By Emmanuel Johnson

On November 9 of this year, I woke up at 7 a.m and boarded a bus to Alabama. I joined two busloads of Morehouse students as they embarked on their first trip to the Legacy Museum and lynching memorial. The trip was organized by the Morehouse Psychology department and was hosted by the Equal Justice Initiative.

Our first stop was the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration which opened to the public on April 26, 2018, in Montgomery, Alabama. The museum is the physical manifestation of years research the EJI has done on the history of racial injustice and the narratives that have sustained injustice. The museum route begins slave pen replicas where you can see and hear slaves of every variety waiting behind bars. By the end of the walkthrough, visitors have seen how America has used violence against black people, all the way up to current day events.

Visiting the museum was like stepping back in history. In fact, the museum is located on the site where enslaved people were once warehoused and a block from one of the most prominent slave auction spaces in America. Over 100 years after slavery was abolished, NEARLY 60 black men stood in the exact place where countless numbers of slaves stood awaiting their fate. As young men in our prime, we would have been exactly what plantation owners were looking for.

I had my most powerful experience near the middle of the museum. I was sitting at an exhibit that was set up like a visitation booth that prison inmates use when they have visitors. I picked up the phone and a young man dressed in a gray inmate uniform appeared on the screen. He picked up the phone on the other end and began telling his story. When he was 17 years old the state of Arkansaw sentenced him to life in prison for a murder that he was involved in. While in prison he received his GED but the prison would not allow him to take college courses. They claimed he wasn’t eligible to take upper-level classes. He expressed that the prison system is not in the business of rehabilitating inmates as they claim. I stood up to digest what I just listened to. Suddenly, from behind me, I hear someone ask me what I thought of the exhibit. When I turned around, my brain started working double time. It took me a few seconds to realize that the person I was looking at was the same person I just heard say he got life in prison. He went on to tell me that in 2012, attorney Brian Stevenson won a Supreme Court case that ruled that it was unconstitutional to sentence a minor to life in prison. Winning that case allowed people like the young man from the exhibit to gain their freedom.

Visiting the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration was an eye-opening experience. To see what my ancestors went through transform into what my brothers and sisters go through today was a sobering reality.