A Trip to Bryan Stevenson’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery

M
y current journey to Montgomery, Alabama, wasn’t my first go to. I had beforehand explored the town and the websites related to Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in 2019, in what turned out to be a pivotal second — after Donald Trump’s ascent to energy, however earlier than the Covid-19 pandemic introduced the world to a standstill. It was additionally earlier than the 2020 killing of George Floyd sparked widespread protests and a yr of reconstruction. 

I bear in mind the world round me, even Trump’s presidency, making sense as I left the Legacy Museum, devoted to the legacy of slavery in the US. The Nationwide Memorial for Peace and Justice, which honors victims of lynching, impressed the thought that perhaps — simply perhaps — the worst was behind us. It looks like a lifetime in the past.

I struggled with the concept of returning this spring to expertise a brand new EJI website, to witness the disclosing of the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. Like many People, I think about, I’m too anxious about the way forward for the nation to look again at historical past, once more. I anticipated being triggered by the Legacy Museum and having my grief compounded by the Nationwide Memorial for Peace and Justice. However the brand new sculpture park promised a revival of types.

“We would like all people to return right here — and don’t be afraid — nothing dangerous goes to occur to you when you come,” Stevenson says in regards to the new, full websites. “Now you’re going to have to grasp some issues — you’re going to listen to some issues which might be difficult, and uncomfortable. However that’s a part of how we develop.”

So, regardless of my reservations, or perhaps due to them, I returned to Montgomery to be saved from my anxieties and to obtain, Lord prepared, some contemporary measure of hopefulness. You will get to the park by boat by way of the muddy waters of the Alabama River, which as soon as trafficked enslaved Africans. One other route is by way of a shuttle that crosses railroad tracks laid by the enslaved, and which additionally served as supply networks for human cargo. Collectively, these networks transported a whole lot of enslaved Africans to Montgomery every day, in response to estimates from the Equal Justice Initiative. By 1860, 66 % of Montgomery’s inhabitants was enslaved, 23,710 folks, a bigger enslaved inhabitants than Cellular, Alabama; New Orleans; and Natchez, Mississippi.

The dashing river, the sound of a distant prepare approaching, and the towering timber in each path are the park’s first displays. They had been passive members within the historical past. They had been witnesses.

A collection of round paths cuts by the 17 acres that make up the park. As I wandered them, I encountered a symphony of voices rendered in wooden, stone, and metallic. One bend options 170-year-old dwellings acquired from former cotton plantations close by, a whipping publish, and replicas of a rail automotive and a holding pen. Others are dotted with sculptures designed to inform a narrative — works by Alison Saar, Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, Hank Willis Thomas, Cliff Fragua, Wangechi Mutu, Rose B. Simpson, Theaster Gates, and Kehinde Wiley.

On the entrance of the park, guests are greeted by a 16-foot-tall bronze bust of a Black girl with a physique form impressed by the dwellings of the Musgum folks of Cameroon and Chad. Artist Simone Leigh’s “Brick Home” is stoic and ancestral, “mighty, mighty,” just like the Commodores tune. 

Amid contentious debates over ebook bans, assaults on Black scholarship, and the manipulation of academic curricula throughout the US, the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park emerges as a beacon of reality and reconciliation.

Think about, for instance, that simply in March, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed a invoice banning state funding for range, fairness, and inclusion applications in faculties, public faculties, and state companies. The brand new regulation additionally imposes restrictions on what it calls eight “divisive ideas,” together with — poignantly — the concept that “any particular person ought to settle for, acknowledge, affirm, or assent to a way of guilt, complicity, or a have to apologize on the idea of his or her race, shade, faith, intercourse, ethnicity, or nationwide origin.” In keeping with The Chronicle of Increased Schooling, 82 such anti-DEI payments have been launched in 28 states and Congress since 2023, with measures signed into regulation in 10 states.

“We can’t be intimidated or silenced by some silly laws or reckless politicians who’re making an attempt to characterize [learning about history] as harmful, when in truth, it’s the silence that’s been so harmful,” Stevenson says. “In fact, there are going to be individuals who attempt to politicize and demonize — all of that stuff. That’s how you already know you’re doing one thing highly effective, as a result of persons are afraid of what might occur when their kids and their grandchildren start to grasp that there’s a greater strategy to transfer by this world.”

EJI’s websites are outgrowths of its work offering free authorized illustration for folks on dying row. (Stevenson chronicled certainly one of his early instances within the bestselling 2014 memoir Simply Mercy, which grew to become a characteristic movie in 2019, starring Michael B. Jordan.) EJI is financially impartial, with a few of its earliest seed cash coming from Stevenson’s personal MacArthur “genius” grant in 1995. The nonprofit has attracted beneficiant assist within the years since from individuals who consider in Stevenson’s mission. 

“I’ve not taken a penny of state or federal cash for any of our websites. The reality is, we haven’t been provided any state or federal cash,” he says with a chuckle. “At this level, I wouldn’t take it if it was provided, as a result of we have now to have the autonomy and the latitude to inform the reality with out worry that our means to function or to operate goes to be compromised or undermined. That has allowed us to do what we expect is true and do what we expect is essential, regardless of the winds on the market which might be pushing in an unhealthy path.”

Howard Robinson, a Montgomery-based historian, member of Alabama’s Black Heritage Council, and affiliate library director at Alabama State College, recollects the Equal Justice Initiative’s beginnings had been humble amid the same panorama. EJI was nonetheless merely a authorized nonprofit housed in an unassuming constructing on Commerce Road greater than a decade in the past. When Stevenson realized of the supply of mentioned commerce — slave markets made up of buildings that peppered downtown Montgomery — he got down to put up historic markers at these websites, together with one in entrance of his personal group’s constructing, the location of a former warehouse for the enslaved.

When the request to erect the markers in 2013 first went up earlier than the Alabama Historic Affiliation, the group declined to sponsor them due to the “potential for controversy,” in response to The New York Instances. Then-Mayor Todd Unusual expressed issues that one of many markers, which named slave merchants, would offend the descendants of former slavers, earlier than in the end backing the venture.

“It provides you a way of the local weather of Montgomery, that there was hostility and reluctance to handle a marker that attracts consideration to parts of the town’s previous,” Robinson says.

Immediately, Stevenson has achieved a lot extra within the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. He has assembled what the Bible describes as “an incredible cloud of witnesses” that empowers believers to “throw off every little thing that hinders and the sin that so simply entangles.”

“I actually do assume we have now to have that perspective that our foreparents had, which is ‘Ain’t gonna let no one flip me round,’ ” he says. “We simply must be actually persistent and diligent, and decided. I’m persuaded that reality is highly effective, that you may’t in the end reach suppressing reality with worry or anger.”

By way of her work within the group’s academic applications, EJI venture supervisor Mia Taylor has seen firsthand the transformative energy of participating with historical past. She retains a log of poignant reflections from college students who’ve visited the websites, expressing how studying about their historical past — together with essentially the most painful components — has empowered them, not traumatized them, as some lawmakers have instructed would occur.

“If we don’t discuss it, we wouldn’t be honoring those that made the sacrifices to get us the place we’re” is how one pupil put it after their go to.

“You attempt to clarify historical past, however with out the total context, it’s actually laborious to totally perceive,” Taylor says. “Glossing over sure components does everybody a disservice.”

Rose B. Simpson’s “Counterculture” collection just isn’t too far-off from “Brick Home.” Its dyed and forged concrete figures stand roughly 10 ft tall, with  hollowed eyes honoring the Indigenous peoples as the primary stewards of the land.

“They’re about accountability,” Simpson displays, “and the way you act when you already know that you just’re being seen by what we think about inanimate.” 

The inclusion of Simpson’s work, and that of different Indigenous artists, exhibits the park’s ethos — a dedication to telling the total, complicated story of America, inclusive of all its voices and views.

Farther into the park, Alison Saar’s “Tree Souls” and Hank Willis Thomas’ “Strike” supply profound reflections on resistance and solidarity. Saar’s sculpture depicts figures suspended by gnarled roots, whereas Thomas’ stainless-steel masterpiece captures the stress of a confrontation between a protester and a police officer — a haunting reminder of struggles previous and current.

“Strike” displays the complicated interaction of battle and peace that has characterised Black American historical past. 

“I used to be considering loads in regards to the methods through which that sort of [resistance] has taken varied kinds,” Thomas explains. And the selection of shiny, reflective chrome steel can also be important. “It’s essential for us to see ourselves in moments in historical past,” he says. 

Saar, a Los Angeles-based sculptor and artist, says her contribution is supposed to discover the sanctuary present in swamps and different hostile environments by escaped enslaved Africans, so-called maroons.

“These areas weren’t ideally suited,” Saar says, “however they had been a refuge for lots of people that had been making an attempt to in some way survive exterior of the horrors of colonialism.”

The journey culminates on the Nationwide Monument to Freedom, an incredible metallic wall standing 43 ft tall and stretching 155 ft lengthy. Drawing from the 1870 Census, the monument evokes extra witnesses, itemizing, in response to EJI, “over 122,000 surnames that just about 5 million Black folks adopted in 1870 and that tens of hundreds of thousands of individuals now carry throughout generations.”

Greater than 500,000 folks a yr go to EJI’s websites, with the brand new monument more likely to entice much more. For them, one unavoidable takeaway is that white supremacy is a delusion together with American exceptionalism. One other is that Black persons are right here to remain. America has already executed its worst, and we’ve survived all of it. We’ve continued, and are available out on the opposite facet, as Maya Angelou put it, having encountered many defeats, however undefeated.

There’s the railroad and river, each supply networks for human cargo. Court docket Sq. can also be close by, at one time one of many largest slave markets within the South, and the Alabama State Capitol constructing, which served because the Accomplice Capitol when Montgomery was named the primary political capital of the Confederacy in 1861.

Civil Rights Motion historical past is one other present operating by the town. Each Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as motion leaders from the Montgomery bus boycott, which started in 1955 and culminated in 1956 within the desegregation of public transportation all through the nation.

In 1961, future congressman John Lewis and different Freedom Riders survived a brutal assault by a white mob on the Montgomery Greyhound bus station. 4 years later, in 1965, activists marching from Selma to Montgomery to demand voting rights continued regardless of terrorist violence, their bloody instance inspiring the introduction of the Voting Rights Act to Congress by Lyndon Johnson.

The Freedom Monument Sculpture Park succeeds in bringing this epic historical past to life. How might I not really feel one thing on such hallowed floor, staring up on the hovering Nationwide Monument to Freedom, scanning the huge listing of surnames and discovering my very own, “Ramsey,” carved into metal in a row on the backside proper of the monument?

In keeping with the 1870 Census, the primary yr through which previously enslaved Black folks had been formally counted as folks and residents, Ramseys had been piecing collectively free lives all around the nation. Knowledge made accessible by EJI to all guests additional exhibits a big quantity, 309, in Georgia, 75 of whom had been dwelling in Columbia County. I do know from household analysis that these are my Ramseys.

I’ve been working to determine the best slaver for many years, partially by eavesdropping on family tree message boards. Once in a while, the white Ramseys reference slaves and plantations explicitly whereas discussing wills and different property data, permitting me to verify names, dates, and areas related to my ancestors. (I’d announce my presence and make focused appeals if I weren’t afraid of being blocked.)

These Black folks — half Nigerian, half Cameroonian, half English and Irish — probably took their identify from a white man who owned them. It’s probably all they took with them when lastly freed. Regardless of their bleak entry into American life, I think about some additionally had the irreverence, optimism, good style, good tooth, hairpin triggers, and coronary heart of the Ramseys I’ve been blessed to know on this life. I doubt I’d be right here in the event that they didn’t.

Do I really feel hopeful? Not but, however actually encouragement from a “nice cloud of witnesses” to “throw off every little thing that hinders and the sin that so simply entangles, and allow us to run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”

Because the solar units over the park, casting lengthy shadows throughout its sculptures, one can not assist however really feel a way of reverence and awe at its grand existence. Within the face of legislative assaults on range and fairness, the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park is one house the place the voices of the previous echo by the current, the place wounds of historical past are disinfected by the sunshine of reality.