Tag Archives: history

Civil Rights Tour #3

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Montgomery, Alabama

Statue outside the National Memorial for Peace and Justice

Site of The Legacy Museum and the six -acre National Memorial for Peace and Justice (aka the Lynching Memorial). These were the main reasons for making the trip and they did not disappoint.

Outside the Legacy Museum

Photos were not allowed inside the museum, so I’ve embedded one of their Instagram posts.

The excitement started before we even entered the exhibits. A hubbub. Early — not even 9:30 am — and ticketed entrants spilled out of the foyer, many more waiting outside. I would’ve loved to know where people had traveled from to be there.

The museum is huge and comprehensive, covering the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, the prison pipeline, and more. Every inch of the museum is designed to appeal to both emotion and intellect, offering the visitor images, text, and audio. Some exhibits were duplicated on both sides of a small space and entries were timed, so you really could take in the displays (or try to). Other exhibits were cavernous, like the area with replicated runaway slave notices stretching 15 feet up and wrapping around stand-alone display walls.

It’s too much to convey here but let me at least describe the entry and first exhibit.

After passing through security, you enter a small dark room with one wall dedicated to a video of the ocean. It’s probably twenty feet tall. The waves are coming at you. Crashing and swelling. You feel a sense of scale — both the enormity of the ocean and the smallness of your body. And then, projected onto the waves you see a few statistics about the slave trade. Numbers of bodies kidnapped. Numbers of lives lost in transit. The scale of the tragedy is almost impossible to take in.

A powerful way to begin.

Next up, right after the waves, probably my favorite space. Again, it’s small and dark. This time water is projected onto the floor. It’s a luminous blue gridded with white light and it washes over the floor and then recedes. Mirrors amplify the effect. On the floor, as if emerging out of the ground or water: clay heads and busts. They are life-sized. Some are in chains, some wear iron-spike collars or ripped tunics. Others are naked. All express agony or bewilderment. Each is distinct and you cannot stop looking at them. The sparkling water washes over them then recedes, illuminating them and then leaving them in darkness. It’s astonishing.

Scattered throughout the interior are viewing rooms. In one room, there was a video about the artist who made these clay forms. Kwame Akoto-Bamfo. He is from Ghana and you can read about his work here.

The outdoor memorial also uses scale to convey the mind-bending levels of violence perpetrated by white people on Black people. The shed is huge. The down-hanging blocks represent counties, with names of known lynching victims etched upon them. They are not organized by state and so you get this dizzying impression of murder being everywhere — an unavoidable and relentless violence.

D is from Georgia and so photographed her county.

Photo by Doris Tennant

The site is not a static memorial. Each block hanging in the shed has a duplicate version stacked up out on the lawn. If a county is prepared to go through a process of public acknowledgement, they can take their block to their county and post a landmark. The plaques below are copies of such acknowledgments. They are not formulaic. I got the impression each was informed by a thorough and deep community process.

Most of the blocks are unclaimed.

Bibliography — Historic Fiction, Colonial SC

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Carawan, Guy, and Candie Carawan. Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life? University of Georgia Press, 1994.

Carney, Judith Ann. Black Rice. Harvard University Press, 2009.

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Douglass, Frederick, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

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Eglash, Ron. African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1999. Print.

Ellis, Joseph J. American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. New York: Random House Large Print, 2007. Print.

Eyiogbe, Frank Baba. Babalawo, Santeria’s High Priests: Fathers of the Secret in AfroCuban Ifa. Minnesota: Llewellyn Publications, 2015. Print.

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Eliza Lucas – PhD Thesis

Fiction

Yonder, by Jabari Asim

Washington Black, Esi Edugyan

Yellow Wife: A Novel, Sadeqa Johnson

The Book of Night Women, Marlon James

The Confessions of Frannie Langton, Sara Collins

Cloudsplitter, Russell Banks

Kindred, Octavia Butler

Sapphira and The Slave Girl, Willa Cather

Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier

The Good Lord Bird and Song Yet Sung, by James McBride

Beloved, Toni Morrison

Water to My Soul, Pamela Mueller

The Color Purple, Alice Walker

Someone Knows My Name, Lawrence Hill

Underground Airlines, Ben White

Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead

The Invention of Wings, Sue Monk Kidd

Nostalgia, Dennis MacFarland

Plantation Patriot, Francis Leigh Williams

The Indigo Girl, Natasha Boyd

The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehesi Coates

Movies / TV

The Civil War (Ken Burns)

The Duchess

Amistad

John Adams – HBO series

Vanity Fair

Daughters of the Dust

Amazing Grace

Harriet

Twelve Years a Slave

Tours / Historic Sites

South Carolina:

Boone Hall Plantation
The Charleston Museum
Drayton Hall
Magnolia Plantation — both the enslaved cabin tour and the big house tour
Magnolia Cemetery
McLeod Plantation
Middleton Place
Aiken-Rhett House
Old Charleston Jail
Rebellion Farm : for a weekend of indigo dyeing in a pole barn with Sea Island Indigo
Stono Slave Rebellion Marker
Sullivan Island
Wappoo Plantation Marker

Massachusetts:

Faneuil Hall Middle Passage Ceremony, August 13, 2015

The Granary Burying Grounds (where John Hancock’s ‘servant’ Frank is buried, as well as Crispus Attucks) Brief mention in this post about attending a protest downtown and again from another protest here: Liberty Marches Boston, January 2017

Mt. Auburn Cemetery (burial sites of Harriet Jacobs and Mary Walker). Homage to Harriet

The Jackson Homestead

The Royall House and Slave Quarters (Reflection on a Night Spent in Slave Quarters) — courtesy of The Slave Dwelling Project

Long Wharf, Boston, 2022 installed Middle Passage Marker

New Hampshire:

Portsmouth African Burial Ground