Freedom Monument Sculpture Park To Open In Montgomery, Alabama

Bryan Stevenson likes to say we are all more than the worst thing we've ever done. He reminds juries of that when defending his clients against death sentences.

Perhaps that same grace should extend to nations.

Stevenson is quick to add, however, an action’s full damage must be understood before attempts at moving on are made.

“You can't skip over the tough part because it's only when you appreciate the harm that you're motivated to think about what's the repair needed? What's the remedy needed? What's the way forward,” Stevenson told Forbes.com “I don't think we've done a very good job in traditional educational settings, and even in many cultural settings, of truth-telling about this history in a way that motivates us to want to see repair and restoration and a way forward.”

Stevenson is talking about the history of enslavement, bigotry, racial violence, and inequality in America. Subjects he’s deeply familiar with as founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit organization based in Montgomery, AL. EJI has been committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States since 1989, challenging racial and economic injustice, and protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.

In 2018, Stevenson took his quest for equal rights beyond the courtroom and activism into a new realm: museums and monuments. The Equal Justice Initiative opened the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration that year along with the National Memorial for Peace and Justice as part of its national effort to create new spaces, markers, and memorials addressing the legacy of slavery, lynching, and racial segregation.

The triumphant success of those projects has spawned a third, also in Montgomery, the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park opening on March 27, 2024.

The 17-acre site combines historical artifacts, contemporary art, original research, and first-person narratives to provide a space for exploring the institution of slavery, the lives of enslaved people, and the legacy of slavery in this country.

Stevenson came across the previously city-owned land during the pandemic, taking phone meetings while walking around the area surrounding the first two Legacy Sites. The parcel had been abandoned for over 70 years and used as a dump in the mid-20^th century.

Its location along the Alabama River made it ideal for telling this story.

“The Alabama River was a key part of the trade of enslaved people here in Alabama and across the Deep South,” Stevenson said.

Visitors to the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park can do more than look at the river, they can opt to arrive at the park by pontoon boat on the river.

“People being moved by boat deeper into enslavement is an important part of the story,” Stevenson said. “We liked having people have some experience of the river. We have narratives at the park where enslaved people are talking about being trafficked on the river.”

By crossing a river which previously trafficked enslaved people onto land where they were separated from family members in the heart of the Black Belt, the Deep South, cotton country, the epicenter of the Civil Rights Movement, Stevenson believes the impact of the sculptures and historical artifacts displayed take on a deeper meaning.

“There are so many Black and Indigenous artists who have created works about the historical experience, but you encounter them in what feels like very sterile environments in major museums and marble halls,” he said. “I got excited about imagining what it would be like to encounter these pieces in a space where the history of the narrative they're presenting could be felt and understood.”

Mass Incarceration, Lynching, Slavery: America’s Unholy Trinity

The Legacy Museum focuses on mass incarceration, a contemporary manifestation of America’s founding on slave labor. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice takes on the legacy of slavery through the specific prism of lynching, racial terror, and racial segregation–white nationalism’s backlash to the swift and dramatic strides toward equality African Americans made during Reconstruction.

Freedom Monument Sculpture Park centers on the enslavement of 10 million Black people and how that has shaped–and continues to shape–the legal, cultural, social, and economic character of the United States.

Stevenson was inspired to pursue this third Legacy Site during plantation visits across the South during the pandemic. He’d never visited one previously.

“I was struck by how all of those spaces, no matter how hard people tried to lift up a narrative about enslaved people, are organized around the lives of the people who enslaved others,” he said. “The Big House dominates, the gardening, the landscape. Everything is organized around that, and the lives of enslaved people are almost necessarily marginalized.”

Stevenson realized a new model was needed. A place to tell the story of slavery in an historically authentic space, putting the lives of enslaved people first. It must focus on people; individuals and personal stories instead of data. It needed to offer an experience, create a journey.

Lessons learned in the courtroom.

“I’ve spent a good part of my career going into courtrooms where there's a lot of resistance, a lot of hostilities to hearing what I have to say about the worth of my clients, the value of my client's life,” Stevenson said. “What that has taught me is that storytelling is really important, narrative is really important, helping people understand how what you're doing, what I'm doing, is not just for my client, but it's for the whole community. I believe that if I can get a community to not execute someone–obviously that helps my client out–but I think it's the right thing for that community.”

The same argument could be made about slavery. Instead of historic and renewed efforts in states like Florida to minimize the horrors of slavery, communities, states, and the entire nation could benefit–across racial lines–from acknowledging the evils and ongoing impacts it caused.

How?

“I think a society that values compassion and kindness is a society that gets closer to justice and equality,” Stevenson said.

Justice and equality for everyone, not only Black people.

Artists As Historians

Visiting sculpture parks in Europe and seeing first-hand the power of artists and artwork to communicate stories and experiences in ways text alone can’t led Stevenson to the idea of an outdoor sculpture park for achieving his vision of sharing the story of slavery in America.

“Art can make things that are dense and difficult accessible and engaging,” he explained. “In our museum, we have found that the use of sculpture, animation, video, and language has been powerful in getting people to understand things about our challenging history that they haven't understood before.”

He sites Kwame Akoto-Bamfo’s Nkyinkyim Installation at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice as the textbook example.

“It's a sculpture that depicts enslaved people and he presents the brutality of slavery, but he also presents the dignity of the people enslaved and it's very effective at getting people to understand how this history wasn't abstract, wasn't just something you read about, it involved real people and I think that's the power that artists have, to create context,” Stevenson said.

For Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, a dream team of contemporary artists with work on display includes Charles Gaines, Alison Saar, Simone Leigh, Wangechi Mutu, Rose B. Simpson, Theaster Gates, Kehinde Wiley, and Hank Willis Thomas. Nearly 50 artworks appear in tandem alongside historical artifacts dramatizing the brutality of slavery while simultaneously illuminating the strength, dignity, and power of enslaved people and their descendants.

Among the historical artifacts are a pair of 170-year-old dwellings from the Faunsdale Plantation 80-miles west of Montgomery. Faunsdale was one of largest plantations in Alabama during the 19^th century enslaving a huge number of people. The two dwellings remained standing, albeit deteriorating, and were acquired, conserved, moved, and now ultimately presented at the sculpture park.

Bricks made by enslaved people 175 years ago can be seen and touched.

Restraints and historical objects representing the violence of slavery hammer home the brutalities, but Freedom Monument Sculpture Park also shares stories of love, perseverance, family and hope in the midst of sorrow. It does so most dramatically through what are known as “last seen” ads.

“After emancipation, many enslaved people spent their last nickels and dimes to take out (newspaper) ads looking for their children, their parents, their siblings, their spouses,” Stevenson explains. “These ads are written with a kind of longing that lets you know these familial connections were everything to enslaved people. We have a lot of first-person accounts by enslaved people, and (visitors) again learn that what sustains people is the love of a mother or the love of a child or a partner. That's what allows people to navigate so much of this brutality.”

Naming Names

The National Monument to Freedom, standing 43-feet-tall and 155-feet-long, marks the culmination of a guest’s journey through Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. Designed by Stevenson using research from the 1870 Census–the first time formerly enslaved Black people were able to formally record a surname–the Monument individually lists over 122,000 surnames that nearly five million Black people adopted at the time and that tens of millions of people now carry across generations.

“I've been long interested in this moment in American history where formerly enslaved people got to claim a family name,” Stevenson said. “My name is Stevenson and on my mother's side, there's a very long verbal history and I can talk a lot about my enslaved great grandparents. On my father's side, there wasn't that tradition, so I knew nothing about the name Stevenson or how and when that came to be.”

Of the 122,000 names, roughly 8,000 represent approximately 70% of African Americans today. Those names appear on the front of the monument with more obscure names on the back.

“I wanted to do something to bring to life and elevate this moment where millions of people claimed an identity,” Stevenson said. “It's a uniquely American moment because formerly enslaved people had been displaced, disconnected, didn't come with names they could retain or even remember like most immigrants, they created names.”

At EJI’s Visitors Center, guests can learn more about the counties and states associated with the names of formerly enslaved people, and visitors can use kiosks to advance genealogical research or trace family histories.

All those 122,000 names representing millions of people who suffered under the worst conditions a nation could impose upon people are owed a debt of gratitude by everyone visiting the park, regardless of race.

“After emancipation, people chose citizenship and community over retaliation and revenge against those who enslaved them,” Stevenson said. “That is a remarkable thing and that's the gift that we've been given. I think it changes your relationship to understanding the people who were enslaved when you can appreciate this perseverance, this faith, this power, this strength, and this hope quotient that they carried with them, even when things were despairing.”

The Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and now Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, they combine for a long, difficult, tear-filled day of travel, of soul searching, of deep thinking, but they’re necessary. They’re necessary in a country that has continually failed to confront, let alone remedy, how its formation and prosperity are owed to slave labor (and stolen land), and how the impacts of those foundational evils persist.

“Taken together, I believe that people spending time (here), their knowledge and understanding of American history will be transformed,” Stevenson said. “Their consciousness about the legacy of that history will be elevated. My hope is that their commitment to advancing the kind of just society where we never tolerate bigotry, and racism, and violence, and hate is elevated.”

One day, perhaps America can become more than the worst thing its ever done.