The Legacy Museum is extraordinary. I think of it as the second museum in the EJI collection, but it was the first, smaller and less comprehensive, then expanded and relocated to the warehouse district on a site previously used for slave trading and incarceration. We walk on its history and breathe in its legacy.

The museum is Bryan Stevenson’s representation of the Black American experience in four acts: the middle passage and slavery, emancipation and hard on its heels, lynching and post-Reconstruction, followed by Jim Crow and deepening disenfranchisement, then the contemporary world, post-Civil Rights Act, of mass-incarceration. All four chapters are ways American society had kept down and apart the Black population.

The museum is both immersive and instructional. It opens with screens depicting maps and the direction and quantity of slave trading, big arrows arcing over the Atlantic, smaller ones more northerly to the America and the Caribbean Islands, but bolder, broader, bigger ones towards the south, in particular Brazil. In none of the museums representing the trans-Atlantic slave trade are there any explanations for why the slave experience in America was unique or why the slave experience in South America where many more millions enslaved were transported developed so differently. Sans Civil War, sans Reconstruction, sans lynching, sans Jim Crow.

The next room is immersive. Waves break to the right and the left and their projection skitters across the floor so that you are in the ocean. The digital waves breaking against the shore crash against and swirl around concrete heads representing captured Africans by the artist Kwame Akoto-Bamfo from his “Nkyinkyim” series. These heads include men, women, children – high status and low — with coiffure that is meaningful within a culture that is unknown to me. Only from other sites am I aware that some of the hairstyles must be royal. Some of the heads are adorned with chains, shackles, or rust iron collars. It is a slave memorial.

Following the ocean passage, the museum experience moves to the American slave experience. This time it is not just descriptions or visuals but an immersive jail block, where seated across from a bared door, holographic ghostly images greet you and tell their unique story. One of the most haunting is a woman who sings plaintively. She sings again and again for each visitor, so even experiencing a different story in a different cell, you can hear her in the far background. 

As I remember, the Civil War does not loom large, although there are acknowledgments of the Colored Corps service to the Union and emancipation where the Union gained control, as well as the flight from the South of many former slaves. Post-reconstruction is the next significant time block.

Were I to suggest a viewing order of the EJI sites, I would begin at the National Memorial to Peace and Justice. In the Legacy Museum, a large section of shelves, floor-to-ceiling, hold knee-high, glass jars like urns filled with soil. These jars contain soil from those lynching sites memorialized at the National Memorial to Peace and Justice. Along with the jars are poignant videos of families, relatives of those lynched, visiting the sites, digging the dirt, and filling the jars. The colors of the soils remind me of artists’ palettes, swatches at the Sherwin Williams counter, or the Pantone color books. Some are dusty sand, some ochre, some red, some mahogany brown, some black — the cotton black soil that made Mississippi and Alabama so rich. They also remind me of the many colors of people. Soil or dust breathed with life to become people, so says Genesis, so acknowledges the Quran, along with the creation myths of many tribes and cultures throughout the world, including the Yoruba, Songye, and Efé peoples of West and Central Africa. 

Jim Crow and Civil Rights protests make up the next movement in the quartet. Here, famous photographs — Bull Connor glaring, Major John Cloud at the foot of Edmund Pettus Bridge confronting young John Lewis and the marchers, sit-ins, dog and fire hoses loosed on civilians — make for wall coverings behind specific screens telling the stories and featuring the heroes of the movement. These are videos and photographic documents of the horrors as well as interactive sections where visitors can take literacy and poll tests to qualify to vote, including naming the number of jelly beans in a jar. By this point in my tour of Civil Rights museums, many of these images are familiar. I have wondered if these images might be updated with more recent police actions, such as the famous image of Ieshia Evans in Baton Rouge in 2016. Or worse, the recent ICE raids where the federal agents are masked and without personal identification on their uniforms. Who are these thugs? And why are they anonymous? In the earlier iterations state violence against Americans, we knew, although we rarely prosecuted and if so did not convict, as with Police Chief Lynwood Shull, the perpetrators or the leaders.

The penultimate section of the museum is unique and a central part of the EJI mission and Bryan Stevenson’s life’s work. The large room replicates a visiting room at a prison with rows of small tables with baffles enclosing a desk facing a life-size video screen with an image of an inmate in prison orange or white. To the right is a telephone. When you pick up the phone, the inmate picks up his and begins to tell his story of incarceration. Here, echoing the slave pens of the second section, you can move from station to station to hear different stories with a similar theme. 

The final room is a reflection area, given over to a space where you can begin to process the museum experience. This is a great segue to the final EJI site, Freedom Monument Sculpture park where artists have represented the history of slavery in a fifteen acre park on the banks of the Alabama river. A place for pause, reflection, and, perhaps, personal closure — or opening a deeper understanding of regaining identity.

Note: the post: Key West – Surprise expands on the story of Chief Shull his crime but not his conviction and the final recognition of his victim.