Black Lives Matter memorial on the quad at Stanford University

Menlo Park resident Carol Jorgenson let us know about the very moving Black Lives Matter memorial on the quad at Stanford. It’s been there for a month, but we’d missed hearing about it and grateful for the tip. It seems a very appropriate to highlight it today, given life long civil rights advocate John Lewis‘s death yesterday.

Reads a placard: “The installation ahead is a memorial to Black individual who were victims of police brutality and racial violence. This memorial can be disturbing, infuriating and overwhelming to interact with. Please make your own choice about how to engage respectfully with the space.”

From a story that ran in the Stanford Daily on June 13:

“The memorial was organized by three Stanford students, who requested anonymity so as to center attention on the Black names featured in the memorial. On Wednesday night, the students hammered stakes into the grass and taped up more than 100 signs, protected from sprinklers by plastic sleeves.

“‘The memorial serves as a physical space to simultaneously celebrate Black lives, and mourn Black deaths, in a way that encourages our local community to continue to address the pervasiveness of racial violence,'” one organizer told The Daily.

Photos by Linda Hubbard (c) 2020