Equal Justice Initiative unveils expansion plans for Alabama-based slavery, racism education sites

• The EJI's expansion will also detail the role played by northern U.S. cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Boston in subsidizing the slave trade.
• Visitors will hear more first-person accounts of slave narratives, learn how slavery evolved by digging deeper into each era and see new exhibits with soil from 800 lynching sites around the country.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – The Equal Justice Initiative has launched a major expansion of its Alabama sites, one that founder Bryan Stevenson hopes will allow more people to gain a broader understanding of slavery and racism's lasting impact on different parts of the nation and the world.

The nonprofit's pavilion and welcome center has been under construction for months at 401 N. Perry St. in Montgomery. By fall, it will be the new home of EJI's Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, with considerably more space than the current site a few blocks away. That will allow EJI to expand the narrative and the subject matter covered by its displays.

"It will begin with the transatlantic slave trade, which is something we don’t currently cover in our museum," Stevenson said. "... People don’t appreciate the impact it had on the entire Americas T – South America, Central America, North America."

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Stevenson said 2 million Black people died during the passage, adding, "Their bodies are buried in the Atlantic seabed, and we’ve sort of ignored that site as a space of suffering and struggle. We’ve spent millions … looking for the remains of the Titanic and done very little to acknowledge this tragic history of the middle passage."

The expansion will also detail the role played by northern U.S. cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Boston in subsidizing the slave trade and making it part of the American economy, and show how that continues to impact different regions of the nation. Stevenson said many visitors to the current legacy museum and the nearby National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which remembers lynching victims, are from the North and don't recognize the North's role in the slave trade or its impact.

Visitors will hear more first-person accounts of slave narratives, learn how slavery evolved by digging deeper into each era and see new exhibits with soil from 800 lynching sites around the country. A section on the civil rights era will be greatly expanded to spotlight "the work of ordinary people to do extraordinary things," Stevenson said. There'll be new exhibits on policing and the plight of children, and visitors will be able to hear more incarcerated people.

As part of the expansion, EJI is also opening an art gallery that Stevenson said will feature the work of world-renowned artists "in conversation with the history we present."  The current Legacy Museum site will become meeting space for visiting groups.

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The EJI's Montgomery sites were at capacity about 80% of the time from the day they opened in 2018 until the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Stevenson said, and visitor traffic is already nearing those levels again. He estimates as many as 50,000 people have visited the memorial but haven't been able to get into the museum because it was full.

"We want to correct that," he said. 

The EJI was established in 1989 to end mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the U.S., challenge racial and economic injustice, and protect basic human rights for the most vulnerable Americans, according to its website.

Contact Montgomery Advertiser reporter Brad Harper at bharper1@gannett.com.