Participatory Rhetorics at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Legacy Museum

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the participatory rhetorics of Montgomery’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Using participatory critical rhetoric as a methodology for criticism, we show how this place of memory uses affective, visual, and embodied appeals to create participatory spaces for remembering lynching pasts (and presents) in U.S. counties where lynchings occurred. As a supplement to the Legacy Museum, which exists down the street from the memorial, this memorial provides a dark tourist countermemorial that powerfully ruptures dominant civil rights memories.