NNs On the Wind

On the advice of our campground host, as the street and neighborhood we’d be in, we did not walk the mile to the bus stop but called Uber to go downtown. We’d been told the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice nearby were not to be missed. So true.

Here in the heart of Montgomery is an “11,000-square-foot museum built on the site of a former warehouse where enslaved black people were imprisoned, and is located midway between an historic slave market and the main river dock and train station where tens of thousands of enslaved people were trafficked during the height of the domestic slave trade. Montgomery’s proximity to the fertile Black Belt region, where slave-owners amassed large enslaved populations to work the rich soil, elevated Montgomery’s prominence in domestic trafficking, and by 1860, Montgomery was the capital of the domestic slave trade in Alabama, one of the two largest slave-owning states in America.”

https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/museum

It was somewhat surprising to see such a record of how horrific Montgomery’s role in the domestic slave trade was, located in the heart of the downtown of this small city. When the slave trade was “abolished” is 1808, the domestic slave trade ramped up and the thousands of slaves then in the US were transported/bought/sold/separated and made part of the south’s economic engine. After the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, though ownership may have diminished, persecution and prosecution continued as inhumanely as during the height of the domestic slave trade itself. Jim Crow laws and the climate of white supremacy continued, even in the courts, as blacks were considered guilty of whatever crime a white could rightly or wrongly pin on a black. The Memorial is a starkly moving tribute to the era of widespread lynching that continued in some states even into the 1940s.

Also in the museum was great videography and storytelling of the birth of the civil rights movement in Montgomery. Rosa Parks and the near year long bus boycott, where thousands of Montgomery black citizens walked thousands of mile rather than take the bus that relegated them to the back, or even to give up a seat should a white not find an empty one. Interviews taken at the time brought to life the story I knew only bits and pieces about. The role a young new pastor in Montgomery, Martin Luther King, Jr., played was made clearer and brought more meaning than I had before.

If you ever get the chance, or make the effort, visiting both the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, will be one the more memorable museum visits you will ever make.