GO TO MONTGOMERY.

Now. This year.
Don’t put it off. Don’t put it on a list.
Make your plans. Find a way.

Sixteen members of The Museum Group chose to go to Montgomery for our winter meeting, so we could experience the new Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace & Justice together.

Visiting and thinking deeply about museums is vital to our professional practices. We expected the bold new Museum and Memorial, confronting the legacy of slavery, lynching, racism and mass incarceration, to be an important, sobering, difficult, but rewarding learning experience.

We didn’t know we’d be blown away by their level of achievement: excellent on every measure.

WE COMMEND the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) for their extraordinary work.

  • Telling the truth; taking action; living their mission
  • Respecting their visitors
  • Connecting with their communities
  • Conducting impeccable original research
  • Creating a visceral, visual, profoundly memorable experience

The Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice clearly demonstrate the value of creating narrative, immersive experiences in museums to powerfully and memorably confront the truth of our collective racist history.

We left the Museum and Memorial full of emotions: anger, sadness, shock, resolve. “Individually and collectively,” says Daryl Fischer, “the trip changed us.”

As individuals and as a group, we committed to support these museums’ work, and spread the word.

The Legacy Museum Photo by Juan Carlos Castaneda/Human Pictures

Go to Montgomery.
We urge you to make every effort to see and feel the Museum and Memorial in person.

Support this extraordinary effort: learn about EJI and the equal justice issues they advance.

A month later, we still think about the visit every day.

For the next three weeks in January, we’ll share what we saw, felt, and took away.

Please let us know what you think!

This week:
* See Paul Orselli’s close-up view in his museum/exhibit/design blog,
Three Places Sharing Difficult Histories in Montgomery Alabama.

* Don’t miss Janeen Bryant’s FaciliateMovement blog post,
Dedication to My Neck, and the Joy of Holding It High.

“Although I have traveled to Alabama frequently as an adult I told myself that if I ever had the opportunity to visit with my child, I would take her. I would teach her about this history-drenched state and guide her to a deeper understanding of what role we all play in history. I would, I promised myself, bravely guide her through historic markers, and help her contextualize bombings, and process a landscape still haunted by brutality.”

– Janeen Bryant [read more]