The memorial’s architecture makes visitors look up at monuments as if at hanging bodies

Evidence

As I kept walking, the floor slanted downward, but the monuments remained level. Before long their bottoms were above my head. As I looked up at them, it was as if I were witnessing bodies swaying from poplar trees—except these were stiff. “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,” Billie Holiday sang in Strange Fruit. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 553

Categorization

• XREF: The design detail (floor slants down, monuments stay level, echoing bodies swaying) parallels how the reader argues late Baldwin forces America to face lynching directly.