Museum Connected To Lynching Memorial Reopening
MONTGOMERY, AL – APRIL 26: A sculpture commemorating the slave trade greets visitors at the entrance National Memorial For Peace And Justice on April 26, 2018 in Montgomery, Alabama. The memorial is dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people and those terrorized by lynching and Jim Crow segregation in America. Conceived by the Equal Justice Initiative, the physical environment is intended to foster reflection on America’s history of racial inequality. ORG XMIT: 775158015 ORG XMIT: CLE1804271232280575 The Plain DealerThe Plain Dealer
A museum thats linked to the national lynching memorial in Montgomery is reopening for the first time since the pandemic began.
The Legacy Museum, which tells the story of slavery and its legacy in the United States, will offer free admission for a limited time, but crowd sizes are being restricted and face masks are required to help prevent the coronavirus from spreading.
The museum and Legacy Pavilion are open Wednesday-Sunday from 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
The lynching memorial, the museum and the Legacy Pavilion are all operated by the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative, which announced the reopening in a statement.
A new museum exhibit explores the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which often is referred to as the start of the modern civil rights movement in 1955. A new exhibit at Legacy Pavilion, located near the museum, will focus on the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Mississippi Civil Rights Museum
The museum opened last year in Jackson and focuses on the period from 1945 to 1976. When a space unashamedly tells the narrative of African Americans who resisted segregation because things were so brutal, its important for that to be recognized, Stevenson says. Its brand-new, and it has that kind of unvarnished truth, which I think is critical for people to understand.
Civil Rights Attractions In Birmingham Alabama
Dr. Martin Luther King was a frequent visitor to Birmingham, and came to know the citys racial strife and its African-American leaders. It would be hard to understate the citys role in Civil Rights history, which makes a Birmingham tour, a key experience for any visitor. The city, once known for police-dog attacks and
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Tips For Taking Children To The New Legacy Museum And Lynching Memorial In Alabama
Standing next to me in front of the new Legacy Museum in blazing hot Montgomery, Ala., my 12-year old son asks: Why are you taking me to another museum?
To be fair, its not surprising that a sixth-grader would rather be playing video games. But we live only an hour from the museum and the also-new National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which is receiving international attention for its stunning public acknowledgment of our countrys history of racial violence. It seemed wrong not to take him as soon as possible.
The museum and the memorial are the work of the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal rights organization in Montgomery. The museum depicts the history of black people in the United States, beginning with slavery, through Jim Crow laws and segregation, to current issues of mass incarceration and police violence against blacks. The memorial honors 4,000 victims of lynching and other types of racial violence.
Since opening in Alabamas capital in April, both sites have received steady streams of visitors, including many children, said Sia Sanneh, senior attorney for the EJI. If you, too, are contemplating a visit with your children to these thought-provoking and moving sites, here are some things to consider before you go, based on my visit and discussions with museum officials and other experts.
Hope is an important part of the experience.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice
Americas Black Holocaust Museum
Since the building closed its doors 10 years ago, Milwaukees ABHM has operated as an online museum, exploring the African American experience from pre-captivity to the present day. Its founder was a man who escaped a lynching in the 1930s, Dr. James Cameron who passed away in 2006. With the onset of the Great Recession, there were no funds to sustain the site, says Stevenson. But supporters are coming together, and it will open again year.
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The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement To Mass Incarceration
The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration is located near the former site of one of the most prominent slave auctions in the country and just steps away from the rail station that trafficked tens of thousands of enslaved people during the height of the slave trade. With Montgomerys proximity to the fertile Black Belt region and its plantations in need of workers, the city became the capital of the domestic slave trade in Alabama. After the Civil War, slave ownership ended with emancipation, but racial inequality and injustice did not. The Legacy Museum, through its immersive exhibits and videos, gives visitors the opportunity to both explore the past and reflect on its impact on society today.
On entering the museum, visitors are confronted with replicas of slave pens and, through sights and sounds, experience what it would have been like to be imprisoned and waiting for the auction block. Narration taken from first-person accounts of enslaved people brings a sobering authenticity to the exhibits. Beyond slavery, the displays and visuals based on extensive research of the terrorism of lynching and the dehumanizing force of Jim Crow laws engage visitors in understanding the legacy of Americas racial injustice. They also provide a link from the past to current social issues such as mass incarceration of African-Americans and police violence.
Jefferson County Alabama Memorializes Lynchings With Marker Dedication
09.14.19
More than 200 racial justice advocates and community members convened at Sloss Furnaces on Monday for the dedication of a historical marker memorializing Tom Redmond and Jake McKenzie, who were lynched as a result of racial violence at the Brookside Mines in Jefferson County, Alabama.
The Jefferson County Memorial Project partnered with EJI on the marker installation and hosted the dedication ceremony, which included performances by Christina J. Wade and the Carlton Reese Memorial Unity Choir.
Jake McKenzie and Tom Redmond are two names that must be remembered in Alabamas history. They were both victims of unspeakable hate and we do them a great disservice by letting their stories be lost to time, said Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin. The Sloss Historical Marker Dedication will stand as a reminder of the injustices we have sworn to fight. Our history may be painful, but its only by acknowledging those scars that we can we truly find healing.
Jefferson County Commissioner LaShunda Scales and City Council Member Darrell OQuinn also offered remarks during the ceremony.
Were here to bear witness to the facts and evils of slavery, convict leasing and mass incarceration, said Jim Sokol, a member of the JCMP core coalition.
We are rehumanizing these souls, she said.
Hundreds of people gathered for the dedication ceremony.
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New Welcome Center Opens For Alabama Lynching Memorial Museum
A legacy shuttle drives by the EJI Legacy Pavilion, that features the faces of Civil Rights warriors, in Montgomery, Ala., on Friday, Jan. 17, 2020. The Pavilion, which houses the EJI ticket office, a gift shop, a restaurant, a coffee shop, civil rights displays and a shuttle stop for the Legacy Museum and the Peace and Justice Memorial opens on Saturday, Jan. 18, 2020. AP
MONTGOMERY The nations first memorial to lynching victims is expanding.
The Equal Justice Initiative on Saturday opened a new welcome center and exhibition space that will add to the existing lynching memorial and museum that documents the history of racial inequality in America.
The pavilion, located in downtown Montgomery, will serve as a hub for visitors to the two previously opened sites, EJIs National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which documents the era of racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950 and the Legacy Museum.
The Legacy Pavilion will include a monument to women, men and children who were victims of racial terror lynchings in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and during Reconstruction. It will also honor civil rights figures including Martin Luther King Jr., Claudette Colvin, John Lewis, Rosa Parks, Jonathan Daniels, Jo Ann Robinson, and E.D. Nixon and describe the role Montgomery played in fueling a civil rights movement.
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After the Civil War, lynching became a terrorist tactic that white people used to exert power over newly-freed black men and women. Although many Americans think of it as a Southern phenomenon, lynchings took place in the North, too. Lynching was not de jure legal in that it was carried out by a mob rather than a formal judge and jury. However, because lynchings went unchallenged in courts, they became a de facto form of legalized mob violence.
No rationale was needed for lynching, but the people who carried them out often accused black men of some perceived slight against white women. These slights could be non-criminal offenses like knocking on a womans door, or criminal accusations like rape. However, because white people used lynching as a tool to intimidate black people and discourage them from exercising rights like voting, historians view these accusations with extreme skepticism. In 1955, a white woman named Carolyn Bryant Donham accused 14-year-old lynching victim Emmett Till of making verbal and physical advances but years later, she admitted shed made the whole thing up.
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Lynching Memorial Possibly Coming To Birmingham
BIRMINGHAM, Ala The Jefferson County Memorial Project is working with the Equality Justice Initiative to bring a lynching memorial to Birmingham.
The heavy history of Birmingham and Alabama is brought to life in many ways in the area like the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the new Legacy museum and memorial in Montgomery.
Its beautifully curated and its presented in a matter of fact way that refused to blink at a very painful topic. You cant help but want to talk about it when you leave, said Maacah David, the public relations coordinator for Jefferson County Memorial Project.
On Thursday, the Jefferson county memorial project and Mayor Woodfin visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery.
The equality justice initiative has 800 hanging monument with 800 lying monuments surrounding in field in the memorial, said Davis.
The equality justice initiative has on their website that they are inviting counties across the country to claim their monuments and install them in their permanent homes in the counties they represent.
Jefferson county is jumping on board and they think Linn Park would be a perfect spot.
Linn park is the physical connector of city and county governments, city hall and the county courthouse, so you have this physical connector and to place it in the center of all of that really reminds our local government that we should never let another atrocity happen again, said Davis.
The National Memorial For Peace And Justice
More than 4,400 African American men, women, and children were hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950. Millions more fled the South as refugees from racial terrorism, profoundly impacting the entire nation. Until now, there has been no national memorial acknowledging the victims of racial terror lynchings. On a six-acre site atop a rise overlooking Montgomery, the national lynching memorial is a sacred space for truth-telling and reflection about racial terror in America and its legacy.
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In The Shadow Of The Lynching Memorial
Midsummer, in an aging subcompact rental car, because that was all we could get, my husband and I took a civil rights tour through the Deep South. With the air-conditioning blasting, we drove to Memphis, Montgomery, Selma and Atlanta, making an impromptu stop in Charlottesville the day after the statues of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson came down. At a time when race is a centerpiece of the American conversationand a specter looming behind political divisionsthis trip, a pilgrimage really, is a necessity for all American Jews. Here is my report from one part of our journey that should not be missed.
When we pulled into Montgomery, Alabama, the sun had long set. Our hotel was downtown and as soon as we unloaded our bags, we ventured back into the brightly lit streets. Just a few feet from the door of the hotel stood a historic marker that got right to the point: Brutal history had taken place here. We were standing in the heart of the old slave-market district, where enslaved people were auctioned at nearby Court Square and other locations. In 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected president and the Southern states seceded, Montgomery had more slave markets than churches or hotels.
Artist Kwame Akoto-Bamfos 2018 Nkyinkyim installation depicts enslaved people in chains.
Nine million terrorized.Ten million segregated.Eight million under criminal control.
The New Legacy Museum: From Enslavement To Mass Incarceration Is Now Open
Located at 400 North Court Street in downtown Montgomery, the Legacy Museum provides a comprehensive history of the U.S. with a focus on the legacy of slavery. Situated on a site where enslaved Black people were forced to labor in bondage, the museum offers an immersive experience with cutting-edge technology, world-class art, and critically important scholarship about American history.
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A Lynching Memorial Is Opening The Country Has Never Seen Anything Like It
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, opening Thursday in Montgomery, Ala., is dedicated to victims of white supremacy.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, opening Thursday in Montgomery, Ala., remembers the thousands of victims of lynchings.Credit…Audra Melton for The New York Times
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MONTGOMERY, Ala. In a plain brown building sits an office run by the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, a place for people who have been held accountable for their crimes and duly expressed remorse.
Just a few yards up the street lies a different kind of rehabilitation center, for a country that has not been held to nearly the same standard.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opens Thursday on a six-acre site overlooking the Alabama State Capitol, is dedicated to the victims of American white supremacy. And it demands a reckoning with one of the nations least recognized atrocities: the lynching of thousands of black people in a decades-long campaign of racist terror.
There is nothing like it in the country. Which is the point.
Just seeing the names of all these people, said Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit organization behind the memorial. Many of them, he said, have never been named in public.
If I believe that each of us is more than the worst thing hes ever done, he said, I have to believe that for everybody.
Expanded Alabama Museum Traces Legacy Of Slavery In America
MONTGOMERY, Ala. The statues of chained men, women and children stick hauntingly out of sand as simulated waves crash overhead, a symbol to the estimated two million people for whom the slave trade ended in a watery grave in the Atlantic Ocean.
The exhibit is part on an expanded museum created by the Equal Justice Initiative that focuses on the legacy of slavery in America. The expanded Legacy Museum a companion to the groups well-known memorial to lynching victims opens Friday and takes visitors on a journey through the origins of the slave trade through the civil rights era to modern criminal justice issues.
Bryan Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, said the goal of the museum is to teach and confront parts of American history that are not frequently taught, an understanding that he says is a requisite for the country to move forward and heal.
I believe that theres something better waiting for us in America. I think that there is something that feels more like equality, more like freedom, more like justice than we have yet experienced. But to achieve that, were going to have to confront the damage the problem, the lingering challenges that have been created by this long history of racial inequality, Stevenson said in a telephone interview.
Momma, momma Have you seen our mother? they call out.
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Birmingham Civil Rights Institute
This Smithsonian-affiliated center in Birmingham, Alabama, highlights the citys most significant civil rights events. Inside, visitors will see the cell door behind which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail. An exhibit by the Alabama photographer Chester Higgins Jr., Foot Soldiers: Profiles of Courage Then and Now, runs through November.
Raise Up By Hank Willis Thomas
The journey through the memorial continues with Hank Willis Thomas‘s sculpture Raise Up, a depiction of policing in America. The sculpture depicts ten Black men, encased in concrete, some with their heads sunken into the concrete with their hands up and their eyes closed. Cultural studies scholar Tanja Schult saw Thomas’ sculpture as a powerful evocation of the reality of black men in America when coming face to face with law enforcement. Thomas interestingly encases these Black men in concrete, leaving them unable to move. Some figures’ heads are sunken in as well, further demonstrating the lack of control and autonomy black people have over their bodies. Though most of their bodies covered, their hands are clearly visible, referencing the many stories of unarmed Black men being shot and brutalized by the police despite their innocence. The National Memorial uses Thomas sculpture as a connection to the present, a kind of call to action that the fight for justice and liberation is ongoing.
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