This week, a lengthy feature on EJI’s work and our new museum and memorial is Newsweek’s cover story.
Since the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum opened in April, 300,000 people have visited the sites and hundreds of articles and reflections have been written praising the power of the sites to inspire new conversations around America’s history of racial inequality.
The Newsweek article explores how America can acknowledge racial injustice and begin healing—starting with discussions like the ones EJI hopes to spark at the museum and memorial.
In April, EJI opened two sites in Montgomery. The Legacy Museum depicts the history of Black people in the U.S., beginning with slavery, through segregation, up to the systemic crisis of street-level harassment by police and mass incarceration. “Truth is not pretty, it’s not easy,” Stevenson will tell me, “but truth and reconciliation are sequential, so you need to get to the truth first.”
The second site, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, informally known as the Lynching Memorial, remembers the more than 4,400 victims of racial terror lynchings in over 800 counties in 20 states between 1877 and 1950—sanctioned violence that forced 6 million Black refugees to flee the South.
Other recent stories about the museum and memorial include a long-form piece in The London Review of Books on the importance of facing difficult history. Lester Holt from NBC’s Nightly News recently visited the memorial on his Across America Tour.
EJI has received hundreds of letters, emails and calls from visitors who have described their trip to the sites as profound and life-changing. We are thrilled that the new sites have become important destinations for people looking to think critically about racial inequality and injustice in this country.