In Montgomery, the Equal Justice Initiative uses art and narrative to confront injustice

Situated on a site where enslaved Black people were once warehoused and forced to labor in bondage, the Legacy Museum, in Montgomery, Alabama, provides a narrative history of the United States with a focus on the legacy of slavery. Drawing a throughline from enslavement to mass incarceration, lynching, codified racial segregation and the emergence of over-incarceration in the 20th century are examined and brought to life through visuals and first-person stories.

A physical extension of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI)— a nonprofit that provides legal representation to people who have been illegally convicted, unfairly sentenced, or abused in state jails and prisons—the museum features works by some of the country’s most acclaimed artists including Sanford Biggers, Margaret Taylor Burroughs, Glenn Ligon, Deborah Roberts, Jacob Lawrence, Alison Saar, Elizabeth Catlett and Carrie Mae Weems.

None more fitting to illustrate the traumas of racial terror than the brilliant and compelling work of the late artist Winfred Rembert. In 1967, Rembert, just 21 years old, survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement. At 51, with the encouragement of his wife, Patsy, he began to work with leather to create vivid illustrations of his near-lynching and time working on the chain gang. Rembert learned leather-working while incarcerated, and his vibrantly colored, painstakingly carved pieces portray joyful and painful scenes from his life in rural Georgia. Stripes (2020) examines the intensity of incarceration in the Jim Crow South and Inside the Tick Mattress (2014) depicts his harrowing ordeal being chased by racist police and a white mob.

EJI has documented nearly 6,500 racial terror lynchings in America between 1865 and 1950 and while near-lynchings were not uncommon, Rembert’s willingness to talk about his experience was.

“I thought it was important enough to let people know the suffering that young Black men had to endure during that time and that things were slowing changing but not changing,” Rembert’s widow Patsy told me in conversation last year, explaining her motivation for encouraging her late husband to give voice to his experiences through art.

“These acts were still occurring but in a different way and I felt that if he could tell his story, it would open eyes.”

Opening eyes is one of the aims of both the Legacy Museum and EJI’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice. A six-acre grassy hill overlooking downtown Montgomery and the State Capitol building that once housed the Confederacy is where you’ll find the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.

As you enter the sprawling site, you’re met with words from Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver--love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.”

With the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum, EJI has created a place where art is a portal through which visitors can see, contemplate and begin to understand the history of Black trauma in the United States.

This story was originally published July 1, 2022 at 1:35 PM with the headline "In Montgomery, the Equal Justice Initiative uses art and narrative to confront injustice."