The “Legacy Museum,” a museum in Alabama, reveals a dark side of American history, from slavery to police violence.
Legacy Museum, a museum of heritage
Slavery, segregation, the overrepresentation of African Americans in prison, police violence… A museum that opened its doors on October 1 in the state of Alabama, in the United States, draws a connection between the racist past of the United States and present-day inequalities. The “Legacy Museum,” the culmination of a project launched in 2018, is located in a building in the city of Montgomery, where African captives were once held before being sold into slavery.
A lawyer, activist, and promoter of the museum, Bryan Stevenson explains to AFP that it is “a museum of American history, centered on slavery and its consequences (…) because no other institution has shaped our economy, our politics, our social structures, and our temperament as much.”
However, he points to a history that is poorly taught in the United States: “many people do not know that 12 million people were taken from Africa and brought to America, that two million died during the crossing…”
An immersive exhibition
The museum’s primary goal is to encourage Americans to engage in the fight against inequality and to create “awareness.” According to Bryan Stevenson, it is just as important to “touch the hearts” of visitors as it is to inform them.
Inspired by the Holocaust Museum in Berlin and the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, the “Legacy Museum” offers an “immersive” experience. Visitors indeed have the opportunity to “board” a ship crossing the Atlantic in order to witness the suffering of future enslaved people.
One wing is dedicated to the thousands of victims of lynchings that occurred between 1877 and 1950, while another space focuses on slavery and sexual violence. The “humiliation of segregation,” long present in the southern United States, as well as the “mass incarceration and police violence” against African Americans, are also at the heart of the exhibition.
The opening of the “Legacy Museum” is part of a broader reexamination of America’s past following the murder of African American George Floyd by a white police officer in May 2020.
Source:
AFP
