LY
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EATHERSPOONFEBRUARY 2019 / SOUTHERNLIVING.COM
82a sliver of pavement more enriched by
history—or laden with it—than Dexter
Avenue in downtown Montgomery,
Alabama. There’s the Winter Building,
once home to the Southern Telegraph
Company, which tapped out the orders
for Confederate troops to fire on Fort
Sumter; Court Square, part of Jefferson
Davis’ inaugural procession route; the
bus stop where Rosa Parks waited
for a ride that sparked the Civil Rights
Movement; the church Martin Luther
King Jr. pastored—they’re all here. You
can stand on the steps of The Dexter
Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church
and clearly see the state capitol steps
that Dr. King was not allowed to ascend
when he addressed the thousands of
Selma-to-Montgomery marchers.
When the Winter Building was
completed in the 1840s, Dexter was
known as Market Street because it
was a center for trade in the city—and
that included human trade.
“We had more enslaved
people in Montgomery in 1860
than in New Orleans,” says
Bryan Stevenson, whose Equal
Justice Initiative (EJI) is respon-
sible for the groundbreaking
new Legacy Museum: From
Enslavement to Mass Incarcera-
tion and the National Memorial
for Peace and Justice, which
remembers more than 4,400
documented victims of lynching.
Both sites, which opened in
2018, are as inspiring as they
are harrowing. Built on the
location of a former warehouse
where enslaved men, women,
and children were forcibly held,
the 11,000-square-foot Legacy
Museum uses technology to
bring visitors face-to-face with
the injustice of slavery andSearch every city in
the South, and you’ll be
hard-pressed to find
lynching—and the legacy of that
injustice, which has repercussions in
our society even today.
The EJI worked with the nonprofit
MASS Design Group and such artists
as Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, Dana King,
and Hank Willis Thomas to complete
the national memorial, which attracted
100,000 visitors in its first 10 weeks.
Resting on a peaceful 6-acre hilltop,
the memorial includes 800 tablet-like
monuments, one for each county in
the U.S. with a documented lynching.
The names of all the victims from each
county are etched into a 6-foot-tall
monument. Some hold only a few
names. Others are completely full.
Either way, it’s chilling to stand below
and look at them suspended above.
The EJI has begun a necessary,
albeit difficult, conversation, but
Stevenson has built his life’s work
around the belief that “each of us is
more than the worst thing we’ve everdone.” As he explains, “I just think
there’s something redemptive and
reparatory and restorative waiting for
us if we commit ourselves to truth
and reconciliation.”
A few years before the EJI opened
these two civil rights experiences, it
planted three unassuming historical
markers—initially deemed too contro-
versial for this community—at slave-
trading sites. “We worked with the
mayor and the city, and after a lot
of back and forth, we put up three
markers in downtown Montgomery:
one outside the EJI building, one down
by the river, and one where the slave
depots would have been,” Stevenson
says. “It was surprising to me how
meaningful that was to many people
in this community. A lot of African-
Americans were energized—but it
wasn’t just black people. There were
others saying, ‘Thank God we’re finally
starting to tell the truth.’ ”
Since the early 2000s, Montgom-
ery has been getting progressively
bolder about truth telling. Before
the EJI turned a national spotlight
on slavery and its aftermath, the city
had already confronted another harsh
reality: Nobody wanted to live
there. New families weren’t
moving in, and the young locals
who left for college weren’t
coming back. Mayor Todd
Strange doesn’t mince words:
“We were a mulligrubby capital
city. You could go out at five
o’clock in the evening, and
everybody was on their way
home. Nothing was happening.”
Golson Foshee leads the
development-and-property
management arm of a family
enterprise called Foshee
Residential, with his architect
brother, John. The Foshees are
longtime Montgomerians.
“Out of the 70 people in
my high school class, only 6
or 7 are still in Montgomery,”
Foshee says. Parents work hardBRYAN STEVENSON
Equal Justice Initiative