Giving Compass' Take:

• The National Memorial for Peace and Justice displays the history of white terrorism in America and honors the victims of lynchings.

• What schools are already teaching America's history of lynching well? How can all schools revamp their curriculum to properly cover this issue? 

• Learn about the removal of Confederate monuments in New Orleans. 

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened late April in Montgomery, Alabama, to honor the thousands of people (mostly black) who were lynched by white American terrorists between 1877 and 1950. A field trip to this much-needed museum should be required for every middle and high school student in U.S. schools, lest we forget that terrorism has been a fixture in American democracy long before 9/11. Students should experience the symbolic representation of that history so they can understand how lynching has evolved in today’s context.

Black people may not hang from trees nowadays, but they are left for dead all the same by biased police and vigilantes like George Zimmerman posing as authority figures who will kill to keep black people in their place. And the impact on the victims’ community is not much different from a hanging.

It is the insufficient references to American terrorism, namely, lynching, in our students’ history books that make the Montgomery memorial such an important corrective.

We should call out despicable acts like the Austin bombings, in which Mark Anthony Conditt, a 23-year-old white man, initially mailed bombs in black areas of the city that killed two people, injured five others and spread fear all over the region.

Read the full article about the National Memorial for Peace and Justice by Andre Perry at The Hechinger Report.