Expanded museum traces legacy of slavery in America

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — The statues of chained men, women and children stick hauntingly out of sand as simulated waves crash overhead, a symbol to the estimated two million people for whom the slave trade ended in a watery grave in the Atlantic Ocean.

The exhibit is part on an expanded museum created by the Equal Justice Initiative that focuses on the legacy of slavery in America. The expanded Legacy Museum — a companion to the group’s well-known memorial to lynching victims — opens Friday and takes visitors on a journey through the origins of the slave trade through the civil rights era to modern criminal justice issues.

Bryan Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, said the goal of the museum is to teach and confront “parts of American history that are not frequently taught," an understanding that he says is a requisite for the country to move forward and heal.

“I believe that there’s something better waiting for us in America. I think that there is something that feels more like equality, more like freedom, more like justice than we have yet experienced. But to achieve that, we’re going to have to confront the damage the problem, the lingering challenges that have been created by this long history of racial inequality,” Stevenson said in a telephone interview.

The museum ranges from the eras of enslavement, lynching, and Jim Crow laws to mass incarceration and modern criminal justice issues that are the focus of the Equal Justice Initiative’s legal work.

The 40,000-square foot (3,700-square meter) Legacy Museum in downtown Montgomery, Alabama sits on the site of a former cotton warehouse. “You are standing on the site where enslaved Black people were forced to labor in bondage," reads

Down a dark hallway, images of slaves talking are...