Montgomery, Alabama

When thinking about traveling around the country, one of the places I felt I needed to see was The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery AL.  Both are the work of the Equal Justice Initiative founded by Bryan Stevenson.  He has been doing pro bono legal work to help death row inmates who were wrongfully convicted for decades.  I read his book Just Mercy and found it to be informative, terrible and deeply moving.  It has now been made into a movie which just came out.

The Legacy Museum tells the history of slavery, evolving into Jim Crow and racial terror lynching, legalized racial segregation and now mass incarceration.  The last section of the museum is a series of panels with questions about what we can do today, such as:

The National Museum for Peace and Justice is devoted to the depiction of racial terror lynching.
You may have seen the sculpture here:

And you may have seen pictures of the National Memorial -- with giant metal slabs for each of the counties of the deep South, listing the names and dates of documented lynchings.  Some panels have dozens of names.  And there are slabs for other states where lynchings occurred, as well as this panel for non-Southern states where documented lynching occurred:

The point is made that we will continue to live with the legacy of slavery in this country until we bring the history to light and acknowledge it.

There is a final section of the museum with duplicate slabs:

You can see my car and camper across the road from the rows of slabs, waiting for us to bring them home.  

The museums are so well done and so powerful.  After going thru the Legacy Museum, I stopped for lunch.  Sitting in the restaurant, tears welled up.  It is hard to witness the stories of what we humans have done to each other, of what we white Americans have done to African Americans, continue to do to African Americans.


The day I visited, there were 72 freshmen from Davidson College -- a small liberal arts school in North Carolina.  They were great -- thoughtful, respectful, and clearly moved.

Encouraging that their professor brought them, and that they will go forward with this understanding.