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| Established | April 26, 2018 |
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| Location | Montgomery, Alabama |
| Coordinates | 32°22′47″N86°18′37″W / 32.37984°N 86.31031°W |
| Founder | Equal Justice Initiative |
| Website | Official website |
The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration is a museum in Montgomery, Alabama, that displays the history of slavery and racism in America. This includes the enslavement of African-Americans, racial lynchings, segregation, and racial bias.
The museum, which opened on April 26, 2018, [1] is founded by Montgomery's Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit organization founded by Bryan Stevenson to assist in providing legal representation to inmates on death row. The Museum, which receives no public funding [2] , was founded as a counterpart to the National Memorial to Peace and Justice, which is dedicated specifically to the memory of the victims of lynching. [3] The development and construction of the museum and the nearby memorial cost an estimated $20 million raised from private donations and charitable foundations. [4] To celebrate the opening of the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the Equal Justice Initiative held an opening ceremony and two-day Summit. The Summit included speakers such as Sherrilyn Ifill the Director Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Anthony Ray Hinton, who spent 30 years as a death row prisoner until he was represented by the EJI and proven innocent in his case, and Former Vice-President Al Gore who discussed Climate Change and Environmental Justice. The Summit included a multitude of speakers as well as those previously mentioned. [5]
On October 1, 2021, the EJI reopened the Legacy Museum as an expansion from the original location at 400 N. Court St. in Montgomery, Alabama. The new grounds of the Legacy Museum is a location where previously enslaved people were warehoused. In order to make the museum and the memorial more accessible, the EJI financially reduced admissions pricing to a single $5.00 ticket to visit both locations. The new expansion of the Legacy Museum is roughly five times the size of the original location. The original location was at capacity about 80% of the time before the pandemic and was expected to repeat those numbers the following summer. About 50,000 people came to the memorial and were unable to visit the Museum due to the former location being at capacity. Following the Legacy Museums move, in late March 2022, the EJI opened another Legacy Site called the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, a 17-acre park that includes art pieces and original artifacts along the Alabama River where millions of enslaved people were trafficked. [6]
[edit] The Museum was originally housed in an 11,000-square-foot museum include oral history, archival materials, and interactive technology. [7] Then, in 2021, the museum expanded to the new location in a 47,000-square-feet building. [8] The new expansion includes immersive modern technology, historical research, and world-class art that exhibits slavery and its modern influence. The expansion offers a deeper story of American history through displays, artwork, and interactive elements. The sections throughout the museum include slavery, reconstruction, lynching and terror, Jim Crow, segregation and the Civil Rights Era, injustice in the judicial system and mass incarceration. [6]
The museum's goal is to lead the visitor on the path from slavery to racial oppression in other forms, including terror lynching and mass incarceration of minorities. [9] .The museum employs technology to dramatize the horror and terror of enslavement, lynchings, and legalized racial segregation in America. [6] Visitors can hear, see, and be in close proximity to slave replicas, which model what it was like to be an enslaved person awaiting sale at the auction block. There are first person accounts of slavery and auctioning through narration and voiceovers. One of its displays is a collection of soil from lynching sites across the United States. [4] The museum includes a variety of interactive exhibits, including a poll site that includes the test black Americans were expected to pass prior to voting, including questions such as the number of jelly beans in a jar, and a visitors wing to a prison where visitors can sit down and hear the inmates stories. [6]
To illustrate the point of ongoing oppression, the exhibits include photographs of African-Americans picking cotton; the photos could be easily mistaken as depicting the slavery period. They are inmates from the1960s. [10] Unlike the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, the Legacy Museum does not tell a comforting story of progress from oppression to civil rights reform but of continually evolving ways of controlling Black people. In one telling exhibit, a panicked group of captured and chained Africans stand opposite a group of men, arms raised, at the moment of arrest. [11]
The final room of the museum, before the art exhibit, is a massive room filled with images and music of the individuals who worked to challenge racial injustices. [6] The art gallery includes works by Hank Willis Thomas, Glenn Ligon, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Titus Kaphar, and Sanford Biggers. [4] EJI founder Bryan Stevenson said in a statement announcing the museum's opening. "We're proud that the Legacy Museum can play a vital role in helping people learn American history that's often not taught and empower everyone to build healthier communities." [6]
Dallas County is a county located in the central part of the U.S. state of Alabama. As of the 2020 census, its population was 38,462. The county seat is Selma. Its name is in honor of United States Secretary of the Treasury Alexander J. Dallas, who served from 1814 to 1816.
Monroe County is a county located in the southwestern part of the U.S. state of Alabama. As of the 2020 census, the population was 19,772. Its county seat is Monroeville. Its name is in honor of James Monroe, fifth President of the United States. It is a dry county, in which the sale of alcoholic beverages is restricted or prohibited, but Frisco City and Monroeville are wet cities.
Pickens County is a county located on the west central border of the U.S. state of Alabama. As of the 2020 census, the population was 19,123. Its county seat is Carrollton, located in the center of the county. It is a prohibition, or dry county, although the communities of Carrollton and Aliceville voted to become wet in 2011 and 2012, respectively.
Racial equality is when people of all races and ethnicities are treated in an egalitarian/equal manner. Racial equality occurs when institutions give individuals legal, moral, and political rights. In present-day Western society, equality among races continues to become normative. Prior to the early 1960s, attaining equality was difficult for African, Asian, and Indigenous people. However, in more recent years, legislation is being passed ensuring that all individuals receive equal opportunities in treatment, education, employment, and other areas of life. Racial equality can refer to equal opportunities or formal equality based on race or refer to equal representation or equality of outcomes for races, also called substantive equality.
The Montgomery Advertiser is a daily newspaper and news website located in Montgomery, Alabama. It was founded in 1829.
America's Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM) is dedicated to the history of the Black Holocaust in America. The museum was founded in 1988 by James Cameron, who became well known after surviving a lynching.
Letohatchee is an unincorporated community in Lowndes County, Alabama, United States. It has a very small population and four businesses. The community is part of the Montgomery Metropolitan Statistical Area.
The Levine Museum of the New South, is a history museum located in Charlotte, North Carolina whose exhibits explore issues relevant to the history of the greater Charlotte metro area and spark curiosity about our world today. Founded in 1991 as the Museum of the New South, it was renamed after museum patron and Family Dollar founder Leon Levine in 2001.
Bryan Stevenson is an American lawyer, social justice activist, and law professor at New York University School of Law, and the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, he has challenged bias against the poor and minorities in the criminal justice system, especially children. He has helped achieve United States Supreme Court decisions that prohibit sentencing children under 18 to death or to life imprisonment without parole.
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that enforced racial segregation, "Jim Crow" being a pejorative term for an African American. The last of the Jim Crow laws were generally overturned in 1965. Formal and informal racial segregation policies were present in other areas of the United States as well, even as several states outside the South had banned discrimination in public accommodations and voting. Southern laws were enacted by white-dominated state legislatures (Redeemers) to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by African Americans during the Reconstruction era. Such continuing racial segregation was also supported by the successful Lily-white movement.
The Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) is the agency responsible for incarceration of convicted felons in the state of Alabama in the United States. It is headquartered in the Alabama Criminal Justice Center in Montgomery.
The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) is a non-profit organization, based in Montgomery, Alabama, that provides legal representation to prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted of crimes, poor prisoners without effective representation, and others who may have been denied a fair trial. It guarantees the defense of anyone in Alabama in a death penalty case.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, informally known as the National Lynching Memorial, is a memorial to commemorate the black victims of lynching in the United States. It is intended to focus on and acknowledge past racial terrorism and advocate for social justice in America. Founded by the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative, it opened in downtown Montgomery, Alabama on April 26, 2018.
Black Southerners are African Americans living in the Southern United States, the United States region with the largest black population.
Kwame Akoto-Bamfo is a multi-disciplinary artist, educator and activist, known for his sculptures and massive body of works dedicated to the memory, healing and Restorative Justice for people of African descent. His outdoor sculptures are dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Transatlantic slave trade, notably the installation Nkyinkim, on display at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice that opened in 2018 in Montgomery, Alabama. His other sculptures include an installation of 1,200 concrete heads representing Ghana's enslaved ancestors in Accra, the capital of Ghana. Called Faux-Reedom, it was unveiled in 2017.
John Henry James was an African-American man who was lynched near Charlottesville, Virginia on July 12, 1898, for having allegedly raped a white woman. James had no known family in the area, and had lived in Charlottesville for only five or six years. He was an ice cream seller; "nothing else is known of him."
Kris Graves is an American photographer who primarily works in portraiture and landscape photography. He is based in New York and London, and his work has been published and exhibited internationally. Graves's photographs evoke the sense of time, change, and memories as well as address social issues to raise awareness. Graves founded and directs Kris Graves Projects, a publisher of art books.
Elmore County is a county located in the east-central portion of the U.S. state of Alabama. Throughout its history, there have been many lynchings in the county including on July 2, 1901, when a local mob lynched Robert White. In a strange turn of events, a local farmer, George White confessed in court to the killing and named five other local men as killers. Three men were convicted in the killing and sentenced to ten years in prison. On 9 June 1902, they were pardoned by Governor Jelks.
Jake "Shake" Davis was a 62-year-old African-American man who was lynched in Miller County, Georgia by a white mob on July 14, 1922. According to the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary it was the 38th of 61 lynchings during 1922 in the United States.
A mob of white Winchester, Illinois, residents lynched Andrew Richards, a black man, on September 11, 1877. He was forcibly taken from the Winchester, Illinois, jail by a mob of several hundred people. He was accused of the rape of a white woman, Mrs. John Pruitt, in a nearby orchard.