The Legacy Museum and the Memorial for Peace and Justice
Near Montgomery, Alabama
In April twenty eighteen, two buildings opened within a short walk of each other on the west side of downtown Montgomery. Their proximity to the auction grounds of Court Square was not accidental.
The Legacy Museum stands near the site of a former slave warehouse where enslaved people were held before sale. Its narrative arc runs from that warehouse through Reconstruction, through the terror of Jim Crow, through mass incarceration and the current American criminal justice system. Attorney Bryan Stevenson, who founded the Equal Justice Initiative in nineteen eighty-nine after years representing people on death row in Alabama, built both sites. The museum is dense with documentation, primary sources, and first-person testimony. It is not a comfortable place to visit. It is designed that way.
The second site, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice on a rise south of downtown, is the first comprehensive memorial in the United States dedicated to the victims of racial terror lynchings. Eight hundred five suspended steel columns hang from the ceiling of a large open-air structure, each column representing a county in a state where a documented racial terror lynching occurred. More than four thousand four hundred Black Americans killed in racial terror between eighteen seventy-seven and nineteen fifty are remembered here. Their names are engraved in the steel.
A duplicate set of columns lies on the grounds outside the memorial. The design concept calls for counties to claim their column and install it as a public memorial at home. Historians note that the record it documents is partial, not complete; total numbers are not fully known.
In the first year after opening, the two sites drew more than six hundred thousand visitors. Both are run by the Equal Justice Initiative. Together they constitute the most substantial public reckoning with this history anywhere in the South.
