So first, Bryan, I want to ask you: Why a museum? In your view, why was there a need for the Legacy Museum in 2018, and now a much larger one in 2021? Bryan Stevenson
Of course, you’ll find much more in the full podcast, so subscribe to Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. On the most recent episode of Vox Conversations, I spoke with Stevenson - the author of the bestselling memoir Just Mercy and the founder and executive director of EJI - about why this exhibit needed a new home, how it complements his legal work on behalf of the wrongfully convicted, and whether museums are the place to strike back against modern efforts to criminalize the teaching of American history.īelow is an edited excerpt from our conversation. But the original Legacy Museum was too small, it seems, to encapsulate the full horror of American injustice visited upon people who look like Stevenson and me. The memorial, with its 800 6-foot blocks of metal displaying the names of lynching victims, remains atop a hill overlooking the Alabama Capitol building.
That’s when attorney Bryan Stevenson and his Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) opened it around the corner from their offices in Montgomery, Alabama, at the same time as their National Memorial for Peace and Justice. I first visited the initial Legacy Museum back in the spring of 2018. The entryway leading to the new Legacy Museum’s main exhibit, depicting enslaved Africans held captive during the Middle Passage.
The display was a haunting memorial to the kidnapped Africans who did not survive the Middle Passage.Īs part of the first chapter of African American history in this nation, seeing that watery grave set the appropriate tone for the museum’s journey through the timeline of Black life in this country, taking visitors from the days of chattel slavery all the way to modern-day evils such as voter suppression and mass incarceration, connecting the dots as it goes. But when I walked into the newly expanded and reopened Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, the first thing I saw, and heard, were ocean waves, crashing up against the video screens in front of me.
0 kommentar(er)
