Field Trip: The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama

Every year, my two sisters and I explore a corner of the U.S. This year we immersed ourselves in the history of slavery at The Legacy Museum, Bryan Stevenson's remarkable project in Montgomery.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice

For the past 20 years, my two sisters and I have set aside time each year to explore a city or region of the country. The tradition started at a point in our lives when getting away from a household of kids for a weekend felt like a get-out-of-jail free card (and well worth returning to a messy house). We spent reunion weekends in cities like Charleston, Santa Fe, and Denver and later, convened near our hometown Boston when our parents were in decline, which was also convenient for coordinating all the care and decision-making. Now that we are empty-nesters, we are knocking destinations off our bucket-list with glee. Besides getting to know the country, we’ve fortified the familial bonds and made terrific memories.

We visited Montgomery, Alabama last month to visit Bryan Stevenson’s Legacy Museum — the so-called “lynching museum.” We admire Stevenson’s non-profit law organization, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), and had heard that his new museum has been bringing civil rights history tourism to Montgomery, an otherwise left-behind city that was once a focal point of slave and cotton trading along the Alabama River.

Stevenson’s overarching belief, after years of work in criminal justice, is that our country will not be truly great until Americans “face the past honestly.” Germany, South Africa, and Rwanda have worked to come to terms with problematic histories, and Stevenson wants America to do the same as pertains to slavery, believing that that the journey can be healing but also insisting that “we ignore it at our peril.” His notion of restorative justice starts with honoring lynched individuals; the museum gathers descendants for a ceremonial “unearthing” from the lynching site, and the remains are memorialized in large jars labeled with the names of the deceased. Over 7,500 lynching stories have been verified to date.

It was a sobering trip. But we each felt welcome in Montgomery and returned to our lives with a perspective we neither learned in school nor find reflected in mainstream media coverage. I know of non-profit boards, criminal defense groups, and other history tourists who have made their way to Montgomery, and am sharing my experience so that you might consider the trip too.