I would like to thank the organizers of the Tallahassee Community Remembrance Project whose work started years ago and has brought us to this moment and this monument. My role here today is to dedicate this memorial site. I do so as a white-passing, cis-gendered Jewish man becoming aware of my own place within the structures of power and privilege that perpetuate our unequal society. I am humbled and overwhelmed by this task.
I think back to the perpetual doubts I felt while studying the Holocaust — an event that decimated my family yet somehow also drew me close to my grandmother who was a survivor.
She was my first teacher about the Holocaust and about life: she taught me about resilience in the face of trauma, and about the dangers of forgetting.
Both the Nazis and their victims were human beings—no different from you and me—who inhabited the extremes of what it is to be a human being: unimaginable cruelty, and indescribable strength. This memorial we dedicate today tells another chapter in the same eternal story. The hatred of one group by another; defined by color and race; manifested as violence and terror; ultimately forgotten and denied.
This monument to their memory, their lives, and their murders tells us a great deal about what we inherit as residents of Leon County, as residents of Florida where at least other lynchings were perpetrated, and indeed as Americans, where untold thousands of other people of color were lynched during the Jim Crow era.
