Legacy Sites, Montgomery, Alabama
The Legacy Memorial Sites in Montgomery, Alabama, comprises four components: The Legacy Museum, The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, The Freedom monument Sculpture Park, and Montgomery Square. The four components display the history of slavery and racism in America. This includes the enslavement of African-Americans, racial lynchings, segregation, and racial bias.
The whole project is the result of planning by Montgomery's Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a non-profit organization founded by Bryan Stevenson, to assist in providing legal representation to inmates on death row.
The museum is the centerpiece of the project (opened in 2021), and it was founded as a counterpart to the National Memorial to Peace and Justice, which is dedicated specifically to the memory of victims of lynching.
The museum is a completely immersive experience of the moral and legal depradation of slavery and its consequences on our history, culture and society. The museum includes sections on slavery, reconstruction, lynching and terror, Jim Crow, segregation and the Civil Rights Era, injustice in the Judicial system, and mass incarceration.
The museum uses technology to dramatize the horror and terror of enslavement, lynchings, and legalized racial segregation in America. For those who visit the museum, it is an emotional and sobering experience of the injustice perpetrated upon African Americans, on the one hand, and other racial and cultural minorities to this day in our country.
In 2022, the EJI opened another Legacy Site called the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, a 17-acre park that includes art pieces and original artifacts along the Alabama River where millions of enslaved people were trafficked.
Unlike other memorials giving the history of African-American enslavement, the Legacy Museum does not tell a comforting story of progress from oppression to civil rights reform—but rather a story of continually evolving ways of controlling Black people. The challenge continues for all of us . . .
The whole project is the result of planning by Montgomery's Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a non-profit organization founded by Bryan Stevenson, to assist in providing legal representation to inmates on death row.
The museum is the centerpiece of the project (opened in 2021), and it was founded as a counterpart to the National Memorial to Peace and Justice, which is dedicated specifically to the memory of victims of lynching.
The museum is a completely immersive experience of the moral and legal depradation of slavery and its consequences on our history, culture and society. The museum includes sections on slavery, reconstruction, lynching and terror, Jim Crow, segregation and the Civil Rights Era, injustice in the Judicial system, and mass incarceration.
The museum uses technology to dramatize the horror and terror of enslavement, lynchings, and legalized racial segregation in America. For those who visit the museum, it is an emotional and sobering experience of the injustice perpetrated upon African Americans, on the one hand, and other racial and cultural minorities to this day in our country.
In 2022, the EJI opened another Legacy Site called the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, a 17-acre park that includes art pieces and original artifacts along the Alabama River where millions of enslaved people were trafficked.
Unlike other memorials giving the history of African-American enslavement, the Legacy Museum does not tell a comforting story of progress from oppression to civil rights reform—but rather a story of continually evolving ways of controlling Black people. The challenge continues for all of us . . .