#RSRSeesTheUSA Day 5: Montgomery, AL
I spent all of this soft-aired, humid gray day in Montgomery at the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
This is quite literally the reason I added Montgomery to my itinerary for this trip, and oh, it was so worth it.
I’m so encouraged to see newly opened museums neatly sidestepping so many of the problematic pitfalls that older institutions have to (and so often don’t) tackle.
The exhibit design was so good, and it highlighted the intense and heavy subject matter in all the right ways to be pointed without ever feeling so “razzle-dazzle” that it took away from the message (*cough* looking at you, National WWII Museum *cough*).
I could write a whole long post about today, and I’m not going to do that for my own mental wellbeing and need for rest, but perhaps the aspect of both the museum and the memorial that I loved best was the embodied, human quality.
Your body in those spaces is vital and necessary. And it’s given physical space to process the experience it’s going through. Identical wall text is provided at multiple spots around the rooms so you can take multiple paths. Interpretive tools like video screens and a take-your-own poll test station are also duplicated. The gallery space is left open and largely unrestricted by walls and corridors.
To hear the first-person audio narrations of family lynching stories, you have to position your body in front of the speakers, otherwise you got the video and the open captions but not the storyteller’s voice. And when a group is gathered around listening together, and the one person standing in front of the speakers moves away, it’s up to someone else to step into the empty space to keep the audio going.
To hear firsthand accounts of incarcerated people, you have to pick up a phone handset and approach a videoscreen “window” like you’re at prison visiting hours. The incaracerated people pick up the handset on their side and they make eye contact and tell their own stories. I couldn’t possibly bring myself to stand up and walk away before any of their stories were finished. It felt like I’d be walking out on a real-time conversation.
To have emotionally wrenching encounters with the translucent projection “ghosts” of enslaved people, you have to step your body right up to the bars of the cells they might have been kept in. If you don’t move close enough, you don’t hear them speak.
That’s all at the museum, which took me 4 hours to get through and should be required visiting for anyone who wants to be a citizen of this country,
That physicality continues at the memorial [and here I’m pasting in my Instagram caption, because it sums up my feelings nicely and I. am. tired.], where you keep descending from greeting these monuments at eye level to standing below them as they literally hang above you in all their weathering, red-brown corten steel physicality. They’re human size and human color and hanging like a silent forest for you to walk through and witness. The symbolism is potent like a powerful memorial should be. It’s perfectly balanced between clarity of metaphor and beauty of form.
At both locations, there are physical spaces for reflection and inspiration (including SEATING) that come at key points after a particularly hard or ugly moment of realization. The memorial has flowing water and beautiful landscaping and meandering paths and a garden to sit in. The museum has upholstered furniture and art galleries that come at the end of the visit, and the final hallway is full of photos of smiling children’s faces.
After spending about 6 hours between the two sites, I asked one of the staffers at the memorial what it was like to work there, and she (a young Black woman) said it was hard but also really good to see people coming to get educated.
That sums up how I felt pretty dang well.
I’m coming out of this day with—somewhat unexpectedly—a sense of renewed hope for museums.
If places like this can exist
AND be so widely recommended and widely visited (by lots of people of lots of different ethnicities and by lots of student groups)
AND only cost $5
AND be staffed by such welcoming and knowledgeable folks
AND tell hard stories thoughtfully and with care
AND refuse to soften their messages for a “general” or “neutral” or “as white wide as possible” audience
then my inextinguishable desire to visit museums when I travel and my indefatigable desire for museums to DO BETTER may not be so hard to square as I have so often felt.
A group of 6 college students and their professor from Cincinnati took just about as long as I did at the museum. When I approached them at the memorial to ask what their group was, they told me it was an “alternative spring break” program where they spend their break taking a deep dive into one topic. Theirs was Civil Rights history in Alabama.
If museums like this can be out there doing the good work and the next generation of professionals can be out there choosing to confront true histories, even—especially—when they’re ugly, then maybe there’s hope for this field, yet.
