Trigger Warning: The following content includes descriptions of rape and lynching that may be triggering for readers.
Missouri coach Cuonzo Martin started to choke up as he spoke for over five and a half minutes, uninterrupted, about taking his team to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice during the team’s recent road trip.
Though the trip to Montgomery, Ala. occurred on Monday, the impact was still fresh in Martin’s mind when he sat down with the media in a Zoom call Friday morning.
“You can talk about the hangings on public display, like as a party, ‘we’re gonna go downtown and look at the light show,’” Martin said. “And that’s a postcard that’s sent all around the country. And that’s normal. Oh, man. That’s tough, that’s tough.
For five minutes and 36 seconds, Martin discussed growing up in East St. Louis, Ill. with grandparents who moved from the South, the sacrifices that his ancestors made to get him and so many others where they are today and the awful truth of the extent of slavery’s brutality.
According to the Memorial’s website, it was “conceived with the hope of creating a sober, meaningful site where people can gather and reflect on America’s history of racial inequality.” The memorial is the first of its kind, dedicated to documenting the bloody history of lynching in America through vivid, concrete examples.
Martin spoke about one of the examples that the team saw at the lynching memorial — an adolescent child, thrown into solitary confinement for a trivial offense as if there was an offense at all.
“Maybe an hour of daylight for the rest of his life, for a young man who’s 15 years old getting put into prison with an adult man, and I don’t want to be graphic here but raped and brutalized for years,” Martin said. “And you find out, ‘What was the crime?’ ‘That was the crime?!’ And that’s consistent.”
For many of Martin’s players, 12 out of 13 of whom are Black, the experience was eye-opening. It brought Jeremiah Tilmon to tears.
“We all grew that day,” Tilmon said. “Of course, we didn’t really know too much about everything that happened back then, but for us to see it in person, just see what was going on in those videos and by sharing those stories, it was very awakening.”
The idea for a trip like this was born over the summer, with the COVID-19 pandemic raging and a racial reckoning taking place across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
Martin, who hadn’t been one to volunteer for non-basketball-related road outings before, went to the Tigers’ director of basketball operations, Paul Rorvig, and discussed taking advantage of opportunities like the one they had earlier this week.
“You start to think, man, ‘What are we really doing?’” Martin said. “You know, what are we really teaching our guys? You have to give them life experiences. I just felt like this was an opportunity. … Not just African-American, it can be anything that culturally we can grow from, let’s try to do that. Because I think we owe it to our players.”
The players were appreciative of the experience.
“We learned a lot about the injustice systems and prisons, about all the lynching that went on,” forward Javon Pickett said. “It was just a great time for us to come together and just learn a little bit more.”
A crucial part of the museum and memorial’s mission is connecting the dots to the present. Martin discussed how after lynching subsided, southern white supremacists shifted to mass incarceration. They said, “Let’s turn these prisons into $80 billion industries.”
“I’ll read something to you guys,” Martin said. “This was on the wall [at the memorial]. ‘A presumption of guilt has been assigned to Black people.’ A presumption of guilt has been assigned to the Black people. In most cases, they’re always guilty until proven innocent. And even if they’re proven innocent, they’ll still do a little time. Can you imagine living life like that? Your whole life.”
Much of what the players learned on Monday wasn’t taught to them in school. Though he didn’t have much to say when they met as a team after the visit, Martin did take note of some of his players’ reactions.
“It’s amazing how you sit back and talk to the guys after and as players, there’s things that they said, ‘I didn’t know that.’ Or “I had no clue about that,’” Martin said. “But it’s American history, but they had no clue about that. And they’re taught American history in schools. That is a part of American history.”
Martin’s full comments on the trip to the Museum and Memorial can be found here:
Here's the full quote from Cuonzo Martin on his team's trip to the Equal Justice Initiative lynching memorial, the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama on the recent road trip. #Mizzou pic.twitter.com/bLg8aPcXUV
— Jack Soble (@jacksoble56) January 29, 2021
_Edited by Kyle Pinnell | kpinnell@themaneater.com_