Oprah Winfrey Goes Inside New Memorial for Lynching Victims

By Sameer Rao Apr 09, 2018

Equal Justice Initiative founder and executive director Bryan Stevenson gave Oprah Winfrey a behind-the-scenes tour of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice on yesterday’s (April 8) episode of "60 Minutes."

The news segment explored how Stevenson and his colleagues developed the memorial and Legacy Museum, which will both open to the public on April 26 in Montgomery, Alabama. The museum commemorates the Black victims of lynching and White supremacist terrorism in the United States. Winfrey and Stevenson viewed the massive memorial, still under construction at the time the segment was filmed, as Stevenson explained how it preserved the names of lynching victims on suspended columns. "We wanted people to have a sense of just the scale of what this violence, what this terrorism was," Stevenson said. 

Watch the segment in full—and a discussion of why "60 Minutes" featured graphic photos of lynchings in the segment—at CBSNews.com.