The Legacy Museum, which opened almost eight years ago, is perhaps the closest thing America has to a national slavery museum. Crucially, however, it is completely privately funded, receiving no state or federal financial support. As such, Stevenson and his colleagues are unburdened by executive orders; they need not bow to pressure to alter an exhibit after a presidential Truth Social post. I wanted to get a sense of how visitors were experiencing the museum and memorials now, when so much of what they depict represents the very history that the Trump administration aims to de-emphasize—if not outright erase—at schools, historic sites, and museums across the country. I also wondered how Stevenson thought about the role these spaces play today, compared with when they first opened, and what kinds of knowledge he hoped they might be able to provide to the visiting public as the country and its politics change around them.
Erasure was a recurring theme among the people I spoke with in Montgomery. On the opposite side of the memorial, I met two Black women, Jackie Brown and Annette Pinckney, who were also visiting for the first time. “We’re from Florida, where you have Governor Ron DeSantis, who is trying to erase our history,” Pinckney said.
Pinckney is an assistant principal at a high school in South Florida, and she has seen firsthand the impact of the state’s recent laws—such as the Stop WOKE Act—that regulate how schools and businesses deal with issues of race and gender. The Florida Department of Education has also banned AP African American Studies from being offered in Florida high schools, claiming that the curriculum lacks “educational value and historical accuracy.”
Earlier in their visit, Pinckney and Brown had stood inside a real former slave cabin located along the Alabama River, on which thousands of enslaved people had once been trafficked. They described feeling the biting wind whistle into the cabin through holes in the wood-panel walls, and thinking about how susceptible to the elements the family staying inside would have been. Pinckney wrapped her arms tight around her chest. “That right there was just gut-wrenching,” she said. “It makes it more real.”
The visceral experience they had is precisely the point, Stevenson told me. When we met that evening at the EJI office, Stevenson said that the goal of the sites is to force visitors to confront the violence of the past without the counterweight of a more uplifting narrative to assuage their distress. The sites were built with the aim of not repeating the triumphant progress narrative found in some other civil-rights museums, which, as he put it, “would rather tell a story of achievement than a story of continuing struggle.”