The Legacy Museum facts for kids
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| Established | April 26, 2018 |
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| Location | Montgomery, Alabama |
| Founder | Equal Justice Initiative |
The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration is a special museum in Montgomery, Alabama. It teaches visitors about the history of slavery and unfair treatment in America. This includes the time when African Americans were enslaved. It also covers racial violence, segregation (keeping people apart), and racial bias.
How the Museum Started
The Legacy Museum opened on April 26, 2018. It was created by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery. The EJI is a group that works for justice and equality.
The museum is a partner to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. That memorial remembers people who were victims of racial violence. Building both the museum and the memorial cost about $20 million. This money came from private donations.
What You Can See at the Museum
The museum has many interesting exhibits. It shows art by famous artists like Hank Willis Thomas and Jacob Lawrence. One unique display is a collection of soil. This soil comes from places across the United States where racial violence happened.
The museum is 11,000 square feet. It uses spoken stories, old documents, and interactive screens. These exhibits help visitors understand the journey from slavery to other forms of unfair treatment. This includes violent attacks and many people being put in prison.
To show how unfair treatment continued, some photos look like they are from the slavery period. But they actually show prisoners from the 1960s picking cotton. The museum wants to show that ways of controlling Black people have changed over time. But they have not always gone away.
The museum uses technology to help visitors understand the difficult history. You can see and hear slave replicas. These models show what it was like to be an enslaved person waiting to be sold. You can also hear real stories from people who experienced slavery. In 2021, the museum moved to a new, larger building. It is now 47,000 square feet and has new exhibits, including an art gallery.
See Also
In Spanish: Museo del Legado para niños
- List of museums focused on African Americans
- Topography of Terror: a museum in Berlin, Germany about the victims of the Nazi regime
