The Rot We Refuse to Name: Montgomery, Alabama, and the Living Legacy of Racial Terror
by
Angela Valenzuela
August 3, 2026
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| Legacy Museum link |
Last week, during a weeklong stay in Montgomery, Alabama as part of the Legacy Summit hosted by the the African American Policy Forum (AAPF), I visited the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum—an experience that unsettled me in ways I am still trying to process. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw and for everyone at the AAPF—as well as to American Association of University Professors and the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, for making the visit possible for me and so many others.
Inside the museum, the history of racial terror ceased to feel like a distant past. It became immediate and embodied: a history carried in names, voices, stories, images, places, and lives, and one whose consequences remain painfully present. I encourage all to consider this opportunity next Summer or alternatively, to take some time off yourself to visit the various sites in Montgomery to get a complete experience.
While there, you must also visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the Freedom Monument and Sculpture Park, and Montgomery Square. Together, these places illuminate the extraordinary decade of struggle that helped transform the United States and, without exaggeration, changed the world. They also remind us that the rights secured through that struggle are neither permanent nor self-sustaining. They are now being challenged by forces of religious nationalism that seek to reverse many of the democratic gains for which earlier generations sacrificed so much.
What struck me most forcefully was the depth and pervasiveness of the terror that Black people throughout the South endured. Terror was not limited to the moment when a person was seized, tortured, or killed. It was directed at entire communities. It instructed Black parents about what could happen to their children. It warned Black veterans against wearing their uniforms with pride. It threatened Black citizens who attempted to vote, acquire land, build businesses, organize workers, attend better schools, or insist upon being addressed with dignity.
Lynching was not simply spontaneous mob violence committed by a few extremists. It was a system of public terrorism intended to restore white supremacy after emancipation and suppress Black civil and political rights. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented at least 2,000 Black women, men, and children killed in racial terror lynchings during Reconstruction and more than 4,400 racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950. These acts were often committed publicly and with impunity, sometimes before crowds that included community leaders, elected officials, and children.
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| #JusticeForJamesCooper |
I pause here to acknowledge James Cooper, whose body was found hanging from a utility pole in Metcalfe, Mississippi. Jay Fletcher first reported on the unresolved questions surrounding Cooper’s death in 2024 with the Delta Democrat-Times revisiting the case two years later (Fletcher, 2024, 2026). Kim Dockery (2026) has also drawn renewed attention to the case and the family’s continuing demand for answers. Although local authorities ruled Cooper’s death a suicide, his family and members of the community dispute that conclusion and are calling for a federal investigation.
Cooper’s story reminds us why the thousands documented by the Equal Justice Initiative cannot remain an abstraction. Each number represents a person with a name, a life, relationships, aspirations, and a community forced to live with the terror and injustice surrounding that person’s death. Naming him here is one small act of refusing the erasure upon which racial terror has long depended.
The museum makes clear that the targets of this violence were not only the people who were murdered. Terror entered homes, churches, schools, workplaces, and everyday relationships. It constrained movement, speech, aspiration, and political participation. It produced forced migration as Black families fled communities where the threat of violence had become unbearable. It also taught white communities that violence against Black people would be tolerated, celebrated, or ignored. Geez, isn't this what's getting "taught" anew with each unresolved case today like James Cooper's?
This is what makes the history so difficult to absorb. The cruelty was not incidental to the social order. It helped create and maintain that order.
Emancipation formally ended enslavement, but it did not eliminate the ideology that had justified it. The mythology of Black inferiority was transformed into new presumptions: that Black people were dangerous, criminal, incapable of citizenship, or naturally suited for subordination. During Reconstruction, violence sought to destroy emerging Black political power. After Reconstruction, lynching and Jim Crow enforced segregation and racial hierarchy. As the museum demonstrates, these narratives did not disappear with the end of legally mandated segregation. They became embedded in policing, prosecution, sentencing, imprisonment, and capital punishment.
After getting back to the hotel, I reached out to my husband, Emilio Zamora, professor emeritus of history at the University of Texas at Austin, to share the anger and sorrow I felt as I confronted this sustained history of racial terror and injustice. His response was that it represents the “rot” of this country.
The word stayed with me.
By “rot,” he did not mean only a shameful chapter in an otherwise unblemished national history. He meant something deeper: a foundational moral and institutional decay that has been repeatedly covered over without being removed. The legal forms have changed, but the underlying presumption of Black guilt, dangerousness, and disposability has remained disturbingly resilient.
Although this system is rooted most fundamentally in anti-Blackness, its logics have extended outward, shaping the criminalization and punishment of Latino men, immigrants, Indigenous people, and other racialized communities. Through policing, immigration enforcement, detention, incarceration, and unequal sentencing, these groups have also been cast as dangerous, foreign, or undeserving of full protection under the law. Recognizing these connections should not blur the distinct history of Black oppression; rather, it reveals how institutions built through anti-Black racial domination have generated broader systems of surveillance, exclusion, and punishment.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, at year-end in 2023, 1,862 Black males per 100,000 Black male U.S. residents were serving sentences of more than one year under state or federal correctional jurisdiction—more than five times the corresponding rate for white males, 341 per 100,000 (Mueller & Kluckow, 2025).
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| See Table 13 in Mueller & Kluckow (2025). |
The Equal Justice Initiative aptly describes the modern death penalty as a direct descendant of racial terror lynching and links the terror era to racially biased capital punishment, excessive sentencing, wrongful convictions, and the continuing presumption of Black criminality.
This does not mean that lynching and imprisonment are identical. It means that institutions of punishment developed within a society that had never fully repudiated the racial assumptions underlying enslavement and racial terror. Black men who were once portrayed as threats requiring mob violence have continued to be treated as presumptively dangerous within schools, courts, prisons, and systems of capital punishment. The rope, the electric chair, the execution chamber, and the prison cell belong to different historical moments, but the Legacy Museum compels us to examine the ideas about race, guilt, innocence, and human worth that connect them.
Montgomery also reminded us that terror and resistance have always existed alongside one another. Black people did not merely endure this history. They built families, churches, schools, businesses, civic organizations, freedom movements, and cultures of extraordinary beauty and intellectual depth. They organized against slavery, challenged lynching, fought segregation, registered voters, contested wrongful convictions, and continued to demand that the nation honor principles it repeatedly denied them.
That resistance, however, should never be used to soften our understanding of the terror they endured and endure. Celebrating Black resilience without confronting the conditions that made such resilience necessary can become another way of avoiding the truth. The moral burden belongs not to those who survived oppression, but to the institutions and communities that produced it, benefited from it, tolerated it, or refused to remember it.
I left the Legacy Museum with a clearer understanding that racial injustice cannot be overcome through commemoration alone. Museums and memorials matter because they interrupt national amnesia. They restore names, lives, and histories that official narratives have—have long suppressed—and, in many cases, continue to suppress. So remembrance must also change how we understand contemporary policy and practice. It must shape how we approach policing, incarceration, sentencing, voting rights, education, housing, and the death penalty.
The rot persists whenever racial inequality is treated as accidental, whenever Black suffering is explained without reference to history, and whenever institutions celebrate true heroes like the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King or civil rights victories while continuously, if hypocritically, reproducing the conditions those movements opposed.
Our week in Montgomery left me grieving, but it also left me more convinced of the necessity of truth-telling. We cannot repair what we refuse to name. We cannot understand mass incarceration without understanding enslavement, Reconstruction, lynching, and Jim Crow. And we cannot claim to oppose racial terror while accepting institutions that continue to treat Black lives, and especially the lives of Black men, as inherently suspect or expendable.
The Legacy Museum asks the nation to do more than remember. It asks us to confront the rot—to expose it, remove it, and build institutions no longer dependent upon the degradation, terror, and punishment of Black people. To this, I will only add that it was a validating experience in terms of the policy battles we are fighting and have fought in coalition as Latinas and Latinos with the Black community.
Reference
Dockery, K. [@thicknpretty215]. (2026, August 3). James Cooper’s family continues to seek answers concerning his death in Metcalfe, Mississippi, and is calling for a federal investigation [Video]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/DbeCtzFB1nA/
Fletcher, J. (2024, May 8). Update on the James Cooper case. Delta Democrat-Times. https://www.ddtonline.com/crime-communities-local-content/update-james-cooper-case
Fletcher, J. (2026, August 3). One year later seeking justice for James. Delta Democrat-Times. https://www.ddtonline.com/communities-crime-local-content/one-year-later-seeking-justice-james
Mueller, D., & Kluckow, R. (2025). Prisoners in 2023—Statistical tables (NCJ 310197). U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/p23st.pdf
