After delays because of COVID-19 and more than a year of build-up, a historic marker that memorializes African American lynching victims in DeKalb County now sits in downtown Decatur.
The marker stems from the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, in 2018. Built by the legal nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative, the site memorializes lynching victims nationwide. It’s the first of its kind to reckon with America’s notorious history of lynching, slavery and segregation.
The DeKalb branch of the NAACP collaborated with the EJI to bring its own marker back to Atlanta. The branch also played a huge role in getting the DeKalb commissioners to approve the marker in January 2019.
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