Reflecting on The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace & Justice
Photo by Cultivating Perception
By IDEAS xLab co-founder + CEO Josh Miller
After spending three days on the University of Alabama campus talking to multiple classes of students and faculty and staff about (Un)Known Project, Hannah Drake and I drove to Montgomery, AL to visit The Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the Mothers of Gynecology installation.
Walking into The Legacy Museum made me think about standing in the Door of No Return off the coast of Senegal - the door captive Africans were forced to walk through to board ships bound for slave markets. A room with crashing ocean waves envelopes you - indicative of the brutal journey into enslavement that not everyone survived.
The art installations, historical information and connection between enslavement, mass incarceration, and recent and current events like our nation's push for racial justice and justice for Breonna Taylor are woven together. Reiterating that there are systems in place, grounded in racism, that persist to this day.
Photo by Cultivating Perception
The Museum notes that "the domestic slave trade (1808-1865) violently separated nearly half of all Black families in the United States." The walls tell the story of how New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolina’s, Georgia, Florida and the gulf coast were all sites of human trafficking.
Jars of dirt are lined up along the wall - from Bowling Green and Frankfort in Kentucky, Pueblo in Colorado, and Chattanooga, Tennessee - the area where I grew up. The dirt has been collected from the locations where racial terror lynchings occurred.
Traveling a few blocks, we visited The National Memorial for Peace & Justice, that "uses sculpture, art, and design to contextualize racial terror. The site includes a memorial square with 800 six-foot monuments to symbolize thousands of racial terror lynching victims in the United States and the counties and states where this terrorism took place."
The installation starts with the monuments at eye-level, and by the time you've walked between the monuments, and down the sloping floor, the monuments hang above you - representing lynched Black people hanging from a tree, or a bridge.
The power of the installation is immense. Like the museum shared, one person was “Lynched because he didn’t say ‘Mr.’”
Each county where documented lynchings took place has a monument with the name of the county, and the name and date of the person or people lynched. In some instances, an entire family including an infant, in other instances, the word "unknown." Hannah was able to visit the memorial after its opening a few years ago, and it is one of the parts of our journey that inspired (Un)Known Project. Over 169 people were lynched in Kentucky, and some of those people are also listed as (Un)Known.
Counties who have a monument at the Memorial can request the replica to install as a memorial in their own community as a way to recognize what happened.
Seeing the power of these spaces, the multiple ways they uses art and storytelling to change how we relate to and understand history was a powerful reminder about the importance of what is being created through (Un)Known Project. That type of space shifts your understanding of history, the totality of what happened, and makes you question - how could one human do this to another? What parts of those beliefs and mindsets still exist today? How do we move toward a place of racial health and reconciliation?
If visiting the Museum and Memorial in Montgomery did anything, it reinforced my belief in the power of art and storytelling to create deep, meaningful change. It reminded me of why Hannah and I are doing the work we are doing. And, how much we have left to uncover and unearth together. So far, community members have shared over 800 names of enslaved people with us, and that's just the start.
Learn more at www.unknownprojecttrail.com
Photos in gallery by Cultivating Perception and Josh Miller
Photo by Josh Miller