The Rot We Refuse to Name: Montgomery, Alabama, and the Living Legacy of Racial Terror, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., August 3, 2026

The Rot We Refuse to Name: Montgomery, Alabama, and the Living Legacy of Racial Terror

by

Angela Valenzuela

August 3, 2026

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.

The museum itself stands on the sacred grounds of a former cotton warehouse where enslaved Black people were once held and forced to labor. From that location, it traces a historical continuum linking the transatlantic slave trade and enslavement to the violent overthrow of Reconstruction, racial terror lynching, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and the contemporary criminal legal system. Personal testimony, archival evidence, art, and data reveal not a succession of unrelated injustices, but the recurring adaptation of racial domination as older systems were challenged and new ones took their place.

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.

#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). 

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

News21: Hate in America - This documentary covers the legacy of hate, and how it shaped America

I strongly recommended folks to see this documentary that, among other things, illuminates the connection between fundamentalist Christianity and violence. This is not unlike the kind of violence and terror that people in our country more commonly associates with Islamic extremism. In this case, what we are seeing is homegrown extremism, unfortunately, connected to a long legacy of settler colonialism and white supremacy.

-Angela Valenzuela

The Brutal History of Anti-Latino Discrimination in America: School segregation, lynchings and mass deportations of Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens are just some of the injustices Latinos have faced

Read about important history that helps to explain the vexed relationship that exists between the U.S. Mexican and broader Latino, community in the U.S. today.  It is clearly linked to a history of violent, U.S. expansionism that continues in the symbolic realm as evidenced in the systemic subjugation of this knowledge of our history that could actually shed enormous light on our political and policy struggles today.

I would only amend this piece to point out that at its base—and the use of the generic term, "Latino," notwithstanding—this reflects a continuation of a history of violence against peoples native to this continent.  These invasions resulted in the elimination of our native names, languages, and identities, resulting in an imposition of European ones and to a degree that is so profound that we often fail as native peoples to acknowledge this.  Moreover, the system has succeeded and continues to dominate us if we think critically in these ways.

I say all of this as we begin our danza Mexican curriculum this morning at Academia Cuauhtli at the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin, Texas.

Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AcademiaCuauhtli/

-Angela Valenzuela

#BrownContinent  #Decolonize #decolonization #mexicamovement #INDIGENOUS #lies #CritcalThinking #EthnicStudiesNow #danzaMexica

UPDATED:

AUG 29, 2018

ORIGINAL:

SEP 27, 2017

The Brutal History of Anti-Latino Discrimination in America

School segregation, lynchings and mass deportations of Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens are just some of the injustices Latinos have faced.

ERIN BLAKEMORE

Olvera Street is a Los Angeles icon—a thriving Mexican market filled with colorful souvenirs, restaurants and remnants of the oldest buildings in Los Angeles. But though the bright tourist destination teems with visitors, few realize it was once the site of a terrifying raid.

In 1931, police officers grabbed Mexican-Americans in the area, many of them U.S. citizens, and shoved them into waiting vans. Immigration agents blocked exits and arrested around 400 people, who were then deported to Mexico, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status.

The raid was just one incident in a long history of discrimination against Latino people in the United States. Since the 1840s, anti-Latino prejudice has led to illegal deportations, school segregation and even lynching—often-forgotten events that echo the civil-rights violations of African-Americans in the Jim Crow-era South.

The story of Latino-American discrimination largely begins in 1848, when the United States won the Mexican-American War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which marked the war’s end, granted 55 percent of Mexican territory to the United States. With that land came new citizens. The Mexicans who decided to stay in what was now U.S. territory were granted citizenship and the country gained a considerable Mexican-American population.

As the 19th century wore on, political events in Mexico made emigration to the United States popular. This was welcome news to American employers like the Southern Pacific Railroad, which desperately needed cheap labor to help build new tracks. The railroad and other companies flouted existing immigration laws that banned importing contracted labor and sent recruiters into Mexico to convince Mexicans to emigrate.

Anti-Latino sentiment grew along with immigration. Latinos were barred entry into Anglo establishments and segregated into urban barrios in poor areas. Though Latinos were critical to the U.S. economy and often were American citizens, everything from their language to the color of their skin to their countries of origin could be used as a pretext for discrimination. Anglo-Americans treated them as a foreign underclass and perpetuated stereotypes that those who spoke Spanish were lazy, stupid and undeserving. In some cases, that prejudice turned fatal.

According to historians William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, mob violence against Spanish-speaking people was common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They estimate that the number of Latinos killed by mobs reach well into the thousands, though definitive documentation only exists for 547 cases.

The violence began during California’s Gold Rush just after California became part of the United States. At the time, white miners begrudged former Mexicans a share of the wealth yielded by Californian mines—and sometimes enacted vigilante justice. In 1851, for example, a mob of vigilantes accused Josefa Segovia of murdering a white man. After a fake trial, they marched her through the streets and lynched her. Over 2,000 men gathered to watch, shouting racial slurs. Others were attacked on suspicion of fraternizing with white women or insulting white people.

Even children became the victims of this violence. In 1911, a mob of over 100 people hanged a 14-year-old boy, Antonio Gómez, after he was arrested for murder. Rather than let him serve time in jail, townspeople lynched him and dragged his body through the streets of Thorndale, Texas.

These and other horrific acts of cruelty lasted until the 1920s, when the Mexican government began pressuring the United States to stop the violence. But though mob brutality eventually quelled, hatred of Spanish-speaking Americans did not.

In the late 1920s, anti-Mexican sentiment spiked as the Great Depression began. As the stock market tanked and unemployment grew, Anglo-Americans accused Mexicans and other foreigners of stealing American jobs. Mexican-Americans were discouraged and even forbidden from accepting charitable aid.

As fears about jobs and the economy spread, the United States forcibly removed up to 2 million people of Mexican descent from the country—up to 60 percent of whom were American citizens.

Euphemistically referred to as “repatriations,” the removals were anything but voluntary. Sometimes, private employers drove their employees to the border and kicked them out. In other cases, local governments cut off relief, raided gathering places or offered free train fare to Mexico. Colorado even ordered all of its “Mexicans”—in reality, anyone who spoke Spanish or seemed to be of Latin descent—to leave the state in 1936 and blockaded its southern border to keep people from leaving. Though no formal decree was ever issued by immigration authorities, INS officials deported about 82,000 people during the period.

The impact on Spanish-speaking communities was devastating. Some light-skinned Mexican-Americans attempted to pass themselves off as Spanish, not Mexican, in an attempt to evade enforcement. People with disabilities and active illnesses were removed from hospitals and dumped at the border. As one victim of “repatriation” told Raymond Rodriguez, who wrote a history of the period, Decade of Betrayal, “They might as well have sent us to Mars.”

Others, like Rodriguez’s father, did not wait for raids or enforcement and returned to Mexico independently to escape discrimination and the fear of removal. His wife refused to accompany him and the family never saw him again.

When deportations finally ended around 1936, up to 2 million Mexican-Americans had been “repatriated.” (Because many of the repatriation attempts were informal or conducted by private companies, it is nearly impossible to quantify the exact number of people who were deported.) Around one third of Los Angeles’ Mexican population left the country, as did a third of Texas’ Mexican-born population. Though both the state of California and the city of Los Angeles apologized for repatriation in the early 2000s, the deportations have largely faded from public memory.

Another little-remembered facet of anti-Latino discrimination in the United States is school segregation. Unlike the South, which had explicit laws barring African-American children from white schools, segregation was not enshrined in the laws of the southwestern United States. Nevertheless, Latino people were excluded from restaurants, movie theaters and schools.

Latino students were expected to attend separate “Mexican schools” throughout the southwest beginning in the 1870s. At first, the schools were set up to serve the children of Spanish-speaking laborers at rural ranches. Soon, they spread into cities, too.

By the 1940s, as many as 80 percent of Latino children in places like Orange County, California attended separate schools. Among them was Sylvia Mendez, a young girl who was turned away from an all-white school in the county. Instead of going to the pristine, well-appointed 17th Street Elementary, she was told to attend Hoover Elementary—a dilapidated, two-room shack.

U.S. President Barack Obama presenting the 2010 Medal of Freedom to Sylvia Mendez, a civil-rights activist of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent. At age 8, Mendez played a pivotal role in a 1946 landmark court case that desegregated California schools. (Credit: Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images)

Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images

The bare-bones facilities offered to students like Mendez lacked basic supplies and sufficient teachers. Many only provided vocational classes or did not offer a full 12 years of instruction. Children were arbitrarily forced to attend based on factors like their complexion and last name.

Then Mendez’s parents fought back. In 1945, along with four other families, they filed a class action lawsuit against four Orange County school districts. Their goal: Ensure that all children could attend California schools regardless of race.

The case culminated in a two-week-long trial. In court, school officials claimed that Latino students were dirty and infected with diseases that put white students at risk. Besides, they argued, Mexican-American students didn’t speak English and were thus not entitled to attend English-speaking schools. (When asked, officials conceded that they never gave students proficiency tests.) “Mexicans are inferior in personal hygiene, ability and in their economic outlook,” said one official.

Mendez’s attorney countered with testimony from experts in social science. He argued that the policy trampled on Latino children’s Constitutional rights. When Carol Torres, a 14-year-old Latino girl, took the stand, she immediately proved that Mexican-American students in the district could and did speak English.
It took seven months for Judge Paul J. McCormick to render a decision. On February 18, 1946, he ruled that the school districts discriminated against Mexican-American students and violated their Constitutional rights. Though the school districts challenged the ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with McCormick. Thanks to Mendez v. Westminster School District, California officially ended all segregation in its schools.

Mendez, who was eight when the lawsuits began, later told reporters that she thought her parents were fighting for her right to attend a school with a nice playground. But the case accomplished much more than that. Soon, parents in Texas and Arizona successfully challenged school segregation. In 1954, a decade after Mendez was turned away from the whites-only elementary school, the United States Supreme Court ruled that all school segregation based on race was unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education.

Though the case was a victory for the Mendez family, Sylvia was harassed and heckled by her fellow students when she attended the white school. Nonetheless, she pushed to succeed and became a nurse and civil-rights activist. She was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2010—and now, two Los Angeles-area schools are named after her parents.

Today, an estimated 54 million Latinos live in the U.S. and around 43 million people speak Spanish. But though Latinos are the country’s largest minority, anti-Latino prejudice is still common. In 2016, 52 percent of Latinos surveyed by Pew said they had experienced discrimination. Lynchings, “repatriation” programs and school segregation may be in the past, but anti-Latino discrimination in the U.S. is far from over.

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