Is This When America Was Great?

In the Riverfront Park of this state capital, you will find a series of panels depicting the city’s history. They will tell you when the first white settler arrived, how riverboats transformed Montgomery into a trading hub for cotton “and many other important commodities,” and how the city became the cradle of the Confederacy.

They will not tell you that the most important of those other commodities was human beings.

It is the sort of lacuna, says Bryan Stevenson, that allows people to “achieve political victories by celebrating the greatness of America.”

“The question is, which decade are black Americans supposed to want to relive?”

It also is a gap that is about to be filled in the most dramatic fashion just a few blocks from the riverfront, beginning Thursday. That is when the Equal Justice Initiative, which Stevenson founded and heads, will open the Legacy Museum and, nearby, an equally powerful, even more unusual outdoor memorial to the thousands of African American victims of the state terror tactic known as lynching.

Together they offer an alternative, and overwhelmingly coherent, arc of the history of white supremacy from slavery to the arrest of two black men at a Starbucks in Philadelphia this month. They reflect Stevenson’s view that, unlike in South Africa or post-Nazi Germany or many other societies traumatized by history, we’ve hardly begun to grapple with ours — and so cannot yet get beyond it.

“Right now we have a lot of people in this country who still can only love people of their color,” Stevenson said during a conversation Friday. “And that means we’re not fully human. We’re not free.

“These projects for me are about ending the silence.”

The museum and memorial are unlike anything I’ve experienced and more than worth a trip, and I hope (and expect) that millions will come. But I will leave the reviews and descriptions to others. What stood out to me, in this political moment, is the clarity of historical exposition from slavery to Jim Crow to what Stevenson sees as a “new caste system” arising from mass incarceration.

In Stevenson’s view, slavery did not end with the Confederacy’s defeat so as much as “evolve.”

After the Civil War, whites in the South refused to give up their control over black populations or the bigotry on which that rested. While sharecropping and Jim Crow laws kept blacks unfree, the criminal-justice system was used to replicate slavery; blacks were imprisoned for minor offenses and then rented out for forced labor. By 1898, 73 percent of Alabama’s state revenue came from convict leasing.

Any possibility of resistance was squelched by the constant threat of lynching — public spectacles in which blacks were tortured, burned alive, hung, shot or dismembered for any offense or no offense at all. Thousands of whites would gather to watch. Postcards of the event would be printed and sold. Toes and fingers and other body parts would be distributed.