One significant place we visited in our travels this month was the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, AL. This museum was started in 2018 through the vision and initiative of lawyer Bryan Stevenson (see the book/movie Just Mercy) and the Equal Justice Initiative. The museum chronicles the experience of people of African descent in the U.S., “from slavery to mass incarceration.”
It was powerful to see in one place the timeline of events through legislation, court decisions, and quotes from specific leaders which maintained slavery and later oppression through Jim crow. We were really impressed to see the specific details compiled – it was more than you would ever learn in a textbook or in school. We highly recommend a visit – it was hard but also important to see more closely the pain and the injustices in our country’s history.
One aspect that stands out to us is how slavery impacted all of the United States, not just the South, in terms of the economic gain from free labor, which benefitted financial institutions, the government, and also normal citizens. Another point that came to life to us through the museum is seeing the negative social and financial impact for people who were enslaved – imagine the generational trauma when families are repeatedly torn apart for centuries during slavery and even after.
The audio-visual exhibits, including many personal testimonies, along with the sheer volume of material, is impressive. We had been in the museum about 3 hours when we talked to a staff member and learned that we were only half-way through!
Along with the museum we also visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, an outdoor site that commemorates the people killed by lynching throughout the United States. They have a large memorial stone for every county in the U.S. where racial-terror killings are known to have happened between 1877 and 1950, along with the names of each individual in that county who was killed and the year they were killed It is a powerful visual reminder of the more than 4,000 people who were killed without getting due process in the justice system - including in northern states like Illinois.
One person asked us why we would want to go visit these sites in Montgomery, given that it is such a hard thing to face. We said that we wanted to go because we have learned that in order to find healing, we have to be willing to face, accept, and express the pain. That goes for individual pain but also for corporate pain. That is one of the key principles in the ministry of Healing Hearts, Transforming Nations. We have to be willing to lean into the pain and injustice in our nation’s history if we want to understand it, accept it, and hope for healing and justice. As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States this year, we thought this was one significant way embrace the ‘whole’ of our history – to acknowledge the wrongs even as we celebrate the many good accomplishments, great people, and hopes for the future.
