Reflecting on the opening of the National Memorial and Legacy Museum in Montgomery, AL
Experiencing the opening of the Legacy Museum for Peace and Justice and the country’s first ever Memorial to the Victims of Lynching in Montgomery Alabama has been both moving and goading.
The revealing of all gives even greater meaning and mandate to achieving of universal equality and equity. If we don’t accept the truth about our past, we cannot claim our agency and accountability for our future, either.
We must still and comprehensively wrestle with the long and devastating effects of the racial caste and gender bias origins of the country and their many persisting and shape-shifting forms in order to get justice for all. Slavery morphed into Jim Crow and racialized terrorism through widespread lynchings of African Americans into mass incarceration, state executions, and unjustifiable police killings of unarmed people of color.
Native American genocide cleared the way for mass land grabs, established economic concentration camps called reservations with the most devastating poverty, suicide and violence statistics. Gender disenfranchisement pervaded into extreme authority and pay inequity and a culture and lawlessness condoning sexual assault and harassment. Xenophobia and bigotry around immigration created second class labor conditions and wages for railroad, farm and restaurant workers and now justify threats and attacks on the civil liberties of immigrants and refugees.
Oppression of difference from our origins transmutes into state repression of sexual orientation, gender identification, and even bathroom choice. And conventional religions attack the rights of all to marriage rights and reproductive choice. We are still fighting the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And we must take that continued fight to organizing, to get out the vote and voting, to impeachment when necessary, to civil service, to criminal justice reform, to natural ecosystem resilience, to economic reform, AND to banking. Bless Bryan Stevenson, EJI, and all the warriors for peace and justice who are making this possible and carrying on the work.
