The Daily UbuntuThread 05 · War and Reconciliation · September 29, 2026
More than our worst moment
A memorial in Alabama names the victims of lynching. Telling the truth without reducing anyone to their worst act: a path toward shared humanity.
1 · The scene
At the counter of a community organization, a man is serving soup. Someone whispers to me that he has been in prison.
I watch his hands, the ladle, the care he takes not to spill anything. I catch myself looking, in his gesture, for a trace of his wrongdoing. I find only a man feeding strangers.
On the way out, I write in my notebook: we don't know anyone by their worst day. We are also what we do next.
Original vignette
2 · The documented case
A memorial to tell the truth
On April 26, 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), an organization founded and led by lawyer Bryan Stevenson, opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. At its heart, more than 800 steel monuments, one for each county where a racial terror lynching took place, bear the names of the victims.
The memorial honours more than 4,400 Black people killed by lynching between 1877 and 1950. EJI has documented nearly 6,500 such killings in the United States between 1865 and 1950. One section allows counties to claim a replica of their monument, to bring it home and continue the conversation there.
For EJI, publicly confronting the truth of our history is the first step toward healing and reconciliation. For Stevenson, this work of memory goes hand in hand with a conviction: no one can be reduced to the worst act of their life.
These two ideas seem opposed; Ubuntu brings them together. Naming the victims gives them back their humanity. Refusing to reduce anyone to their worst moment keeps the door open to change. Recovering our shared humanity does not require forgetting: it asks us to remember together, and to believe that everyone can still be part of the "us."
3 · The voice
“Africa's gift to world culture must be in the realm of human relationships.”
“Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done.”
4 · The question
Who around you is still reduced to their worst moment, and what would it take to give them back the rest of their story?
Sources
- Equal Justice Initiative, "The National Memorial for Peace and Justice." legacysites.eji.org
- NPR (via KAXE), D. Elliott, "New Lynching Memorial Is A Space To Talk About 'All Of That Anguish,'" April 26, 2018. www.kaxe.org
- UU World, "Justice and redemption" (on Bryan Stevenson and Just Mercy), November 1, 2015. www.uuworld.org
- American International Journal of Contemporary Research, vol. 4, no. 1, citing K. Kaunda, A Humanist in Africa, 1966, p. 22, January 2014. www.aijcrnet.com
Every figure on this page links to a verifiable public source.
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