The ghostly prisoners include two children dressed in white nightshirts. The effect is authentic-maybe because this is a building where such scenes took place, and the testimonies are those of real people. Visitors huddle around the pens and listen closely, as the figures speak in hushed tones. Just past the entrance, a ramp slopes down to five “slave pens,” behind which ghostly holograms in nineteenth-century costume tell their stories.

Would that revival benefit its citizens equally? The name of the coffee shop, which isn’t visible from the street outside, is Prevail Union.īetween the fountain and the Alabama River, the Legacy Museum occupies a building that was once a warehouse for human chattel. We ordered coffee and biscuits and wondered whether the past that has made Alabama infamous could be a force for economic development, as the new memorial draws visitors to the area. The shop’s owners, who are white, got interested in ethically sourced coffee while working for an N.G.O. Yet these two spaces appear to be in deep conversation with each other. It seems odd for such a place to look out on a former slave market, especially given the historic connection between slavery and coffee. Hip and industrial, it resembles a coffee shop that one might find in San Francisco. During a recent renovation, workers found bricks made by enslaved women, which were donated to the Equal Justice Initiative. Today there is a craft-coffee shop across the street, on the first floor of a building from 1898, which was home to the S.

A nearby marker explains that this is the site where “slaves of all ages were auctioned, along with land and livestock, standing in a line to be inspected.” When it was placed at the fountain, in 2002, the city councilman Tracy Larkin said that the past is often “painful and embarrassing” but that it must be studied and known. Markers draw attention to the curb where Rosa Parks stepped onto a bus and refused to give up her seat to the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King, Jr., served as a pastor from 1954 to 1960 to the First White House of the Confederacy, where Jefferson Davis lived until 1861, when the Confederate capital was moved to Richmond.Īt the intersection of Commerce Street and Dexter Avenue, once known as the “romantic center” of the city, stands the Court Square Fountain, topped with a corroded statue of Hebe, the Greek goddess of youth and cupbearer to the Olympian gods. The city’s past is inescapable on its sleepy downtown streets, almost deserted on a humid Friday afternoon. We knew that the museum and memorial would ask different things of black and white visitors, and that the trip would shake us.įrom 1850 until the end of the Civil War, Montgomery was the Southern port most active in slave trading-even surpassing New Orleans, where an estimated hundred and thirty-five thousand human souls were auctioned between 18. In June, we had a chance to see them in person, and to spend a few days together. We do talk a fair amount about race-we talk a fair amount about everything, since our friendship is of the cross-country, intensive-text variety-and, when the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened, in April, we began passing back and forth articles about them. As a historian and a novelist, neither of us is especially adept at the confessional mode it’s possible that we take pains to avoid it. We went to Montgomery, Alabama, to think about history, our country’s and our own.

Ricky king memorial