Slavery, lynchings, segregation, mass incarceration and police abuse: A museum that opens Friday in the state of Alabama establishes a direct link between racism beyond the United States and current inequalities.
The Legacy Museum in the state capital of is located on a site where blacks were forced to paint in captivity.
“This is a museum about American history, with a legacy about slavery,” Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a civil rights organization in Alabama, told AFP.
“I can’t think of an establishment in America that has more profoundly shaped our economy, our politics, our social structures. And our character. “
“Our slavery is very, very incomplete,” he said.
It’s this data vacuum that the Legacy Museum aims to fill, while inspiring Americans on a crusade against the inequalities that persist today, according to Stevenson.
“The only way forward in this country is to interact with our minds and hearts in a serious commitment to facts and justice in the face of racial injustice,” he said.
The museum, through the Holocaust memorials in Berlin or apartheid in Johannesburg, provides an immersive experience, with videos and sculptures capturing the terror of slavery after a dangerous Atlantic crossing.
Another is committed to the violence suffered through slaves, adding sexual violence.
One wing is committed to the thousands of victims of the lynchings of black Americans between 1877 and 1950, and the National Lynching Memorial, located near the museum, is committed to the same issue.
The museum is witnessing the “humiliation of segregation” in the South after World War II, Stevenson said.
Stevenson’s organization provides legal representation to others who have been unlawfully convicted of crimes, wrongfully convicted, or abused in prison, a widespread challenge for African Americans.
The organization controlled to acquit several other people who had been sentenced to death. At the museum, visitors can pay attention to them tell their story.
The museum is a national assessment of race and racism in America, which has intensified since the killing of African-American George Floyd through a white police officer in May 2020.
Stevenson lamented that the efforts are met with resistance from conservatives, but is optimistic.
“The good news is that we have the ability to triumph over that fear, to triumph over that preference for silence,” Stevenson said. “I will make that decision. “