Germany and the U.S.
The program began in March when Margaret Huang, then president and CEO of the SPLC, and a group of SPLC staff members along with more than 40 other participants spent a week in Germany to learn how that country remembers its past, particularly the rise of the Nazi party, World War II and the Holocaust.
In Germany, federal, state and local governments alongside private associations and foundations preserve several concentration camps where Jews and other persecuted minorities were imprisoned and murdered as historical sites. There, visitors learn and reflect on the country’s complicated history. These sites, as well as museums and memorial sites dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust and World War II, continue to be funded and supported by the government.
“You can never make up for the damage,” said Andreas Etges, who teaches American history at the University of Munich (LMU) and is the co-organizer for the Building a Critical Memory project. “But you cannot move on as a society if you don’t at least start with accepting your history and telling it in an honest way.”
By comparison, private groups as well as federal, state and local governments in the U.S. fund numerous monuments and memorials to the Confederacy. Those that commemorate the lives lost and the families torn apart by slavery are few. School curricula discussing slavery and the Civil War vary widely in breadth and accuracy from state to state. Meanwhile, “Lost Cause” mythology that idealizes antebellum culture while minimizing the brutality of the abuses free and enslaved Black people endured runs rampant throughout the country, particularly in the South.
Now, a government-supported campaign is underway against diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Federally funded museums that accurately reflect the history and experiences of Black people, such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture, have been threatened with censorship and budget cuts. Private companies have been warned to cease equitable and anti-racist hiring policies. Classroom discussions of slavery and discrimination have been labeled as “divisive” and banned from educational curricula in some states.
“I believe the Critical Memory Project is vital at this moment as we see some attempting to pull history away, erase it and make it illegal,” said Lecia Brooks, the SPLC’s interim chief of staff. “It becomes more important for people to see things for themselves, with their own eyes, so that when someone tries to deny this history, they know differently.”
In Montgomery, the group visited the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) Legacy Museum, an expansive constellation of exhibits that utilize art, sound and historical text to connect the U.S. legacy of slavery and Jim Crow with mass incarceration. As they moved through the museum, participants often lingered, absorbed in images and text, consumed in the feelings the exhibits elicited.
“It’s very, very emotional, and I think that was the point,” said Dagi Knellessen, a Holocaust researcher at the German Historical Museum in Berlin. “This is a very violent history that marked this country.”
Part of her work has centered on the criminal trials of Nazi perpetrators that took place in the mid-to-late ’40s in the aftermath of World War II. She was struck by the fact that most of the historical violence against Black people in America has gone unpunished — particularly the racial terror lynchings that took place across the country well into the 1940s and ‘50s, highlighted by EJI from public records.
“In Germany, it took a long time for the prosecution of Nazi perpetrators to begin, and the results remain unsatisfactory overall. Nevertheless, we had in Germany Nazi perpetrators more than 90 years old in front of the court,” Knellessen said. “Murder is a crime that has no time limitation.”
The group spent two days of a weeklong tour in Montgomery, visiting the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which memorializes people who were killed in racial terror lynchings, as well as EJI’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, an outdoor exhibit that features Black artists and historical artifacts, and the Mothers of Gynecology Memorial Park, which memorializes Black girls and women who endured the painful experimentations that led to advancements in modern gynecology.
Ahead of a panel discussion on the importance of critical memory, Bryan Fair, the SPLC’s interim president and CEO, drew parallels between German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller’s post-World War II statement and the reluctance of some to speak out today against the controversial policies and practices of the current administration.
“First they came for the socialists,” Fair read, reciting the start of Niemöller’s quote. “Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”
During the tour earlier this month, the group participated in several discussions in which they reflected on what they had learned and experienced, as well as the similarities and differences between approaches to historical memory in the two countries.
“The role of historians is to search for facts, to find out what really has happened and to inform the public about it,” said Markus Pieper, executive director of the Saxon Memorial Foundation site in Dresden. “Unfortunately, this didn’t really happen as it should have happened in the United States, and I see similarities to Germany in this. After WWII, nobody wanted to talk about the Holocaust. It took years until even historians started doing research. But this is exactly what we are for: to find out what has happened in the past and to prevent politicians or people from repeating the mistakes of the past.”
Before arriving in Montgomery, the members of the Critical Memory Project tour traveled to Atlanta, Georgia, where they visited the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, home to a rich history of civil rights advocacy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., after he began serving as co-pastor alongside his father in 1960. The group also traveled to Stone Mountain Park, the site of a larger-than-life Confederate monument carved into the mountainside, which has served as a gathering place for the Ku Klux Klan and Confederate groups since the early 20th century.
Following their time in Montgomery, the group continued north to Birmingham, where they visited Dynamite Hill, a neighborhood the Ku Klux Klan regularly terrorized with bombings during the civil rights era, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, where they learned about the local actors who propelled the Civil Rights Movement forward. They also participated in a discussion with former U.S. Sen. Doug Jones and former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley, who prosecuted the men involved in a bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church. Participants had visited the church — where four little girls were killed in the 1963 attack — earlier that day.
“On the one side, I’m taken aback by how often I encountered, in only a few days, a glorification of the Confederacy,” said Christine Gundermann, a professor of public history at the University of Cologne. “But on the other hand, the resistance against this narrative that I saw in the streets, and in the sites and in the monuments, Black people depicted here are not only shown as passive victims, but as people who have an agency. And that is really inspiring.”
“In Germany,” she said, “we’ve been thinking for a very long time about how we deal with the German guilt. How do we come to terms? How do we find a way to accept that mothers and daughters lost their fathers and sons on the one hand — but also accept that they fought for an unjust cause?”
The tour ended in Washington, D.C., where visitors had hoped to tour the National Museum of African American History and Culture — the country’s preeminent collection of historical artifacts and events tracing the history of Black people in America from past to present. But the ongoing federal government shutdown prevented that visit.
“What I’ve found interesting about this tour is that people are more open to the experience because of the moment we are in right now,” said Brooks, the SPLC’s interim chief of staff. “They feel it being pulled away just as they are learning about it. But there are a lot of professors in this group. That makes me very, very hopeful, because they’ll go back and teach their students. Our history won’t be erased.”
Image at top: At the Equal Justice Initiative’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama, Dorothy Davis (left) and Catherine Adams look inside the Faunsdale Plantation housing that their ancestors once occupied. (Credit: Jacob Saylor)