Brave Museums Part 3: The Legacy Museum

As I get back to regular blogging, I want to begin each one, when I can, calling out museums that are brave in challenging times.  Today, check out this New York Times article featuring a number of sites and museums dedicated to telling the full story of American life, including the story of African Americans and the legacies of enslavement.  In the article, Ashley Rogers, director of Whitney Plantation, reminds readers, “a wound doesn’t get better if you ignore it. It just festers.”

This week, thousands of museum folks are gathering for the American Alliance of Museums annual conference in Los Angeles where I'm sure so many issues about history, funding, and more will be discussed.  I miss Twitter for conference sessions and hope someone will find Threads or some other way to share for those of us not there.  Please share other brave museums you learn about!

But, on to another brave museum.  Some museums become brave, like the Valentine that I wrote about last time (and as an aside, some start as brave and become less so). But others are born brave--their very founding is a call for us to remember and to be brave about facing both past and future.  A few weeks ago I spent a day at the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.  Created by Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit law office. The goals and inspiration of the Legacy Project are described on their website: "Seeing firsthand how excessive punishment, racial discrimination, and inequality are deeply rooted in America’s history of racial injustice inspired us to create the Legacy Sites. By offering these unique spaces for people to gather, learn, and reflect on our history and its legacy, we hope to foster a new era of truth and justice in America."

No pictures are allowed in the museum and I didn't take notes, partly because of the nonstop conversations Dina Bailey and I were having along the way.  As a result, I have no pictures of label texts, so this post is more reflective of the experience overall.  As you enter, you encounter a very large video of waves, crashing forward, which served to me as both a representation of the journey of the middle passage and of the journey the exhibition would take us through.  The museum has almost no objects and in the early history,  stays away, for the most part, from the images that are so familiar.  Instead, there were hand-drawn videos (with the hands shown at work) sharing parts of the story and as well, concepts and historical facts that may be unfamiliar to many.  We didn't take time to watch the installations in the small theater spaces, but I can imagine they are equally powerful.

The label text is unsparing--when is the last time you saw the phrase "racial terrorism,"  to describe our history?  The amount of graphics with words:  runaway slave ads, legal notices, newspaper headlines, all in black and white, feels a bit overwhelming.  As we read the labels though, it struck us that this is very much an exhibit developed by folks with legal minds.  They assemble the evidence--so much evidence--and then make an impassioned argument.  The exhibit demands our attention to the evidence.

Photo:  EJI

There's also a subtle shift in perspective.  Earlier in the exhibition,  you walk on the outside of cells where you can hear re-created audio of enslaved African Americans--but you're on the outside, listening in, still at some remove.  But at the end of the exhibition, visitors can sit and listen, face-to-face with death row inmates, making sure that visitors understand that this is not history, that this is not past, and that the legacy of enslavement and racism continues forward.

Photo:  EJI

But then,  at the end of the exhibition, we entered a space that I found so beautiful and moving.  It's a very large gallery, that is floor-to-ceiling portrait images, faces only of African Americans of achievement in every field.  The space is copper/gold colored and is the place where the importance of Black imagination, passion and knowledge are made gloriously clear.  We sat in this space for quite a while, talking, but also watching people as they walked through, stopping at images they recognized or sitting like us, for a moment to take it all in.  

From there, we went to what's commonly known as the Lynching Memorial (also, by the way, the admission cost for all three legacy sites was $5 and the tickets are good forever if you don't make it to all three in a day).   There's been a great deal written about this memorial (for instance, here, here and here) and I hope all of you who can will make your way to Montgomery.  As we approached the memorial, there's a large, pristine green lawn between us and the memorial itself.  As we wound our way up the path, the large iron shapes, each delineating a county and its lynchings, come closer and closer.  And then, all of a sudden, we found ourselves looking at counties and wondering.  Wondering about the people named, wondering about all of the unknowns, wondering about why the lynchings happened when they did--sometimes a county had quite a few in a year, and then none.  We walked among these pillars, slowly making our way down the ramp until these are hanging over us, as lynching victims would have been.  You could feel the deep pressure and pain.

I particularly appreciated the way this national memorial focused on the local.  By creating this county-by-county memorial, it makes it hyper-local.  Visitors, including us, think about counties we know, or have been to.  But it also, after the memorial, let's us know that we can make change.  All of the county pillars have duplicates, lined up on the ground for counties to take home once some sort of reconciliation process has taken place.  There are still lots of them left--but then, down a bit, are versions of familiar shaped historic markers for those counties who have actually done the work, a clear message that there is much work still to be done.

"Hopelessness is the enemy of Justice."    
~ Bryan Stevenson

(thanks Paul Orselli of Exhibit Tricks for pointing me to this interview and quote that I found 

when I was writing this post)