The Legacy Museum

Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, displaying the history of slavery and racism in America

For the museum in Lynchburg, Virginia, see Legacy Museum of African American History.

The Legacy Museum

Established| April 26, 2018; 7 years ago (2018-04-26)
Location| Montgomery, Alabama
Coordinates| 32°22′47″N 86°18′37″W﻿ / ﻿32.37984°N 86.31031°W﻿ / 32.37984; -86.31031
Founder| Equal Justice Initiative
Website| Official website

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.

## Development

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The museum, which opened on April 26, 2018,[1] is founded by Montgomery's Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit organization founded by Bryan Stevenson to assist in providing legal representation to inmates on death row. The Museum, which receives no public funding,[2] was founded as a counterpart to the National Memorial to Peace and Justice, which is dedicated specifically to the memory of the victims of lynching.[3] The development and construction of the museum and the nearby memorial cost an estimated $20 million raised from private donations and charitable foundations.[4] To celebrate the opening of the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the Equal Justice Initiative held an opening ceremony and two-day Summit. The Summit included speakers such as Sherrilyn Ifill the Director Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Anthony Ray Hinton, who spent 30 years as a death row prisoner until he was represented by the EJI and proven innocent in his case, and Former Vice-President Al Gore who discussed Climate Change and Environmental Justice. The Summit included a multitude of speakers as well as those previously mentioned.[5]

On October 1, 2021, the EJI reopened the Legacy Museum as an expansion from the original location at 400 N. Court St. in Montgomery, Alabama. The new grounds of the Legacy Museum is a location where previously enslaved people were warehoused. In order to make the museum and the memorial more accessible, the EJI financially reduced admissions pricing to a single $5.00 ticket to visit both locations. The new expansion of the Legacy Museum is roughly five times the size of the original location. The original location was at capacity about 80% of the time before the pandemic and was expected to repeat those numbers the following summer. About 50,000 people came to the memorial and were unable to visit the Museum due to the former location being at capacity. Following the Legacy Museums move, in late March 2022, the EJI opened another Legacy Site called the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, a 17-acre park that includes art pieces and original artifacts along the Alabama River where millions of enslaved people were trafficked.[6]

## Exhibits

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[edit] The Museum was originally housed in an 11,000-square-foot museum include oral history, archival materials, and interactive technology.[7] Then, in 2021, the museum expanded to the new location in a 47,000-square-feet building.[8] The new expansion includes immersive modern technology, historical research, and world-class art that exhibits slavery and its modern influence. The expansion offers a deeper story of American history through displays, artwork, and interactive elements. The sections throughout the museum include slavery, reconstruction, lynching and terror, Jim Crow, segregation and the Civil Rights Era, injustice in the judicial system and mass incarceration.[6]

The museum's goal is to lead the visitor on the path from slavery to racial oppression in other forms, including terror lynching and mass incarceration of minorities.[9] The museum employs technology to dramatize the horror and terror of enslavement, lynchings, and legalized racial segregation in America.[6] Visitors can hear, see, and be in close proximity to slave replicas, which model what it was like to be an enslaved person awaiting sale at the auction block. There are first person accounts of slavery and auctioning through narration and voiceovers. One of its displays is a collection of soil from lynching sites across the United States.[4] The museum includes a variety of interactive exhibits, including a poll site that includes the test black Americans were expected to pass prior to voting, including questions such as the number of jelly beans in a jar, and a visitors wing to a prison where visitors can sit down and hear the inmates stories.[6]

To illustrate the point of ongoing oppression, the exhibits include photographs of African-Americans picking cotton; the photos could be easily mistaken as depicting the slavery period. They are inmates from the1960s.[10] Unlike the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, the Legacy Museum does not tell a comforting story of progress from oppression to civil rights reform but of continually evolving ways of controlling Black people. In one telling exhibit, a panicked group of captured and chained Africans stand opposite a group of men, arms raised, at the moment of arrest.[11]

The final room of the museum, before the art exhibit, is a massive room filled with images and music of the individuals who worked to challenge racial injustices.[6] The art gallery includes works by Hank Willis Thomas, Glenn Ligon, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Titus Kaphar, and Sanford Biggers.[4] EJI founder Bryan Stevenson said in a statement announcing the museum's opening. "We're proud that the Legacy Museum can play a vital role in helping people learn American history that's often not taught and empower everyone to build healthier communities."[6]

## See also

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* List of museums focused on African Americans
* Topography of Terror: museum in Berlin, Germany dedicated to the victims of the Nazi regime

## References

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1. ^ "Exonerated death row inmate tells his story at Legacy Museum". CBS. April 9, 2018. Retrieved April 12, 2018.
2. ^ ^ St Félix, Doreen. "The Art of Memory." The New Yorker; New York, 1 Apr. 2024. Music Periodicals Database, ProQuest One Literature, https://www.proquest.com/magazines/art-memory/docview/3051462782/se- 2?accountid=14472. Accessed 5 Nov. 2024.
3. ^ Henderson, Nia-Malika (April 9, 2018). "This new lynching memorial rewrites American history". CNN. Retrieved April 12, 2018.
4. ^ a b c Miller, James H. (April 16, 2018). "Alabama memorial confronts America's racist history". The Art Newspaper. Retrieved April 20, 2018.
5. ^ ^ April 26, 2018 (page 8A). (2018, Apr 26). Montgomery Advertiser (1987-) Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/april-26-2018-page-8a/docview/2082329231/se-2
6. ^ a b c d e f Harper, Brad. "EJI Opens Expanded Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration Shows How Slavery, Its Impact Continue to Influence the Nation." Montgomery Advertiser, 1 Oct. 2021. Global Newsstream, [1]. Accessed 5 Nov. 2024.
7. ^ Dafoe, Taylor (April 26, 2018). "A Look Inside the New Alabama Museum and Memorial Boldly Confronting Slavery and Its Brutal Legacy". Artnet. Retrieved April 26, 2018.
8. ^ "Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration". Legacy Museum and National Lynching Memorial. Retrieved May 2, 2018.
9. ^ Little, Becky (April 20, 2018). "See America's First Memorial to its 4,400 Lynching Victims". History.com. Retrieved April 20, 2018.
10. ^ Williams, Drew (April 22, 2018). "From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration: A Timely and Necessary Memorial". Greenwich Sentinel. Retrieved April 22, 2018.
11. ^ Cotter, Holland (June 2018). "A Memorial to the Lingering Horror of Lynching". The New York Times. Retrieved September 21, 2018.

## Further reading

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* Street, Erin Shaw (May 27, 2018). "Visit Alabama's Legacy Museum and lynching memorial". The Messenger (Madisonville, Kentucky).

## External links

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* Official website

* v
* t
* e

Lynching in the United States

List of lynching victims in the United States

| Before 1900|

* Francis McIntosh (1836)
* Elijah Parish Lovejoy (1837)
* Josefa Segovia (1851)
* Pancho Daniel (1858)
* Joshua Boyd (1863)
* Henry Plummer (1864)
* Bill Sketoe (1864)
* Clubfoot George (1864)
* Steve Long, Ace and Con Moyer (1868)
* Wyatt Outlaw (1870)
* John W. Stephens (1870)
* Alexander Boyd (1870)
* Jim Williams (1871)
* David Jones (1872)
* Jo Reed (1875)
* Arthur St. Clair (1877)
* Michael Green (1878)
* Joseph Standing (1879)
* Big Nose George Parrott (1881)
* Charles Thurber (1882)
* John Wesley Heath (1884)
* Eliza Woods (1886)
* Samuel "Mingo Jack" Johnson (1886)
* Amos Miller (1888)
* Joseph Vermillion (1889)
* George Meadows (1889)
* Ellen Watson (1889)
* Brown Washington (1890)
* Jim Taylor (1891)
* Dick Lundy (1891)
* Joe Coe (1891)
* Robert Lewis (1892)
* Ephraim Grizzard (1892)
* Samuel J. Bush (1893)
* John Peterson (1893)
* Alfred Blount (1893)
* Henry Smith (1893)
* Richard Puryear (1894)
* Stephen Williams (1894)
* Amos Hicks (1894)
* Jacob Henson (1896)
* William Andrews (1897)
* Joseph H. McCoy (1897)
* John Anderson (1898)
* John Henry James (1898)
* F. W. Stewart (1898)
* Sam Hose (1899)
* Benjamin Thomas (1899)

|

1900–1940|

* Fred Rochelle (1901)
* Ballie Crutchfield (1901)
* George Ward (1901)
* Walker Davis (1903)
* J. D. Mayfield (1903)
* George White (1903)
* David Wyatt (1903)
* Marie Thompson (1904)
* Paul Reed and Will Cato (1904)
* Bunk Richardson (1906)
* Ed Johnson (1906)
* Slab Pitts (1906)
* William Burns (1907)
* Earnest Williams (1907)
* Jim Miller (1909)
* James Hodges (1909)
* Matthew Chase (1909)
* "Mose" Creole (1909)
* "Pie" Hill (1909)
* William "Froggie" James and Henry Salzner (1909)
* Grant Richardson (1910)
* King Johnson (1911)
* Name unknown (TX) (1911)
* Laura and L. D. Nelson (1911)
* Will Porter (1911)
* Zachariah Walker (1911)
* Mary Jackson (1912)
* Rob Edwards (1912)
* George Saunders (1912)
* Robert Perry (1913)
* ? Anderson (1913)
* Charles Fisher (1914)
* John Evans (1914)
* Leo Frank (1915)
* Name unknown (MS) (1915)
* Jesse Washington (1916)
* Anthony Crawford (1916)
* Jeff Brown (1916)
* Paulo Boleta (1916)
* Frank Little (1917)
* Charles Jones (1917)
* Ell Persons (1917)
* Robert Prager (1918)
* Mary Turner and her unborn baby (1918)
* Hazel "Hayes" Turner (1918)
* George Taylor (1918)
* Jim McIlherron (1918)
* Olli Kinkkonen (1918)
* Wallace Baynes (1919)
* Will Brown (1919)
* Wesley Everest (1919)
* John Hartfield (1919)
* Jay Lynch (1919)
* Berry Washington (1919)
* Willie Baird (1920)
* Roy Belton (1920)
* Dick Rowland (attempted) (1921)
* Henry Lowry (1921)
* James Harvey and Joe Jordan (1922)
* Joe Pullen (1923)
* Samuel Smith (1924)
* L. Q. Ivy (1925)
* Raymond Byrd (1926)
* James Clark (1926)
* Fred N. Selak (1926)
* Tom Payne (1927)
* John Carter (1927)
* Dan Anderson (1927)
* Will Sherod (1927)
* Bernice Raspberry (1927)
* Owen Flemming (1927)
* Joseph Upchurch (1927)
* Joe Smith (1927)
* Albert Williams (1927)
* Thomas Bradshaw (1927)
* Winston Pounds (1927)
* Thomas Williams (1927)
* Henry Choate (1927)
* Leonard Woods (1927)
* J. C. Collins (1928)
* George Hughes (1930)
* James Cameron (1930)
* Lynching of Raymond Gunn (1931)
* Matthew Williams (1931)
* Shedrick Thompson (1932)
* George Armwood (1933)
* Cordie Cheek (1933)
* Claude Neal (1934)
* Austin Callaway (1940)
* Elbert Williams (1940)

After 1940|

* Felix Hall (1941)
* Johannes Kunze (1943)
* Robert "Bobbie" Hall (1943)
* Willie James Howard (1944)
* Recy Taylor (1944)
* John Cecil Jones (1946)
* Willie Earle (1947)
* Lamar Smith (1955)
* George W. Lee (1955)
* Emmett Till (1955)
* Judge Edward Aaron (1957)
* Willie Edwards (1957)
* Mack Charles Parker (1959)
* Louis Allen (1964)
* Lemuel Penn (1964)
* Frank Morris (1964)
* James Reeb (1965)
* Vernon Dahmer (1966)
* Wharlest Jackson (1967)
* Carol Jenkins (1968)
* Henry Marrow (1970)
* Marian Pyszko (1975)
* Betty Gardner (1978)
* Arthur McDuffie (1979)
* Michael Donald (1981)
* Yusef Hawkins (1989)
* James Byrd Jr. (1998)
* James Craig Anderson (2011)
* Ahmaud Arbery (2020)

Multiple victims

* Death of Joseph Smith (Joseph Smith, Hyrum Smith) (1844)
* Marais des Cygnes, KS, massacre (1858)
* Great Hanging at Gainesville, TX (1862)
* New York City draft riots (1863)
* Detroit race riot (1863)
* ? Lachenais and four others (1863)
* Fort Pillow, TN, massacre (1864)
* Plummer Gang (1864)
* Memphis massacre (1866)
* Gallatin County, KY, race riot (1866)
* New Orleans massacre of 1866
* Reno Brothers Gang (1868)
* Camilla, GA, massacre (1868)
* Steve Long and two half-brothers (1868)
* Pulaski, TN, riot (1868)
* Samuel Bierfield and Lawrence Bowman (1868)
* Opelousas, LA, massacre (1868)
* Bear River City riot (1868)
* Chinese massacre of 1871
* Meridian, MS, race riot (1871)
* Colfax, LA, massacre (1873)
* Election riot of 1874 (AL)
* Juan, Antonio, and Marcelo Moya (1874)
* Benjamin and Mollie French (1876)
* Ellenton, SC, riot (1876)
* Hamburg, SC, massacre (1876)
* Thibodeax, LA, massacre (1878)
* Mart and Tom Horrell (1878)
* Nevlin Porter and Johnson Spencer (1879)
* Elijah Frost, Abijah Gibson, Tom McCracken (1879)
* T.J. House, James West, John Dorsey (1880)
* New Orleans 1891 lynchings (1891)
* Ruggles Brothers (CA) (1892)
* Thomas Moss, Henry Stewart, Calvin McDowell (TN) (1892)
* Porter and Spencer (MS) (1897)
* Phoenix, SC, election riot (1898)
* Wilmington, NC, insurrection (1898)
* Julia and Frazier Baker (1898)
* Pana, IL, riot (1899)
* Watkinsville lynching (1905)
* 1906 Atlanta race massacre
* Kemper County, MS (1906)
* Walker family (1908)
* Springfield race riot of 1908
* Slocum, TX, massacre (1910)
* Laura and L.D. Nelson (1911)
* Harris County, GA, lynchings (1912)
* Newberry, FL, lynchings (1916)
* East St. Louis, IL, riots (1917)
* Lynching rampage in Brooks County, GA (1918)
* Jenkins County, GA, riot (1919)
* Longview, TX, race riot (1919)
* Elaine, AR, race riot (1919)
* Omaha race riot of 1919
* Knoxville riot of 1919
* Red Summer (1919)
* Duluth, MN, lynchings (1920)
* Ocoee, FL, massacre (1920)
* Tulsa race massacre (1921)
* Perry, FL, race riot (1922)
* Rosewood, FL, massacre (1923)
* Jim and Mark Fox (1927)
* Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith (1930)
* Tate County, MS (1932)
* Thomas Harold Thurmond and John M. Holmes (1933)
* Roosevelt Townes and Robert McDaniels (1937)
* Beaumont, TX, Race Riot (1943)
* O'Day Short, wife, and two children (1945)
* Moore's Ford, GA, lynchings (1946)
* Harry and Harriette Moore (1952)
* Anniston, AL (1961)
* Freedom Summer Murders (James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner) (1964)
* Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore (1964)

| General|

* Lynching
* Indiana White Caps
* Jim Crow laws
* Ku Klux Klan
* Nadir of American race relations
* Red Shirts
* Jews
* Women

|

Anti-lynching movement|

* American anti-lynching activists
* American Crusade Against Lynching
* Jessie Daniel Ames
* Martin C. Ansorge
* Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching
* Flossie Bailey
* William O'Connell Bradley
* Ella Barksdale Brown
* Father Divine
* "Flag Salute"
* N.A.A.C.P.
* National Conference on Lynching
* Paul Robeson
* "Strange Fruit"
* Ida B. Wells

| Legislation|

* Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill
* Costigan-Wagner Bill
* Justice for Victims of Lynching Act
* Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act
* Emmett Till Antilynching Act

|

Defenders of lynching|

* Theodore G. Bilbo
* Cole L. Blease
* Julian S. Carr
* Sidney Johnston Catts
* Thomas Dixon Jr.
* Rebecca Latimer Felton
* John Temple Graves
* John Trotwood Moore
* John T. Morgan
* James Rolph
* Goodloe Sutton
* Benjamin Tillman
* James K. Vardaman
* Thomas E. Watson

Memory|

* America's Black Holocaust Museum
* Civil Rights Memorial
* The Legacy Museum
* National Memorial for Peace and Justice
* National Museum of African American History and Culture
* Southern Poverty Law Center

Related articles|

* James Allen (collector)
* "And you are lynching Negroes"
* Attack on John Shillady
* Battle of Liberty Place
* The Birth of a Nation
* The Clansman
* Deaths in police custody
* Fury (1936 film)
* Hang 'Em High
* Lynching postcard
* Mississippi Burning
* Mississippi Cold Case
* Murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson (1965)
* The Ox-Bow Incident
* Parade (musical)
* Reconstruction era
* Red Summer
* Scottsboro Boys
* Silent Parade
* Stone Mountain
* Summer in Mississippi
* Sundown town (list)
* They Won't Forget
* "The United States of Lyncherdom" (Twain)
* United States v. Shipp
* Vendetta (1999 film)
* Wilmington insurrection of 1898

Categories|

* Lynching in the United States
* Lynching deaths in the United States

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