Our time at The Legacy Museum.

While Ayada Leads was in Selma, we had the opportunity to visit the Legacy Museum, and for many of us, history came to life in a powerful way.

The experience moved beyond textbooks and became deeply personal and emotional, strengthening our understanding of the past and our commitment to justice moving forward.

Although we were unable to take photos during our visit, the impact of the museum stayed with us. Our team left with powerful and personal reflections.

We invite you to read and experience the Legacy Museum through the voices and perspectives of our team as we share their individual reflections from the trip.

Communication Manager Account

Personally, as a child, I had always felt the impact of Black history in America, from slavery to the civil rights era. However, history did not truly come alive for me until I stepped foot into the Legacy museum.

In the legacy museum, I experience new ranges to my emotions and allow history to come to life as I travel through time. 

When you begin your walkthrough, You are met with the ocean,  

You see the paths that were used to take many away from home.

As you are well below sea level, you see multiple heads in the ground, those who chose to drown rather than be taken into bondage. 

As you move to the next section You find yourself standing on a  site where enslaved black people were forced into labor in bondage

Coming to the site with cages used to keep black men, woman and children

You see specific quotes on the wall. 

“…Lord, how come me here”

“…Walk with me lord walk with me.”

As you progress further, you see the fact that leads us down to the present time:

12 million people from Africa were kidnapped during the transatlantic slave trade

9 million black people terrorized by the threat of lynching violence

10 million African American citizens were segregated 

8 million Americans under criminal control are incarcerated

While in this area, there is a depiction of the United States Supreme Court’s racial timeline spanning from 1842 to 2013Pressing on, the horrors of the past are illuminated. 

The walls of the museum are covered with Auction or reward notices for Black people who escaped bondage, cold reminders of a time when Black lives were assigned prices and treated as property. $1200  to $1250 to for negros the auction, $200 rewards for the run away the Negro.

At a crucial point, you learn that the Legacy museum sits on the site of a former cotton warehouse where the coerced labor of enslaved black people created enormous wealth for this nation. A haunting sound begins to echo in the air over and over again. We later learned that it was the sounds of chains clacking.

A section in the museum shows all those signs that I had only ever seen in textbooks:

“Whites only”

“No negros allowed after sundown.”

“Help wanted, Whites only.”

The most haunting part of the legacy museum is the area focused on lynchings. A wall back to back with the ashes and dirt of those Black people who were lynched,  There is a screen provided that shows how many from each state. Imagine how our hearts stopped when we saw that there were 3 collected from the state of Minnesota. 

It was at this point that the pain and anger was unbearable.

My body began to vibrate at all of the injustice presented before me, my eyes full of tears I refused to allow it to fall, my anger blazing, thinking only vengeance could soothe it…

I found myself thinking, What is the point? Why are we still fighting?

And yet at the end of it all, we were reminded of something: 

Upon entering the Golden room the song Stevie Wonder was playing ‘They won't go when I go’

I didn't understand how and why the song was able to soothe me… I wasn't sure I wanted to be soothed. 

The song felt like it was affirming the feeling and thoughts I was having, asking me to sit with these feelings. So I sat with it. All while surrounded by Black figures and heroes that paved the way when no one thought there was a way.

While in the golden room there was a quote on the wall that I read over and over:

“If we have the courage and tenacity of our forebears, who stood firmly like a rock against the lash of slavery, we shall find a way to do for our day what they did for theirs.”

We shall find a way…

If we did it before we can do it again.

Truly a transformative experience.

Civic Engagement & Advocacy Manager

​​I was extremely impressed, moved, and heartbroken by the Legacy Museum in Montgomery Alabama. While the Museum consists of a few different sites, our team was able to visit the Museum, the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, as well as take a boat ride down a stretch of the Alabama River. 

The Museum was set up in a way that walked us through the history horrific history of oppression Black Americans endured within the United States, from the Atlantic Slave Trade, up to current day mass incarceration. Through the Museum, this timeline was illustrated by archival media, interactive displays, as well as ritual. In my memory I see the newspaper clippings from past times calling for the death of Black Americans, or reporting the lynchings of others. I was able to sit at a steel bench, look at a mock “two-way window” and learn about the lives of incarcerated Black Americans through a visitation phone. I felt the weight of a wall, lined with dirt-filled glass jars, each collected from the death sites of Black Americans who  had been killed by white mobs. Three of those jars honoured the lives of victims from Minnesota. At the end of the exhibitions, we were able to enter what was called “The Gold Room.” A large room with high ceilings, it was covered from top to bottom with portraits of historical Black Americans, who have shaped the image of this country and the lives of each of us within it. 

The Legacy Museum exists to deliver the important message that the ideologies that allowed mass enslavement and dehumanization to persevere, is still here today, contorting itself and transforming itself under different names and systems. Systems that we grow alongside and are told to accept, that it is impossible or even radical to imagine another reality, but we must, because we cannot be blind to injustice when it shows itself to us.