A new Legacy museum has been opened in Montgomery, Alabama by the Equal Justice Initiative. The museum traces the history of enslaved black people in America from the horrors of slavery to the terrors of lynching, the humiliation of Jim Crow and the current crisis of police brutality. Nearby a National Memorial for Peace and Justice, also opened last month, becomes one of the country’s first memorials dedicated to more than 4,000 victims of lynching.
Bryan Stevenson, founder and director of the Equal Justice Initiative, said the country cannot heal until it confronts the truth of what happened, especially in the South.
“This landscape is littered with a kind of glorious story about our ‘romantic past’,” said Stevenson, a lawyer who has helped overturn the convictions of more than 125 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row. “You can’t say that if you fully understand the depravity of human slavery, of bondage, of humiliation and rape and torture and lynchings of people.” Read more in this article. Visit the museum website.
