Memorial for Peace and Justice and Legacy Museum

We flew yesterday to Dallas (and then got stuck in Dallas due to a cancelled flight due to weather and had to spend the night!) and then caught an early plane to come to Montgomery this morning with our wonderful group of neighbors to come see The Legacy Museum and the Memorial for Peace and Justice. And an absolutely incredible part of our day was that we got to hear Bryan Stevenson himself speak to our group for over an hour (as there was an inside connection since one of the leaders of our group went to college with him)! UNBELIEVABLE!  A talk similar to the one we got to hear is from an interview he did on PBS with Kelly Corrigan. Listen in! 

There really are no words to capture what a powerful day it has been--- it should be a requirement for every person in this country to come to this experience to reckon with challenging aspects of our history.  More to come tomorrow---

"Set on a six-acre site, the memorial uses sculpture, art, and design to contextualize racial terror. The site includes a memorial square with 800 six-foot monuments to symbolize thousands of racial terror lynching victims in the United States and the counties and states where this terrorism took place." https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/memorial

Needless to say, this one was incredibly poignant for me to come across and reflect upon given that my grandparents were from Rutherford County... 

"The memorial structure on the center of the site is constructed of over 800 corten steel monuments, one for each county in the United States where a racial terror lynching took place. The names of the lynching victims are engraved on the columns. The memorial is more than a static monument. It is EJI’s hope that the National Memorial inspires communities across the nation to enter an era of truth-telling about racial injustice and their own local histories." https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/memorial