Issue link: http://maconmagazine.uberflip.com/i/1184234
A U G U S T / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 9 M A C O N M A G A Z I N E . C O M | 1 0 3 I N THE MID-1800S, Montgomery, Ala., was a central hub of the U.S. slave trade. ousands of enslaved people were sold at several auction houses throughout the city, and then sent farther on – to farm, build, tend and grow the Deep South. Two hundred years later, the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law office working on constitutional challenges to capital punishment, prison conditions and mass incarceration, decided to educate the public about the historical roots of the problems it challenges in court. Its study culminated – though it has not ended – with the opening of the Equal Justice Initiative's Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in spring 2018. e impact of the museum and memorial are profound. Profound feels too small a word; they each evoke powerful physical and emotional responses: confusion, anger, sadness, sickness, a deep need to do something. Many visitors find the names of their family members or forebearers. Visitors to the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, built inside a former warehouse that housed slave auctions, walk through interactive exhibits including ghostly projections of men, women and children housed in tiny cages, newspaper ads selling human beings with prices according to age and physical characteristics, jars of earth collected at sites of lynchings all over the country and business signs trumpeting segregationist policies. Video installations allow visitors to listen by prison phone with men and women facing death sentences. Touch screen computers display lynchings by state and county. Two small side rooms play video loops of programs featuring Civil Rights Movement work. e corridor leading to the museum exit features displays raising a number of current concerns: the death penalty, prosecution of children as adults, treatment of prisoners. We are presented with perspectives, context and facts, but are called to think about the past that has led us directly into the present. A little under a mile away from the museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice commemorates the lives taken in acts of violence and from whom justice – or even public acknowledgement – has been stolen. Museum staff have documented about 4,400 lynchings in the U.S. between 1877 and 1950. Every event was confirmed by two primary sources, which begs questions about how many more killings occurred but could not be documented through this meticulous procedure. Visitors enter along a path of historical markers and intensely evocative sculpture and approach the primary space indirectly, along a grassy slope. At the first approach, the monuments – large corton steel markers for each U.S. county in which a lynching occurred – are at eye level. It is not an accident that, engraved with the names and dates of lynchings, they evoke coffins. As the path slopes down, markers are suspended from the ceiling, so we walk beside and then under the hanging representations of the many thousands of black bodies tortured and killed over decades