Pilgrimage to Montgomery
Montgomery, Alabama has the feel of an idea struggling to take shape. Despite the fact that it is the capital of the state, it has too many empty buildings to signal energy and initiative. We went looking for something between Charleston and Atlanta, but kept bumping into the wall of stalled renewal.
You could be forgiven for thinking that its day is done, except for the fact that it has achieved something miraculous: a cluster of institutions focused on slavery and its aftermath that are vivid, sophisticated, and deeply moving. Montgomery has leaned into its history in the trade of African bodies and given us a model for how to reckon with the past.
The constellation of cultural centers is mixed in its quality. The Freedom Rides Museum is housed in the old Grayhound Station and consists mostly of foam-core storytelling panels. It’s a rudimentary effort that calls out for more attention and resources. Video clips foregrounding first-hand testimony would have helped revivify its story.
The Legacy Museum, however, is at an entirely different level. It engages its visitors in a theater of truth-telling, communicated through images, recreations, and physical objects. The most powerful of these is a wall of remembrance. Shelf after shelf is loaded with jars of earth, excavated from sites where Black American were lynched. Relatively few are labeled “Anonymous.” It turns out that we know a great deal about the 6,000 lynchings in which Blacks were hanged, burned, shot at, or flayed. Names and dates were reported in the papers, along with the gruesome details of white perversity.
The center makes the point that slavery is ongoing, What began with the transport of twelve million souls (two million of whom never made it alive to the Americas) continued in the humiliations of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, and now flourishes again in mass incarceration. There is no room here for self congratulation, as if we have resolved the question of race in America.
Nor does the museum lose its focus. The Black experience in America may have attracted white allies, but the narrative focuses squarely on enslaved persons and their descendants. It moves beyond political and social history to tell a statistical story of national wealth rooted in the bondage of people owned by others. You cannot escape the question of reparations when the financial value of slavery has been so comprehensively recorded.
At the next level, Montgomery accomplishes something more: a weighty encounter between its visitors and black suffering. This is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. the capstone in the city’s presentation of its concerns. Taking its cues from Maya Lin, whose Viet Nam Memorial taught the eternal truth that a tribute must individually name those who are swallowed by their history, it records the name of every murdered Black, some as young as three-years-old.
The effect is overwhelming, physical in its weight. Walking through the Memorial requires a descent into the depths, as if you were walking into an open grave. Either that or climbing down into the fetid hold of a slave ship. Above you hang massive metal ingots—more like coffins, rusted into a matte brown crust. Each represents a county in America, where a Black body was obliterated by racist whites. Each one is pierced with the names of those who were killed. Very few of these murders happened at night. Many took place in the public square, witnessed and photographed by hundreds—thousands—of onlookers. There is the constant, barely registered consciousness that a coffin might fall and bring down all the others with it, a traumatic climax to the American Experiment.
Days after the fact, Montgomery is still with me, a relentless, fully realized experience of what it has meant to be Black in this country. Our struggle is the struggle of Montgomery itself, to bring life out of the complications of American history. Kudos to a whole community for showing us the way.