Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum Expands

The Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration has reopened with significantly more space in a new facility in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. It is just blocks from one of the most prominent slave auction spaces in America and only a few feet from the rail station where tens of thousands of Black people were trafficked during the 19th century. 

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Equal Justice Initiative

This nonprofit advocates for prison reforms and offers legal representation to people who have been unjustly convicted of crimes.

The 40,000-square-foot museum presents an immersive history of the domestic slave trade, the Jim Crow era, and modern mass incarceration using images, first-person narratives, videos, animations, and life-sized holographs of enslaved people who tell their stories when you stand before them. One exhibit is a wall of jars of soil from 800 lynching sites from around the country.

“The current social justice movement has ignited an overwhelming desire and demand for purposeful and educational travel in America, and the Legacy Museum’s expansion could not have come at a more opportune time,” says Destination Montgomery executive director Ashley Jernigan. She adds that the expansion will allow more people to “gain a comprehensive understanding of slavery and racism’s lasting impact on different parts of the nation and the world.”  

The museum is open Wednesdays through Sundays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. with timed-entry tickets. Visitors must wear a mask.