The Equal Justice Initiative Immersion Trip 2023 in Montgomery, Ala., was an eye-opening experience for a small cohort representing El Movimiento Sigue (EMS). We visited the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Incarceration and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
As a former museum professional, I was excited to visit the Legacy Museum. The tone of the museum was set with its initial lighting and sound. The lights were dim, and you can hear swooshing water and crashing waves that enveloped the room. Any chatter that was had prior to entering was all but gone. A somber mood filled the room. The entire wall was a video screen with waves crashing that informed people about the transatlantic-slave trade and the astronomical number of people brought over in disregard of their free will.
The mood and tone continue into the next room. The floor is covered with beach sand on both sides of the room with busts of slaves which depicts men, women and children placed everywhere on the ground. Some of the busts have their hands bound together with iron cuffs, others have iron slave collars affixed to their necks. One, in particular, stood out which was a pregnant woman wearing one of those collars. The emotion that the Ghanaian artist Kwame Akoto-Bamfo captures in each bust fills you with heavy emotions and empathy.
My museum training kept me looking for other things that could be telling a bigger story. Most people walk through this area rather quickly, I’m betting because of the emotion and feeling uncomfortable, I stood and took in the whole room. There were mirrors on each side of the beach scene. It created a powerful effect of an infinite beach with infinite slaves being brought to their new world.
At the entrance of the next room, was a plaque on the wall which informed patrons that the very warehouse that the Legacy Museum occupied was once used to hold slaves before they were auctioned off. The next room was made to look like holding cells with holograms of actors portraying slaves. I found it peculiar that they had directional speakers for each cell where only a listener or two could hear the narrative that the actors were speaking. There was much sadness and anger in these stories. However, the last cell was of a slave woman singing songs from that era. The whole hall was filled with this emotional, beautifully sang song. I feel that this was done purposely to give a sense of hope in a rather deep, emotionally draining space.
The museum is enormous. It could have taken two plus days to take in all of its imagery, interactives, panels, art pieces, individual stories, and videos. The transatlantic-slave trade continued into the next room. It showed where the slaves were brought and the number of slaves through each port. It continued to freedom and what came with it. Black codes, the Jim Crow era and the lynching of black people were the main focus.
Another strong exhibit piece was 800 jars that were filled by primarily family members of people who were lynched. The clay was collected from the actual sites where the individual lynchings took place. It was surreal to watch a video that showed some of the family members filling the jars and wondering if the DNA from their ancestors was within the clay that they dug up. The shelves were filled with these jars from the floor to the ceiling which were approximately twelve feet high.
The museum continues to the civil rights era, but due to time constraints, I had to move through this area rather quickly. The last area I will tell of is the incarceration section of the museum. Again, I had to walk and glance at most of the panels and interactives. However, I did stop and listen to inmates tell their stories of incarceration. When you walk up to the video monitor you see an inmate sitting across from you. You sit down and pick up a phone just as if you were to visit a person you know who was incarcerated. The phone triggers a switch, and the person picks up the phone and tells you about their incarceration journey.
We took a short bus ride to the monument after our time at the museum. The monument had steel structures on the ground or hung from the ceiling which were about six feet tall. They had individual counties and the states stamped in them where lynchings had taken place. The names of each person who was lynched in said county was on each structure also. It his close to home when I saw a panel that read, “Calvin Kimblern was lynched by a mob of at least 3,000 people in Pueblo, CO, in 1900.” As a historian from Pueblo, I have never heard of this lynching before.
The immersion trip informed and justified our work on the Transforming Justice initiative. It also made me think what a museum would look like if it was From Indigenous Slavery through Incarceration. What sights and sounds, individual stories, artifacts, and interactives that could tell OUR story. Work needs to be done.
In partnership with the Latino Coalition for Community Leadership, and the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition.
The Transforming Justice Project is made up of several grassroots organizations whose community’s are facing particularly high incarceration rates – Pueblo, Grand Junction, and Colorado Springs. We are funded by the Public Welfare Foundation – an organization that supports efforts to advance justice, racial equity, and economic well being for all.
