Visiting the EJI Legacy Museum
In school, learning about Black history, warts and all, was never in the cards for me. When I did learn about Black history, in between founding fathers and rose-colored civil war retellings, but my teachers did not explore Black history outside of a few figures and moments. And though I’ve ventured through Black history on my own, going to the Legacy Museum on that rainy November afternoon in Montgomery, Alabama, was truly something to behold.
The Legacy Museum, created by the Equal Justice Initiative, is a museum dedicated to teaching Black history, more specifically about how mass incarceration is directly connected to slavery.
Past the security check, the first thing I remembered seeing was the statues. Illuminated through blue light with the haunting sounds of waves crashing in the background, their emotive faces looked up. Though they were statues, I could still feel their emotions, as if the spirits of my ancestors were in the room with me. As if the painful voyage to America was happening right there in that room.
The museum’s exhibitions were laid out in chronological order, starting from slavery and ending with mass incarceration. In the beginning, there was an exhibit that displayed cages. When I stepped in front of each cage, there was a hologram of an enslaved person that would tell their story. And as hard as the stories were to hear, they became even more daunting when, in the next exhibit that showed the stories of enslaved people in detail, I realized that the stories were told verbatim.
One thing that I admired about the experience was seeing all the words written on the walls of the museum. It really showed how the museum was dedicated to displaying history unapologetically. If the information was laid out in the conventional way, with a small plaque off to the side, then it would be easy to ignore the information. But in the Legacy Museum you are constantly surrounded by history. When I went through the exhibits that talked about the Post Reconstruction and Lynching eras (topics that I wasn’t as familiar with), I got a broader understanding of what happened during those time periods.
Although the Legacy Museum has a separate Memorial for people who were lynched, there are specific parts of the museum that remember these victims. One display includes a long wall with dozens of jars of dirt. The dirt in each jar was collected by community members at the sites where people were murdered by lynching.
Moving from the lynching exhibit, through the civil rights section, into the part of the museum about mass incarceration, made it clear that slavery is not just part of Black history, it is also our present. A particularly powerful part of the exhibit included letters written to the Equal Justice Initiative and Bryan Stevenson (the organization’s founder). Each letter talked about someone who was trapped in prison and the inhumane circumstances that they had to deal with. It was extra terrifying because I realized that a lot of the letters were very similar to the stories of people who were enslaved 200 years ago. It was disheartening to see that in many ways, slavery is still alive and well in the United States and continuing to ruin the lives of so many Black people.
Now the museum could have ended there. Instead, it ended in a yellow room with hundreds of powerful Black people who have passed on. I loved this because it showed that despite the heartaches of the past and the tribulations in the present, there is still hope. All in all, I loved the Legacy Museum and can’t wait to go again.
