MONTGOMERY, Ala. – Hundreds of steel columns, each engraved with the names of the dead, convey the scale of the terror.

But sitting off to the side of the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, which memorializes more than 4,400 black lynching victims, are rows and rows of duplicate monuments ready to be dispatched across the country.

It’s this sprawling portion of the site that represents how the group behind the memorial, Montgomery-based Equal Justice Initiative, intends to push the message of reconciliation beyond the confines of the solemn site.

“I think it’s important to have this space in Montgomery,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the New York-based NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, referring to the memorial. “But I think the most important work will happen at the local level when local communities take responsibility and ownership of their history.”

Ifill, who has written about the lasting effects of lynchings, said there is a misperception that the killings were secretive affairs carried out in the woods by masked men when, really, the extrajudicial lynchings were often public spectacles attended by hundreds, if not thousands, of people.

“That’s what makes it a crime of import to the entire community and that’s what compels, in my view, the community to take ownership of addressing that history and dealing with how you repair it,” Ifill said.

The Equal Justice Initiative appears to still be in the beginning stages of establishing a process for communities to claim their monument. Locals can fill out a form indicating interest on the group’s website.

Many local officials from throughout CNHI coverage areas said they were not aware of the program when contacted this week, and their reactions to the concept were mixed.

“It saddens me to think of the number of people who have been lynched in the past in the name of prejudice,” said Lynn Laughter, who chairs the board of commissioners in Whitfield County, Georgia, where five lynchings have been documented. “If it were my vote alone, I would go get one of those replicas and have it installed in a prominent place.”

Within that same county, though, Dalton Mayor Dennis Mock wasn’t so sure.

“My personal opinion is this is a terrible piece of our history, and I don’t see how memorializing it serves any purpose or in any way unites us,” Mock said. “As mayor and council, we will do whatever the citizens of Dalton request of us.”

The memorial opens as local communities across the country wrestle with the appropriateness of Confederate monuments and statues in public spaces, such as courthouse lawns. Such displays can be found in many of the communities where lynchings have been documented.

“We’ve had people demanding the removal of the [Gen. Patrick Cleburne] statue in Cleburne,” said Councilman John Warren in Cleburne, Texas, which was named for the Confederate general.

“So to confront them with something like this that others may want here, I don’t know,” Warren said. “There’s still so many ill feelings about that war and it might be best to just leave this statue mess alone.”

Other officials said there needs to be a local dialogue that starts with the family members of those who were lynched.

“Do they want people to look at them and say ‘Oh, that was your family this happened to?’ Do they want to bring eyes on them?,” said Melissa Hughes, a commissioner in Tift County, Georgia, where four people were lynched.

“I’m not sure I would if it was my family member,” added Hughes, who is black. “Not that it’s shameful or anything, but … is it something they want to dwell on?”

The memorial is designed to make it obvious which counties have not claimed their monuments, which some have noted resemble rows of coffins. EJI has documented lynchings in more than 20 states. The memorial and accompanying museum opened Thursday. 

“Over time, the national memorial will serve as a report on which parts of the country have confronted the truth of this terror and which have not,” according to EJI’s website

Madeline Burkhardt, who is a native of Athens, Alabama, has already reached out to local officials about Limestone County’s monument, which features three names.

“There are people who don’t even know that it happened in their county. They need to own up to that history and talk about it instead of having a white narrative of history,” said Burkhardt, who is white. 

Jill Nolin covers the Georgia Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach her at jnolin@cnhi.com. Matt Smith in Cleburne, Texas, Chris Whitfield in Dalton, Georgia, Stuart Taylor in Tifton, Georgia, and Jessica Barnett in Athens, Alabama, contributed to this report.