A few weeks ago, my daughter and I pulled into Montgomery, Alabama, seven days and 1,447 miles into a five-week driving tour of the country.
What drew us to Alabama’s capital city was the grand opening of The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice — two new institutions dedicated to racial justice that have been created in the city by the Montgomery-based Equal Justice Initiative (EJI ).
The people on the stages and in the audiences throughout the 48 hours of the opening events at the museum and memorial were legendary and inspiring artists, activists, legislators, journalists, academics and others. We heard filmmaker Ava DuVernay (“Selma,” “13th,” “A Wrinkle in Time”), Michelle Alexander (author of “The New Jim Crow”), Black Lives Matter and Campaign Zero co-founder Brittany Packnett, Sherrilyn Ifill (president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund), New Yorker columnist Jelani Cobb, Congressman John Lewis, Sen. Cory Booker, Patti LaBelle, Common, Usher, Stevie Wonder and many others.
Former president Barack Obama provided a video message. Rev. Jesse Jackson strolled past us in the conference registration line and at the museum, mingling with the thousands of people who had showed up to the Peace and Justice Summit at the last minute, overwhelming the registration staff and filling three overflow ballrooms in addition to the large main venues. The closing concert at Montgomery’s Riverwalk Amphitheater, capacity 7,000, sold out.
At one point during the opening ceremony, EJI Executive Director Bryan Stevenson asked those in the audience who had marched, sat-in or protested in other ways in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ‘60s to stand. I choked up as throughout the arena, thousands of creaky-kneed and gray-haired elders rose to their feet to thunderous applause.
During our time in Montgomery, we went to both the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial. The former is an illumination of the reality of slavery in this country, and its direct legacies: Jim Crow segregation, racial terror violence including lynching, and the mass incarceration of African-Americans today. The latter is a somber meditation on the racially motivated terrorism visited upon African-Americans between the end of the Civil War and 1950. It’s a visceral, disturbing and moving experience to walk through the vast, open-air structure and grounds.
The memorial is layered with metaphor and brilliantly cross-references information and themes from the museum. Upon entering, we passed a life-size sculpture of six enslaved adults (one holding an infant), screaming and straining at their shackles and chains. As we walked, we looked out at the city including the Capitol Building, and I was reminded of some of the hard truths I’d just learned at the museum:
In 1860, Montgomery had more slave-trading spaces than churches or hotels, and enslaved people were two-thirds of the city’s population;
By 1898, 73 percent of Alabama’s state revenue came from convict leasing;
The Alabama State Constitution still contains language mandating racial segregation of schools, despite statewide ballot referendums as recently as 2012, trying to remove it.
After emerging from the memorial structure (in which hanging, 6-foot tall, steel slabs resembling human bodies denote each of the 800-plus U.S. counties where documented lynchings occurred), we passed a duplicate set of slabs laid out on the ground, evoking coffins.
As we neared the memorial’s exit, we encountered another sculpture depicting a second, life-size group of six African-Americans, all men with their hands up, encased and seemingly sinking into, a concrete wall. It’s an unmistakable commentary on today’s racial terror violence — mass incarceration, the death penalty and harassment and killings of black people by police.
Despite being immersed in this grim subject matter, at one point during the Summit, Sen. Booker said, “Hope is the refusal to let despair have the last word.” He continued, “It is a profoundly political action to do nothing.”
Visiting the iconic locations of civil rights history around Montgomery is one small but important way to do something.
“This has to be a place where every American who believes in justice and dignity must come! You must go home and tell others!” said Ava DuVernay during the summit.
With so much unvarnished ugliness and brutality on display, and all the stark evidence of the wrongs that white individuals and white-led institutions have inflicted on black people in this country and still do today, I can’t say we “enjoyed” our experience in Montgomery.
But I’m so glad we went, and urge everyone who believes in justice and dignity to make the pilgrimage as well.
Amber Black, the communications director at the Rosenberg Fund for Children, lives with her daughter in Easthampton.