Wednesday, May 11, 2022
The Legacy Museum provides a history of the United States with a focus on the legacy of slavery. From the Transatlantic and Domestic Slave Trade and Reconstruction, the museum provided not only a lot of history, but narratives and powerfully interactive content. Lynching, codified racial segregation, and the emergence of over-incarceration in the 20th century that continues today are connected with our country’s legacy of slavery in the museum as well as the Peace and Justice Memorial.
From the exhibit that begins with crashing waves and beautifully eerie music, we were quickly immersed in the historical truth we were about to be told. One of the first few rooms we walked through contained cages with silhouettes in them. These silhouettes turned into a projection of an enslaved person when you walked up to the bars of the cage. They told you a small piece of their story as they waited to be auctioned off. In one of the cages, two young children called for their mother, while in another, a woman sang a sad, soulful hymn.
Towards the end of the museum is an exhibit on mass incarceration that features voices of people who have been wrongly condemned, unfairly sentenced, and unjustly treated in the American legal system. We saw stories of children prosecuted as adults and those suffering brutal conditions in some of our nation’s prisons and jails. There was a wall of letters from prison and a series of recorded video of actual people who had spent time in prison that were incredibly powerful. One letter was a person pleading for help for one of his fellow inmates who had life in prison without parole. Instead of asking for help for himself, he was only concerned with getting legal help for his fellow inmate. One of the the people in the videos talked about being falsely imprisoned as a 16 year old and the decade that he had lost in prison, all the lost experience and time with family and friends.
These two exhibits amongst so much at this museum weighed heavily on our group. It conveyed to us the ways in which oppression and racism are interwoven into the fabric of America that is held together by white supremacy. A young man working for the Equal Justice Initiative named Solo said to us that Abraham Lincoln may have won the Civil War, but the ideological battle that occurred during the Reconstruction years was lost to white supremacy. The war that America faces today is an ideological one that activist groups and people who care for justice cannot lose again. The Equal Justice Initiative through their Legacy Museum, Peace and Justice Memorial and other educational outreach seek to educate Americans on the throughline between the history of slavery to where we are today. An honest reckoning with this history and legacy are necessary to create the racially just country we seek to see.
-Sav Baird and Tyler Wagner