EJI.org The Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice
Attorney Bryan Stevenson says in the HBO documentary, True Justice (2019): “I am one of the broken ones too”; this is an unexpected humility. How can a Harvard educated lawyer say this? How is Bryan Stevenson broken?
It is in handling the many capital cases, including applying for Leave to Appeal or Stay, and these actions being denied or dismissed. And his clients then being actually executed.
It is in the sheer volume of need for competent legal representation of the accused and/or convicted.
It is in the depressing pattern of poverty, abuse, neglect, poor health, weak education, and despair often seen in these communities.
It is in the failure of the system to right itself, to abandon structural inequalities.
And yet this brokenness has led to marvelous progress, to manifest improvements. The EJI (Equal Justice Initiative) physical sites at the Legacy Museum and the National Monument to Peace and Justice are obvious examples of substantial achievement, raising cultural awareness about the scope of the problem and the path forward to its solution.
But when you travel on purpose to Montgomery, Alabama, and visit the Legacy Museum and the National Monument to Peace and Justice, the theme of brokenness resonates at a whole different level. It is confrontational because it has to be. It is unrelenting because it can’t give up.
Bryan Stevenson is going all in on the message which is: the history of America as it is currently told, is a fraud, and a lie by omission. Our history includes the genocide of Native tribes or Indigenous peoples, and the slavery and incarceration of ethnic Africans. Both were here from the so-called ‘founding’ – at Jamestown in 1619, at the Pequot War and Massacre in 1636, and certainly throughout the glorified 18th century, when the ‘Founding Fathers’ waxed poetically about inherent freedoms, inalienable rights, and ‘all men are created equal’…
The taut and terrible irony of this context is not lost on the EJI sites. But they take a different approach to mere factual revisionism. They use story-telling and movie or theme-park-quality special effects to change people’s impressions, and knowledge, of what slavery was and did and meant, generationally.
For example, when you enter the Legacy Museum, it’s dark, as if entering a movie theater; the space is an empty room with a feature-film-sized screen playing a huge, violent ocean; waves and waves crashing and colliding, but not at shore. You are still at sea. There is no land. You will not survive this angry surf and water turbulence. Even the best swimmer would drown. That’s the first message; a preparatory message: you will drown.
The next space is equally darkened, but now you are on the beach, and hundreds of human heads, just above water or wading to shore out of the brutal surf, litter the sand. Some are pierced with an anchor-type collar or ropes around their necks; many are children; some are pregnant; men and women, boys and girls. Some will still not make it. Some with drown or die. This is the second message: you may have survived the ocean crossing in the bowels of a slave ship, but you still may not make it to shore, and later, you may not survive what comes next.
The next part of the museum is a more standard presentation of 18th century slavery facts, maps, population numbers, and historical texts and quotes. For example, in both Virginia and South Carolina, at one point in the long 1700’s into early 1800’s, slave populations outnumbered white or master-owner populations. The ‘3/5th of all other persons’ counting rule is explained in this context, in terms of Census numbers required by Article I of U.S. Constitution. Yet it is still the most obvious, infamous example of the nascence of American structural racism.
The next display in the museum is a series of jail or holding cells, all equally darkened, down a long broad hall. Peek into each cell. A person in the form of a hologram, comes to life and tells you their story – this was (for me) the most impressive, effective part of the museum – every bit as good as anything you’d see at Disney or MGM. For example, a young woman asks about where her children are. She knows ‘they are here somewhere’ (the museum itself was a former slave-pen where unsold slaves would be corralled in cells while awaiting their fate at sale). Mothers were separated from children; husbands from wives; brothers from sisters. In another cell, two little boys look stunned and start to cry, the older one is asking for help. The message here is that this abominable cruelty really happened to real families.
The museum continues its march through time, to the present, where you can sit and listen to several real-life former convicts (some are former clients of Stevenson’s), tell about what their prison experience was like. You pick up the prison visit phone and the inmate begins to speak. Most salient of these is Anthony Ray Hinton, who is featured in the HBO documentary and in Stevenson’s book, Just Mercy (2014). He was wrongfully convicted of murder and spent over 30 years in an Alabama prison on death row.
Growing up in Detroit in the 1960’s, I surely did hear bad things said by white people against Black people. White folks in my own family. I thought it was because they were mad at them. Black people were clearly better at everything that seemed to matter on the T.V. and on the radio and in the newspapers and magazines: They were better singers, better dancers, and better at the sports that mattered to white men (Football, Baseball, Basketball).
About 4 years ago, a woman, who was my boss at a major public university, said something very racist to me. And I did not react. I did not question her assumption about me nor challenge her words. I went away and disappeared. Yet her words stuck with me even though I knew they were wrong, both about me and just in saying them in a professional context. She was wrong.
So, when I went to EJI.org — the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, twin sites in Montgomery, Alabama – that ground zero for the Civil Rights Movement and for the heinous heritage of structural hate and systemic violence – I knew that I had to sort out what happened between the woman and me. And to find a way to articulate it so as to explain it – because that is what writing does – it confronts, points out, illustrates, argues, and persuades the reader, the mind, the writer, the culture, the Internet that this is what it meant.
I thought that I would find the answer to what she said to me, the why. And perhaps I did. But it was not about ‘suffering’ per se – it is about sharing in the suffering, in the brokenness – in recognizing oneself in the hurt, deprivation, poverty, discrimination, islolation, and pain. Not to the scale of what is presented at the EJI sites, no. Not for comparison or equivalency. But it is similar to the Catholic concept of the nature of suffering, that it can be a form of contemplation, purification, and transformation – and an opportunity to change others, as the unearned suffering of the innocent can be a powerful tool for justice – as Dr. King believed. Indeed, I have also been to the National Memorial for Civil Rights (the death site of MLK) in Memphis, TN.
I have been to the Holocaust Museums in Washington DC and in West Bloomfield, Michigan. I have been to Auschwitz in Poland with my dad. Every weekend at Saturday Mass at St. Mary in Jackson, I contemplate, view, and receive the crucified body of Jesus Christ. In all ways as a Catholic, we are instructed in the holy sacrifice of suffering. It teaches more than all other acts. St. Ignatius Loyola developed a practice of ‘Imaginative Exercises’ that trained the Catholic faithful to fully envision and imagine the suffering of Jesus Christ as a way to empathize with him, his Passion and demise. This is what I too do, or try to do. To see and share the suffering.
Just down the highway from EJI is the Tuskegee Airmen National Park at Moton Field. The experience of Tuskegee Airmen Field could not be more different than that of visiting EJI. And yet, Tuskegee contextualizes the story of the brave and talented African-American aviators and crew, by telling you first off what the world was like that they lived in, in the early 1940’s – a highly segregated, lynching-prone world in the North and the South, where ‘no one wanted them to succeed’ – it’s not a 100% happy story – like all war stories, it’s full of both heroics and loss, of victory and defeat. The airmen were trained just like their white male counterparts – on basic flight concepts (roll, pitch, yaw), on basic equipment like the single-prop Stearman plane. Eventually, the red-tails painted on their P-51 Mustang fighter planes became synonymous with the group – and they were the most requested, bomber-escort unit in the Army Air Corps. My dad was a Naval Aviator (AV cadet rank); he told me about the Tuskegee fliers.
I attended Law School for 2 years, earning 59 of 90 credits toward a J.D. degree. Bryan Stevenson is the reason why I wanted to go to law school – to bust people out of prison who were wrongfully convicted. Briefly, I ended up getting a clinic internship at the Innocence Project, where I served for 4 weeks, a similar legal mission to EJI.org — using court rules like MCR 6.502(G)(3) to introduce ‘new scientific evidence’ like DNA to prove innocence (albeit legally, innocence is presumed; it’s guilt that must be probative or proven). I now work as a Paralegal and have at least one case that the CIU (Convictions Integrity Unit) of the AG (Attorney General’s) office has taken.
I also work in prisons, teaching for the local community college in their ‘CEP’ (Corrections Education Program). As CEP Instructors, we go deep inside the MDOC facility, past the bubble and into the perimeter, through the yard and into the facility’s school. In my students, I see suffering regularly. But I also see some smiles, a little laughter, courteous discourse, and polite debate. The prison population is mixed in terms of demographics but seems to share a similar socio-economic background: poverty usually connects somehow to crime. Prison teaching is rare, but now growing as it is seen as a market segment in higher education.
The very last room on the Legacy Museum is a small art gallery. They have silhouette works by the great Kara Walker and a portrait by the great painter Kehinde Wiley. They have beauty and potency. Brokenness is not banished and suffering is not expunged; it is worked into the art as a purifying element.
This space is the last before you board the shuttle and drive over the short distance within downtown Montgomery to the outdoor, EJI sister site, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
This site is a holocaust memorial for the 6500+ lost souls who were murdered by extra-judicial execution. It is solemn and monolithic, yet each hanging stone represents a county in a state that lynched or otherwise killed a black or brown person. With total impunity. This takes ‘interactive’ to a new level: the identical stones outside the monument are to be taken up by those counties and states that committed those crimes, and thus displayed prominently in the public square, in recognition of ‘truth’ and in an effort at ‘peace.’ [NOTE: The Legacy Museum does not allow any photos or video inside it; only the Memorial does (outside).] [NOTE: see my piece from 2016: Why Racism is Everybody’s Problem for more background on the aims of the Memorial.]
Elizabeth_Ferszt 