TY - JOUR
AU - Morgan, Ward, Jason
AB - Eighty years ago, as a battle over federal anti-lynching legislation loomed in the United States Senate, Walter F. White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), graced the cover of Time magazine. Behind him hung a painting of a black man hanging from a tree. The portrait was one of fifty pieces featured at the NAACP-sponsored An Art Commentary on Lynching, which ran in Manhattan for two weeks in early 1935. “It may upset your stomach,” a New York newspaper review warned. “If it upsets your complacency on the subject it will have been successful” (quoted in “An Art Exhibit against Lynching,” The Crisis 42, no. 4 [April 1935]: 106). The Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) Legacy Museum and its companion site, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, follow in an activist tradition of research, art, and advocacy. Like Walter F. White, who spent years investigating lynchings, lobbying public officials, and pricking the public conscience through any means and medium available, EJI’s recently opened museum and memorial present a narrative journey structured to inspire reflection and action. Both sites blend historical scholarship, artistic expression, and social justice advocacy into an ambitious and compelling achievement. The Legacy Museum, as its brochure makes clear, is a “narrative museum.” The core theme of that story, both at the museum and at the companion memorial, is violence. The institutions that sustained racial brutality, from the transatlantic slave trade to the modern prison-industrial complex, are as much actors in the story as are the African Americans who suffered, survived, and resisted these evolving structures of oppression. Located on the site of a building that once held enslaved people, the museum launches an interpretive journey “From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration” with three video-screen animations that summarize the transatlantic slave trade, the domestic slave trade, and the role of “confinement” in this chattel economy. Montgomery looms large in this history, as a major hub of the traffic in human bodies that relocated an estimated one million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South in the years after Congress banned the importation of slaves in 1808. “You are standing on a site,” read words painted on a rough brick wall, “where enslaved people were warehoused.” From the entrance, visitors walk down a ramp that leads to a dark corridor lined with a half-dozen cell doors. Six-foot video screens in each prison cell depict enslaved men, women, and children. Past these life-size videos of praying, pleading, and imprisoned captives, Harriet Tubman’s words are emblazoned on a black wall: “Slavery is the next thing to hell.” The darkened passageway leads to the museum’s main exhibit hall, which is organized around the four “chapters” of EJI’s narrative—enslavement, lynching, segregation, and mass incarceration. A wall along the left-hand side of the exhibit hall provides a depiction of the historical progression “From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration” that shaped white supremacy and black resistance. A core theme of the museum’s narrative, emblazoned near the entrance to the main exhibit hall, is that “slavery evolved . . . bolstered by an elaborate narrative of racial inferiority.” To emphasize the active and intentional nature of seemingly monolithic forces, the timeline is punctuated and sectioned with verbs—“KIDNAPPED,” “TERRORIZED,” “SEGREGATED,” “INCARCERATED.” From the slave dungeon depicted in the museum’s entranceway through the images of law enforcement abetting mob violence and attacking civil rights demonstrators, the intertwined histories of racial discrimination and “criminal justice” figure prominently. Within each section, and extending across the hallway of the open space, are interactive exhibits that explore these four chronological chapters in greater detail. Texts and facsimiles of advertisements for enslaved people are arrayed from floor to ceiling, as are discriminatory signs and statutes from the Jim Crow era. In the section devoted to lynching and racial terrorism, a four-sided station of touchscreens allows visitors to view video testimonials from the descendants of lynching victims and to explore lynching data amassed by EJI via interactive maps. On an adjacent wall of shelving, 320 labeled glass jars hold soil reclaimed from lynching sites across the South and beyond. Interactive video is a core component of all four sections of the exhibit hall, which allows visitors to explore the historical eras and issues in greater detail and at their own pace. Particularly compelling is a cluster of four video screens, built to resemble a prison visitation room, where museumgoers can pick up a telephone handset to begin playing the inmate’s prerecorded testimonial. In addition to touchscreens that provide additional interpretive text, each section contains an adjoining viewing area for viewing additional short films and testimonials. The Legacy Museum relies on text, photography, and audiovisual content rather than on artifacts or three-dimensional exhibits, yet the exit corridor underscores the artistic impulse that links it to its companion site. Lithographs, etchings, and sculptures line the hall, along with photographs that highlight a set of contemporary issues related to remembrance, reconciliation, and social justice. Beyond the hallway, a cluster of touchscreens reading “What Do I Do Now?” offers information on a range of actions and activities—from voter registration and petition signing to volunteer opportunities—that connect the educational aspect of EJI’s work to its ongoing advocacy efforts. Less than a mile away, on a bluff overlooking downtown Montgomery, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice mirrors the narrative presented in the Legacy Museum. While the focal point of the six-acre site is the nation’s first comprehensive memorial to lynching victims, the gravel path that leads to and through this structure begins with a series of inscriptions that link slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction to the heyday of what EJI terms “racial terror lynchings.” The first sculpture installed on this uphill path, a depiction of enslaved people in chains created by Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, underscores this narrative continuity. The lynching memorial itself, a square structure of roofed corridors surrounding a grassy courtyard, contains more than eight hundred individual monuments—one for each county where EJI has documented at least one racial terror lynching. The six-foot corten steel monuments in the first corridor rest on the ground, at eye level, and slowly rise overhead as the ramped floor descends downward through the second, third, and fourth sides of the memorial. Along the walls of the third corridor, placards briefly summarize a range of lynching incidents—chosen to emphasize the range of transgressions that provoked the killings, the variety of brutal methods employed by the killers, and the range of victims, which included women, children, the elderly, and the infirm. Past the fourth corridor, where a wall of falling water is dedicated to the thousands of unnamed and unknown lynching victims, a “monument park” contains a replica of each monument installed in the memorial structure. Laid side by side, in alphabetical order by state and county, the duplicate monuments, as the brochure notes, “are waiting to be claimed and installed in the counties they represent.” EJI intends the monument park to be a living visual record of those communities that have confronted their lynching history—and those that have not. Past the monument park sits Dana King’s Guided by Justice; the sculpture, depicting three women, the foot soldiers of the Montgomery bus boycott, stands just beyond a reflection area dedicated to anti-lynching pioneer Ida B. Wells. Combined, these elements underscore the role of women in the anti-lynching crusade and the mass movement that gained momentum in its wake. Like the NAACP’s earlier campaigns, EJI’s melding of historical data and artistic expression reflects a longer history of activist scholarship and strategic advocacy. Compared to prior campaigns to confront lynching’s history, from 1935’s Art Commentary to Without Sanctuary, the traveling photography exhibit of lynching artifacts that premiered in 2000, EJI relies much less heavily on depictions of racial violence. Photographs and artistic depictions of lynching represent a relatively small component of the museum’s exhibits, and such images are conspicuously absent from the memorial site. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of EJI’s twin-pronged project is its ability to create a narrative arc of violence that holds even without literal depiction or re-creation. EJI’s historical narrative—a seamless story told in four sweeping chapters—will surely invite scholarly quibbles. EJI’s interpretive choices, from its emphasis on slaveholders’ use of calculated deprivation to maximize labor output to its argument that lynching was the primary cause of the Great Migration, are neither neutral nor unassailable claims. Yet those choices, like the brutal subject matter itself, can and should be placed in historical context. The site’s planners are not the first partisan scholars to tackle the topics and themes confronted in Montgomery; nor are they the first to attempt an ambitious and sweeping narrative of struggle from slavery to (un)freedom. By telling these stories of violence for generations to come, EJI places itself within—neither above nor beyond—a tradition of freedom fighters who preserved those glimpses of a brutal past for the rest of us to illuminate. © The Author 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration; The National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
JF - The American Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ahr/rhy184
DA - 2018-10-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-legacy-museum-from-enslavement-to-mass-incarceration-the-national-qQnU4YZKDZ
SP - 1271
VL - 123
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -