Expansion of Museum Shows the Legacy of Slavery in America

MONTGOMERY, Alabama, USA (AP) – Statues of chained men, women and children emerge from the sand on a beach as fake waves crash on it, a symbol that honors the two million people whose It is speculated that they were eventually buried. Atlantic Ocean because of the slave trade.

The exhibit is part of an expansion of the museum created by the Equal Justice Initiative – a non-profit group based in Montgomery, Alabama – that focuses on the legacy of slavery in America.

The expansion of the Legacy Museum – a companion to the National Monument for Peace and Justice, the group’s famous memorial in honor of lynching victims – opens Friday and takes visitors on a journey through the ages, through the origins of the slave trade. The struggle for civil rights and even of modern problems of criminal justice.

Brian Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, said the museum’s goal is “to teach and confront the parts of American history that are often not taught,” an understanding he says will help the country move forward and heal. the wanted.

“I think something better awaits us in the United States. I think there’s something that feels more like equality, more like freedom, more like justice than what we’ve experienced to date.” But to achieve this, we must face the damage caused by this problem, the persistent challenges created by this long history of racial inequality,” Stevenson said in a telephone interview.

The museum spans from the days of slavery, lynching and Jim Crow laws to issues of mass incarceration and modern criminal justice, focusing on the legal work of the Equal Justice Initiative.

The 40,000-square-foot (3,700 m) Heritage Museum in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, stands on the site of a former cotton warehouse.

“You are in the place where enslaved blacks were forced to work under conditions of subjugation,” the sign reads.

Along a dark corridor, images of talking slaves are projected onto the walls behind the bars of the cell, and they question visitors before them. The first is that a woman pleads for the children that were taken from her. In another, two kids pounce against each other.

“Mother, mother… have you seen our mother?” They scream.

One wall is covered with earthen jars taken from the places where the lynching victims were killed. In another exhibit, visitors are invited to take a Jim Crow-era literacy test to register.