The Legacy Museum

Eighty years ago, as a battle over federal anti-lynching legislation loomed in the United States Senate, Walter F. White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), graced the cover of Time magazine. Behind him hung a painting of a black man hanging from a tree. The portrait was one of fifty pieces featured at the NAACP-sponsored An Art Commentary on Lynching, which ran in Manhattan for two weeks in early 1935. “It may upset your stomach,” a New York newspaper review warned. “If it upsets your complacency on the subject it will have been successful” (quoted in “An Art Exhibit against Lynching,” The Crisis 42, no. 4 [April 1935]: 106). The Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) Legacy Museum and its companion site, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, follow in an activist tradition of research, art, and advocacy. Like Walter F. White, who spent years investigating lynchings, lobbying public officials, and pricking the public conscience through any means and medium available, EJI’s recently opened museum and memorial present a narrative journey structured to inspire reflection and action. Both sites blend historical scholarship, artistic expression, and social justice advocacy into an ambitious and compelling achievement.

Art history · Battle · Conscience · Economic Justice · Legislation · Media studies · Political science · Portrait · Scholarship · Sociology · White (mutation) · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

• Somebody do Something!”

  Open Access•Amy Wood•European Journal of American…•2019

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• Environmental commemoration

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

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