Description
The Legacy Museum
115 Coosa Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
National Memorial for Peace and Justice
417 Caroline Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, informally known as the National Lynching Memorial, is a national memorial to commemorate the Black victims of lynching in the United States. Founded by the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative, it opened in downtown Montgomery, Alabama on April 26, 2018.
The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration is a museum in Montgomery, Alabama, that displays the history of slavery and racism in America. This includes the enslavement of African-Americans, racial lynchings, segregation, and racial bias.
The museum, which opened on April 26, 2018, was founded by Montgomery's Equal Justice Initiative as a counterpart to the National Memorial to Peace and Justice, which is dedicated specifically to the memory of the victims of lynching. The development and construction of the museum and the nearby memorial cost an estimated $20 million raised from private donations and charitable foundations. Former Vice-President Al Gore spoke at the two-day opening summit meeting.
Media reviews...
The New York Times declares, "There is nothing like it in the country. Which is the point."
The Washington Post calls the memorial "one of the most powerful and effective new memorials created in a generation. . . . [T]his ambitious project will force America to confront not only its wretched history of lynching and racial terror, but also an ongoing legacy of fear and trauma that stretches unbroken from the days of slavery to the Black Lives Matter movement of today."
Rolling Stone describes the museum and memorial as "bold and unapologetic reminders of the American hatred, torture and murder of black people" and "exactly the remembrance America needs."
"[J]ust as a defendant must elocute on his or her crimes before the court, we cannot reconcile our past and move forward as a country until we begin to acknowledge its basest barbarism inflicted on its citizens." The Root
The memorial "is the single greatest work of American architecture of the 21st century, and the most successful memorial design since the 1982 debut of Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. . . . [T]he Legacy Museum and Memorial for Peace and Justice tell us we still have a long road to travel for racial equity." Dallas Morning News
Oprah Winfrey reported for 60 Minutes that the museum and memorial are part of a "reckoning taking place in America over how we remember our history."
"EJI's new cultural spaces are a way of 'putting our city on therapy, and our country.'" NPR
The memorial is "deeply moving" and "provides a bold bid for reconciliation. . . . The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is a marker writ large — exposing not just Montgomery's and the South's participation in lynching but also the nation's." Newsweek
"It is an ambitious project, an attempt to shift the conscience of the United States and to make the EJI’s litigation against systemic and individual injustices no longer necessary. The museum aims at redemption through narrative, a change of heart." London Review of Books
Alabama Memorial Remembers the 4,400-plus Who Were Lynched in the U.S. How Stuff Works