Montgomery
Alabama – Friday, June 9th, 2023
As I write these words, there’s some comfort in knowing that some sixty years later the Civil Rights Trail is now an established tourism brand. The world can change significantly in the span of a lifetime, hopefully for the better. The commodification of that history through museums, monuments, tour buses, even souvenir shops is a sign of how deeply the once precious, precarious civil rights movement has now been firmly embedded in the official national narrative. People like myself now pay to visit Montgomery to learn more about these stories of persecution and resistance, and how sustained, organized effort over time led to real, material change.
Of course, there’s also plenty of commodification of the Lost Cause throughout the South as well. While destinations along the Civil Rights Trail tend to center their narratives on both victims and those who acted as agents for change,
there’s usually to be much less attention paid (whether for philosophical reasoning or political necessity) to the people who were the primary reason behind this history: the slaveowners and segregationists, reactionaries and racists who fed the ecosystem of exploitation and hate that eventually made such radical organizing and resistance necessary. Today that legacy has a monumental scale literally manifest in monuments along the Civil Rights Trail, but it is sobering to remember how much of that legacy is all ultimately derived from individual pettiness, small mindedness, and outright cheapness, aggregated into a societal scale. The descendants of those people are also still around today. “Your granddaddy was such a racist piece of shit that they had to make an entire museum about it fifty years later.” How much has fundamentally changed? And how much of the dumb shit you see on social media going to form the bedrock for the next generation of transformative social struggle and the accompanying museum exhibitions in a couple decades’ time?
Rosa Parks Museum
Montgomery, Alabama is one of the most essential cities along the Civil Rights Trail. Among the many sites and events of significance, the Montgomery bus boycott started here in 1955 when Rosa Parks was arrested after refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger. Today you can visit the Rosa Parks Museum on the corner where her arrest took place. The museum opens at 9:00am, a good place to start a busy day.
I nearly had the museum to myself first thing in the morning. A visit begins with a multimedia show featuring a restored Montgomery bus from the 1950s as the centerpiece. Media screens in the bus windows depict a narrated reenactment of Parks’s arrest with actors filmed in mostly real-time. I knew the basics of the story from middle school, but found my mental picture of the event was very inaccurate. It happened at night, in the cold of December. The bus was crowded with passengers, which is what prompted enforcement of the segregated seating rule (as well as several Karens to sic the driver on Parks for not giving them her seat). The bus proceeded one stop further down the road after Parks was told to move before the situation escalated, whereupon the driver called for a police officer. One of the things that struck me about the presentation was the banality of this evil. Everyone on the bus was tired from their jobs, not just Parks. Getting to see a historical moment played out in such minute, mundane detail, played against the escalating apprehension of how history will unfold, both gave me a much better understanding of the event and a vivid memory of it.
After the presentation, there are additional exhibits that detail the story of the Montgomery bus boycott that ensued over the following year. While the arrest of Rosa Parks served as a compelling story of the unequal treatment under the Jim Crow regime, the boycott required a highly coordinated, sustained effort on behalf of all of the city’s Black residents, which is why this serves as a landmark event in civil rights history with its own dedicated museum today. These exhibits were likewise well-done, if much more in line with what one would expect from a university-sponsored history museum.
Stepping back out onto the street, you can stand in the spot where the bus pulled over and the arrest was made. What struck me was how much Montgomery has transformed nearly seventy years after the fact. The few people outside all drive their own cars, where ample parking has led to a somewhat barren cityscape. It’s hard to imagine there being regular bus service along this road anymore, let alone one that would ever get so crowded as to require standing room. Maybe when the university is in session. Buses and schools in Montgomery have long been desegregated, but in other ways everyone is even more segregated from each other than they were half a century ago. Underneath the fight for civil rights, the march of capitalism has had an even more quietly seismic transformation on the urban social fabric.
The Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration
That story of capitalist depredation comes much more into view on the second stop of the day. The Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration is located on the former site of a warehouse for processing enslaved people, and was privately built by the Equal Justice Initiative with the current location opening in 2021. No photos were allowed inside so my written account of the experience will have to suffice.
The Legacy Museum is best categorized as a history museum, but it takes a fairly different approach. Detailing the legacy of slavery and racism in America that persists to this day, there are relatively few historical artifacts in the collection. Instead, the experience may be better described as a walk-through narrative multimedia art exhibit. Another aspect that sets it apart from other history museums is how it takes a strong interpretive viewpoint toward the material; the narrative quality is less “history textbook” and more “historical documentary by an award-winning filmmaker.” That narrative explicitly draws comparisons between historical and modern-day methods of oppression, making the argument that racism and injustice tend to evolve into new forms rather than progress into post-racial equality. There’s no mistaking that the museum advocates for a particular perspective and serves as a call to political action through more emotionally-rich, persuasive forms of communication.
It works. The first half-hour was absolutely jaw-dropping, both due to the material and the way it’s presented. One of the first rooms is simply a short written introduction to the trans-Atlantic slave trade surrounded by immersive stormy ocean waves crashing via media projections. This then transitions to a corridor along a beach with the sand rendered into sculptures of the enslaved captives frozen in agony. It’s a large area given to support a minimal amount of interpretive text, yet the overall effect is so overpowering I continue to think about it years later. In another hallway a little while later, a row of jail cells feature Pepper’s ghosts of incarcerated individuals who materialize to tell you their story, some tragically eloquent, others bracingly short and simple, before disappearing back into the void.
One of the things that was so well done about the design of this sequence was not just the artistry and clarity, but how it manages the flow of the audience and ensures that you never feel lost, rushed, or crowded. Often in museums I find myself a little overwhelmed by how much I know there is to see, and consequently find myself slightly speeding through exhibits once I feel like I’ve gotten the main idea. Early on, I noticed in a text-heavy room that the same interpretive panels were mirrored along both sides. This both allowed people to spread out more (only so many people can read the same panel at once in a physical space), and also communicated that these particular panels are important and meant to be read in full, in sequence. There’s no instruction, yet seemingly everyone in that room implicitly understood this and took their time to read to the last word. Having written interpretive scripts for museum exhibits before, I know how hard it is to hook visitors into reading the whole thing (if anything), so to witness this level of concentration shared among all visitors seemed like a miracle.
At a certain point in the Legacy Museum, this highly evocative, linear thesis sequence transitions into a series of larger, more conventional exhibit floors each centered around a particular theme. The layouts of these rooms are even copied between them, with a circular theater space anchoring the center of each. It’s smart design, since visitors can recognize the pattern of these rooms and more intuitively navigate each subsequent floor without having to analyze and learn a different exhibit layout each time. It’s also all beautiful architecture with world-class exhibits that never lack in the power of its message. Yet compared to the first section, the repetition limited the sense of discovery and ability to integrate really bold artistic statements, and I found myself at times getting itchy again as I tried to figure out how to pace myself and navigate through the open-floor exhibits. Even the centerpiece theaters all play a curated hour-plus loop of various content that leaves responsibility to each viewer to decide how long to watch, a marked contrast to the highly focused, intentional pacing of the first exhibits. (I ultimately chose to just skip the last couple of theaters.)
Rationally I can understand why the museum is laid out the way that it is, since the depth of content in the later rooms is necessary for repeat or all-day visitation. But emotionally I wished the raw power of that opening sequence could have been somehow sustained all the way through. Fortunately that mostly just speaks to how high the highs are at the Legacy Museum, which I would still comfortably rate among the top five museums I have ever visited.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice
A $5.00 ticket to the Legacy Museum will also include admission to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. (It’s incredible that EJI, a private, non-government funded organization, can charge so little for both of these highly acclaimed sites.) This outdoor memorial over six acres is dedicated to the legacy of racial terror and lynchings across America. Similar to the Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice is laid out as a linear pathway that creates a highly effective narrative through its design language. It begins in this enclosed area as you enter the site.
The main memorial is atop a hill overlooking Montgomery. To get there, walk past the first set of sculptures (again, presented in an unflinchingly brutal depiction) and up the hill where a series of panels provide a historical understanding of the regime of racial terror perpetuated by Jim Crow. Again, the combination of highly emotional and intellectual content serves a powerful purpose here.
Inside the main memorial square, an array of over 800 corten steel monuments each represent a county across the U.S. where lynchings, murders, and other forms of racial terror took place between 1877 and 1950, engraved with the names of the victims. You begin by walking among these beams, reading the names of individual counties and victims.
However, as you progress the floor begins to slope downward while the monuments remain suspended at the same height.
You feel yourself sinking as the weathered metal monoliths become innumerable overhead. You switch from seeing the individuals to comprehending the collective, and the scale of it overwhelms the senses.
A waterfall wall features inscriptions to help process the enormity of this legacy.
This is the emotional climax of the memorial where the weight of history is most fully felt. But there’s still more to go to bring us back to the present day and to look ahead to the future.
Making the way back outside into the sunlight, we next approach Monument Park. Duplicate copies of each of the 800+ monuments were created with the intention that they work with leaders from each county to eventually find placement for the monument in their communities.
Many have already been distributed, but a large number still remain in this park, a testament to those places who still to this day resist fully acknowledging their role in racial terror. Again, this was such an ingenious concept to make the memorial bigger than just the six acres of its own site, a simple yet staggering way to track the progress on long overdue historical reckoning. This was actually the feature that I recalled reading about several years prior when the Memorial opened in 2018, and ensured that my eventual road trip across the South would include a stop in Montgomery.
Those communities that have claimed their monument also have received a duplicate of these historical markers in this next passage.
Several more sculptures, art installations, and interpretive panels complete the pathway back to the beginning.
All of the three museums and monuments I experienced in Montgomery were incredible, and far beyond the standard of quality I would have expected from a city of 200,000 in the deep south. I would highly recommend them for anyone near the area, and would encourage people to look into experiencing sites along the Civil Rights Trail.
Look, I’m a pretty average white guy from Michigan relocated to California, so I don’t innately have any strong connection to this place or subject matter, but I don’t think anyone really needs to. It’s a good thing to seek places where you can look at the world from outside your own perspective. I’d like to live in a country where everyone can have that attitude toward self-enrichment and civic awareness; we don’t, but I feel the least I can do is try to cultivate that curiosity in myself and encourage others to do the same. Nobody should look at these types of museums and conclude that it’s not “for them” or only worth their effort to visit places with roller coasters. It takes effort to break down those barriers, including the ones we construct for ourselves mentally. Once you recognize it in yourself you can see how much they may impact people who may be different from you; that’s one of the reasons we need organizations like the Melanin Coaster Network, founded in 2022. History is shared by all of humanity. And for all their imperfections, museums are still one of the best ways we have to share that history in a space that ought to welcome everyone equally.
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