Recently Popie and I traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit a museum and memorial sponsored by the Equal Justice Initiative, the organization led by Bryan Stephenson, author of Just Mercy. If you are ever in the Deep South, take this trip. I’ve been to quite a few civil rights museums over the years: this is the best I’ve seen. It’s done with skill and care; and everything is priced so that anybody can afford it. (Even the t-shirts and mugs are inexpensive.)
The “Legacy Museum” is in the heart of downtown Montgomery, built on the site of a warehouse used to house slaves going up for sale. The museum aims at education, not emotion (though there’s plenty to get emotional about). It tells the story of racism in America, beginning with slavery, extending through Jim Crow, and entering the present with a look at the racial bias of law enforcement. The story is factual, crammed with statistics, geography and eyewitness testimony. It’s not about making white people feel bad; it’s simply an account of what happened. None of it is controversial from a historian’s point of view, but I didn’t learn any of this in my history classes. It is exactly what some people are determined to keep out of our history classes.
The “National Memorial for Peace and Justice” does, by contrast, aim at emotion. It’s located on a hilltop about a mile from the museum, and its subject is lynching. The main exhibit offers rusty steel columns for every county in America that hosted a verified lynching. On that column is incised the name of the person lynched and the date. Visitors can wander among the pillars, perusing the names and locations. Some counties have one name; some have a dozen. There are over 4,000 names. The cumulative impact made me tremble. To think what we did and what we tolerated. The memorial’s simplicity and solemnity reminded me of the Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C. I found it even more powerful.
It’s remarkable that these exhibits are presented in Montgomery, first capital of the Confederacy. This is the small city where Martin Luther King preached and where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. I admire that Stephenson has made his investments in Alabama, not New York or Washington. If we are ever to make a dent in the powerful tradition of racial prejudice, it has to happen in places like Montgomery.