Having the Best Experience When You Visit the Legacy Museum

What is the Legacy Museum?

What is the Legacy Museum? I am re-publishing my article from 2022, in which I encourage you to visit this amazing museum in Montgomery, Alabama. This article also helps you make the most of your trip when you visit the Legacy Museum. I know many of my articles about Alabama have focused on race relations in America. Please know that I understand there is, undeniably, much more to Alabama than a negative history of race relations. For articles that celebrate Alabama’s positive side, you can read here and here and here. I have simply chosen to experience these major historical sites during my early visits to the area because they are important to our shared history as Americans.

A Hero’s Legacy

“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” From “On the Pulse of Morning” by Maya Angelou

First, I should specify, I do not have many heroes and I use that term as sparingly as possible. However, I read nearly everything Maya Angelou ever wrote. Somewhere in storage, I still own a VHS tape containing an interview with her and footage of her reading “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Clinton’s inauguration. For me, she was a phoenix who rose from darkness, reborn. Then, she flew back, pulling her fellow man into the light with her. By coincidence, she died on my birthday in 2014. I tell you this so you will understand the tone it set for me that her words are emblazoned along the length of The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama.

Visit the Legacy Museum: An Introduction

With a tagline of: From enslavement to mass incarceration, the museum opened in 2018 on the site of a former cotton warehouse. The museum contains historical displays, art and stunning multi-media installations. The Equal Justice Initiative (a non-profit organization) teaches visitors about the logistics and economics of slavery. In addition, the modern legacy of slavery is showcased. In fact, it is the first museum of its kind that I have seen, that includes exhibits addressing modern day issues of crime, incarceration, and the court system.

Statistics from the museum: Incredibly, half of those in federal prison today are incarcerated for a drug offense. Two-thirds of those in prison for drug offenses nationwide are people of color.

Admission Information

First, the adult admission price is $5.00.  For this price, you will receive two tickets: one for the museum and one for the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Both locations are open Wednesday through Sunday from 9:00am until 5:00pm. Timed tickets are required, so we purchased ours in advance online. Conveniently, we walked right in when we arrived.

When you visit the Legacy Museum, absolutely no photography is allowed inside.

Parking Information

Free parking is available in the neighborhood. In our case, we walked one block from our chosen parking lot to the museum’s front door. Visitors should, in fact, be aware that the memorial is one mile away from the museum. Fortunately, a shuttle between the two is offered free of charge. A word to the wise: Do not miss the shuttle experience. Our shuttle driver, Maurice, made our 5-minute drive one of the best moments of the day.

Maurice’s Fast Facts:

• A statue commemorates the end of the 54-mile Selma to Montgomery march in 1965.
• Incredibly, the fountain in the center of Montgomery covers the site of a slave auction block.
• Montgomery’s minor league (double A) baseball team is called the Montgomery Biscuits.

The Use of Multimedia

Many museums offer a 5-minute introductory video. Perhaps museums using multimedia for maximum impact is common practice today. However, it was not something I had experienced in such a haunting way.

First, when you visit the Legacy Museum, all visitors stand in a room with floor-to-ceiling video screens. Narration is absent. The words to educate you on “The Middle Passage” that Africans took to arrive in North America appear on the screen. At the same time, immersive images give you a first-person view of crossing a rough ocean on a ship headed to God-knows-where. Powerful is an inadequate word.

. . . and Holograms

Second, the museum also offers interactive touchscreens in some exhibits. Interacting with holograms of enslaved people waiting for their own sale in the market holding rooms is, obviously, powerful. These life-sized holograms simulate carrying on a conversation with someone missing their homeland. Or perhaps, someone searching for their children from whom they were separated. In the final exhibit (mass incarceration in the modern era), there are holograms of inmates that visitors interact with as if they are in a visitation room at a correctional facility.

Art Gallery

Lastly, the final room is an art gallery. Here, various aspects of Black life in America are represented. Presented through art rather than straight history, it is enthralling. The exhibits rotate, but during my visit, I was thrilled to see a display of Gordon Parks photography. Don’t know who Gordon Parks is? Read here. As an art lover, I have always believed that artistic interpretation can add an entirely new layer of depth to the understanding of any weighty subject. This gallery is no different.

What I wish I had pictures of

Since there is no photography or video permitted inside the museum, I did not take pictures of two of my favorite displays: the truth and reconciliation glass jars and the reflection room. However, below I borrow photos of both from the museum’s website.

The Soil Jars

Across the country, communities are undertaking a process (called truth and reconciliation) led by their own residents. The intent is to acknowledge painful historic events that are specific to each locale. Each community distinguishes truth from lies in its own past and seeks healing. Dirt from lynching sites is taken from that community, placed into a jar, and sent to the Legacy Museum. I stood before a wall of hundreds of identical jars, each labeled with a community name from somewhere in my vast country. The variation in soil colors is eerily reminiscent of the diversity among America’s citizens.

The Reflection Room

The walls of the reflection room are a cross between ochre and pumpkin. Portraits of accomplished Black Americans wallpaper the room from floor to ceiling. A stamped copper inset in the ceiling reflects the wall color giving the entire space a glow that, to me, spoke of sunrise and hope.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice

Subsequently, visitors will experience the second part of their historical journey. One mile away, on a hill overlooking Montgomery, is our nation’s first memorial to those who suffered from racially motivated violence (including during slavery, during Jim Crow and beyond). Astonishingly, the six-acre site is comprised of 800 vertical steel columns (monuments). Each monument represents a county in America where a lynching occurred. Lynching victims’ names are engraved on the columns.

Among the Columns

Some columns are mounted on the ground and others are mounted from above. Visitors follow a winding path that climbs gradually from the hill’s base to its summit. Along the way, guests weave between and even underneath the dangling steel columns. As a result, standing beneath these imposing columns one feels (symbolically) the weight of our collective mistakes. In fact, my husband found the column marked “Alachua County.” Our home. Eighteen names appear. The engraving represented eighteen people from my own county subjected to racial terror.

For a different perspective, a second set of the 800 columns is displayed horizontally in a park-like setting. Each piece of steel is arranged alphabetically by state and by county. It is impossible to ignore how damn many of them there are. My personal fear, of course, is that as more historical research is conducted, historians will add more columns. Perhaps, I will be wrong. Hopefully, those 800 columns are as bad as it gets.

A Final Note

Finally, there is so much more I could write but the words of an amateur like me will always fail to capture the impact of these places. So, I will end with the words of Fannie Lou Hamer who helped organize 1964’s Freedom Summer voting registration campaign.

Visit the Legacy Museum: Where to Stay: When in Montgomery, we often stay in the Prattville area, which is a suburb about 15 minutes outside of Montgomery. We enjoyed both the Courtyard Prattville and the Montgomery Marriott Prattville Hotel & Conference Center.