Equal Justice Initiative Legacy Museum

In April 2018 the Equal Justice Initiative (Eji) in Montgomery, Alabama, simultaneously opened the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Through diverse forms of memorialization and audience engagement, each encourages a national and personal reckoning with the violent and racist histories of the United States, as well as forging links to the contemporary struggles of African Americans and other minorities in America. Both the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum are outcomes of Eji's larger project against racial bias in American society and systems. For the first few decades of its existence, the main venue for Eji's work was the legal system; but as the initiative's founder Bryan Stevenson has noted, U.S. courts still tolerate a certain level of inequality that is easily apparent in police and prison statistics of contemporary America. The understanding of racial bias needed to be broader to effect the profound change for which Eji is advocating, and Stevenson began to consider how best to make the historical and contemporary conditions of inequality more present and resonant. The memorial and the museum are the most recent results of this process, and they arguably mark a beginning of a new kind of historical dialogue for the nation, which had never memorialized its histories of slavery and oppression in such scale (although the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in 2016 and also addresses these histories, among others). Approximately four hundred thousand people visited the Eji institutes during their first year

Criminology · Economic Justice · Mass incarceration · Memorialization · Oppression · Political science · Politics · Prison · Racism · Sociology · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society

• Environmental commemoration

  Open Access•Mihaela Mihai, Mathias Thaler•Memory Studies•2023

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