The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration in Montgomery provides a comprehensive history of the United States with a focus on the legacy of slavery. It is situated on a site just blocks away from one of the most prominent slave auction spaces in America. It was quite the immersive experience. There are wall size videos and interactive exhibits all in a series of room tracing the history of bondage in the United States. Over 12 million captured men, women and children made the Middle Passage to the New World with about 10.7 million making it alive. The numbers are mind boggling.
The Legacy Museum, while very hard to swallow was intense. Hard to swallow because of the giant scale that was presented, intense because of the subject matter. I highly recommend this museum in the same way that I would recommend Yad Vashem in Israel. We need to be reminded of our history so that we can do better.
Pictures inside of the Legacy were not allowed.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice was even more intense and sobering. It is also know as the National Lynching Memorial – it commemorates the black victims of lynching in the U.S. The Memorial is intended to focus on and acknowledge past racial terrorism and advocate for social justice. While the Legacy Museum focused on the details of the black experience, this Memorial is more of a gut punch. It consists of a memorial square with 805 hanging steel rectangles, the size and shape of coffins, representing each of the U.S. Counties where a documented lynching took place. There are 4400 documented lynchings but it is estimated that there were many thousands more undocumented lynchings. As you walk into the Memorial, there is a slope and soon these rectangles are hanging over your head. In other words, the farther you walked into the Memorial, the more powerful it becomes. This Memorial reminded me of the Vietnam Wall in Washington D.C.
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| As you approach the Memorial, you have no idea what is in store for you |
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| We think lynching is just a southern thing |
On a lighter note:
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| Our campground in Montgomery did not have a lot of charm |
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| But...it had a lovely pond out back |
not a lot of campground charm but easy for you to navigate and park, for a change ! great photos and wording on the museums, everyone needs to be reminded of this history, which cn only make us wiser as we move forward
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