The National Memorial for Peace & Justice and The Legacy Museum
Since I first read about the memorial in 2018, I had the urge for going.
It was every bit as impressive and powerful as I imagined. Comprised of sculptures, calm green lawn, an infinity wall of running water, and at its core are the 805 hanging steel, monolithic rectangles — one for every county in America where documented lynchings took place.
They are massive impediments, coffin-like in their size, so that the viewer must walk among them and consider the names on each one. There are so many, it’s like a forest but not of ‘strange fruit’ — these hanging blocks create a forest of context of the enormity of white on black terrorism.
As you wend your way through, you descend lower and lower until the blocks are hanging above you.
There is no path between them, you must walk under them as they loom over your head, massive and imposing. You can feel the weight of them.
Visitors are reminded through signage throughout to be quiet and respectful, to reflect the solemnity of the exhibit. The result is a somber silence, the quiet only disturbed by the sound of running water and the constant shuffle of the observers. Owned and conceived by the Equal Justice Initiative and designed by the MASS Design group, this beautiful and brutal place is a chance to reflect and reconcile, to heal and to hope. Go, I urge you to go.
The pavilion, surrounded calming unbroken green and greater Montgomery beyond lends context.
Installation by Kramer Akoto-Bamfo
Names lost to history
A short shuttle bus ride away is the impressive and immersive Legacy Museum. An incredible facility which uses state-of-the-art techniques to bring to bear the personal stories ‘from slavery to mass incarceration’. Photography is not allowed, these images were grabbed from various online sources.
From the original building site, By Soniakapadia - Own work
The entrance, created to commemorate the thousands and thousands of victims of drowning. Visitors are stunned into silence as the sound of waves fills the spaces and the light washes the anguished faces in a sickening rhythm.
Children among them Contributed/Equal Justice Initiative
Contributed/Equal Justice Initiative
This was such a powerful exhibit. When you pick up the phone (the cords short enough that you have to sit down and give the inmate your full attention), they explain what circumstances led to their incarceration and what their experience is like in prison. From Robert Rausch, The New York Times
Jars of dirt, taken from the lynching sites. Photograph from The Equal Justice Initiative
Here in Montgomery lies the intersection of truth and reconciliation, of healing and hope. Of context and accountability. I urge you to go.
