in the POD - the weeping time

*Photo of museum from their website

Water surrounding you, swallowing you. An ocean that is angry and loud.

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That is what you are confronted with as you step inside the first room of the Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, in Montgomery, AL. It is just you and a 20’ tall video screen of churning and crashing waves - seemingly shot from the water line - and  the constant roar of a storm. A bit shocked by the sight and sounds you stiffen up and push back.  But the longer you stand there watching the weaker you become…… and you are lulled into the abyss.

 Helpless.

The Legacy Museum, opened in the spring of 2018, is housed in a warehouse building that once stored cotton and is steps from one of the most active slave auction sites in America. Using sculpture, text, video, holograms, first person accounts, and photos the museum painstakingly shows how slavery, after Reconstruction, was “dusted off and repurposed” in the American penal system.

There are many “ghosts” that guide you along this journey - from the haunting sculptures of faces and torsos that rise up from the depths of the ocean as you are pulled through the second room, the life size holograms of human beings in cages crying out for help, the towering walls lined with clear jars filled with the dirt from lynching sites and the inmates sitting on the other side of the glass connected to you by only a telephone. So many untold stories. So many continue to be untold….. 

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Memorial for Peace and Justice 

Memorial for Peace and Justice

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A short shuttle bus ride from the museum is the Memorial for Peace and Justice. Water is an important element here as well. It is the tears for those lost and it is the tears that allow us to heal. The memorial seems to be growing out of the top of a hill and as you walk up the angled walkways it’s hard edges of concrete and metal come into focus. Rusted metal coffins emblazoned with the county and state and the names and dates of those lynched are hung from a wooden ceiling. I do not know how many counties are represented - all I know is that it was overwhelming. 

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“Over the course of three days, while the rains poured down on the open square in the center of Montgomery, over 450 men, women and children were sold off. It became known as the weeping time.”

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