A legacy leads to the present moment

We entered the Legacy Museum in Montgomery as if riding in on the giant waves projected on the screen in front of us, words telling us about the beginning of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. That stretched from 1501 to 1867, kidnapping nearly 13 million Africans, loading them on ships for the perilous, often fatal trips across the ocean to the Americas – South and North.

We saw the role the slave trade played in the North as well as the South, the conditions of enslavement, the hopes and crushing disappointment of the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, complete with lynching after lynching. We saw the growth of the Civil Rights movement with new freedoms and new possibilities and the growth of mass incarceration that once again treated Black citizens as disposable in so many parts of our society.

It was a sobering day for the eight of us from Christ Presbyterian Church. And there were moments that stood out for me during the four hours we spent absorbing so many stories in the museum.

Here’s a number that startled me. In New York City in 1730, about 50% of New York residents owned slaves. It was one fact about the role the slave trade played in the New England and East Coast states, creating enormous wealth while providing some of the workers who physically created the cities we know there.

On the very site where this museum now stands was one of the slave warehouses in Montgomery, a city that between 1820 and 1860 was one of the most active human trafficking sites in the nation. In 1860, two thirds of the population of Montgomery was made up of enslaved Black people.

One of the hardest things to experience here was the separation of families in the selling of slaves, parents take from children, children separated from siblings. There is a powerful movie portraying one family’s separation that is just heart wrenching. There is a hologram of two children in a slave pen calling out plaintively, “Mother…mother.”

The domestic slave trade from 1783 to 1861 violently separated nearly half of all Black families in the U.S. 

And this is not just an issue in the past. The way the U.S. immigration policy works now will bring more family separations, not for slavery but through deportation.

States each had their own unique way of dealing the realities of enslaved people and Black people in general. Here is Alabama, the Legislature passed a law in 1833 that banned freed Black people from living anywhere in the state. The only way a Black person could be in Alabama is if they were enslaved.

Alabama, like so many other states also banned Black and white marriage or cohabitation from 1852 until 2000 (although the U.S. Supreme Court in a 1967 decision ruled all bans on interracial marriages unconstitutional). The day before this visit, when we were at Holt Street Baptist Church, the man who greeted us was telling us about his two Black children’s marriages to white people. A century ago, they could have been lynched for doing that.

And speaking of lynchings, that particular horror gets much attention in this museum, which is connected to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which remembers and honors the more than 4,400 Black people who were lynched between 1877 and 1950. We will be visiting that on Friday.

In the museum are jars - so many jars - of dirt gathered from the lynching sites in many counties all over the country. It is a place to stop and ponder and remember.

One of my journalistic heroes is Ida B. Wells, who reported in detail about the lynchings through the nation in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In a quote on a wall from her, she describes how lynchings, once used as rough justice for white criminals, became racialized acts of terror. In the first decade of the 20^th century, she reported, there were 959 known lynchings – 102 of white people, 857 of Black people.

And then the museum took us into the prisons of today, with the disproportionate share of Black people imprisoned, where children wind up spending the rest of their lives behind bars, where capital punishment is much more likely to be inflicted on Black people and where prison conditions are too often wretched. One person noted that where once people in white robes (the KKK) kept Blacks in subjugation, now it is people in black robes (the judges).

This shifted to a very human scale when you could sit in front of a glassed-in space, pick up a phone and hear a prisoner on video tell you a bit of their story.

This all, of course, was pretty depressing. But there were moments of victory, when justice overcame oppression and inhumanity. And there was that sense of resilience that sustained people then and that we need now.

One exhibit has people held in slave pens speaking as holograms out of their very confined space. One woman stood there holding her Bible, tell the story of a friend whose five children were taken from her, of the agony, the despair – and her prayers. When the boat taking her children to their new owner went aground, the children were returned to her. 

“Everybody got to have faith,” the woman holding the Bible said. “This trouble won’t last for always.”