A 30ft wave crashes over your head as you enter the museum, dragging you instantly down into the roiling waters. The waves keep coming at you in gunmetal grey surges, with nothing to cling to amid the loneliness of the sea.
Across the giant screen in front of you, words start emerging that ask you to reflect on “the terrifying, tragic and deadly ocean journey” which 12.7 million men, women and children were forced to make having been kidnapped from their homes in Africa and sold into slavery. For about 2 million of them, the voyage to the Americas would end “in a watery grave at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean”.
The cinematic representation of the horror of the middle passage forms the start of an agonizing journey through the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration.
As the name suggests, the visitor is taken on a white-knuckle ride through some of the most painful elements of America’s long history of racial injustice – slavery, lynching, segregation, all the way to the present-day epidemic of police killings of African American teenagers and the societal addiction to putting Black people behind bars.
The museum pulls no punches. One section memorializes the children killed in racial terror lynchings: “Four-year-old Black girl Lillie Mike, her six-year-old sister Emma Mike, lynched by a white mob 1884, Calhoun County, Georgia.”
Bryan Stevenson, the mastermind behind the Legacy Museum, sees such searing detail as bitter but necessary medicine for the American soul. The new institution, which starts on 1 October, lands at a time when racial violence is again on the rise and when “critical race theory” is being used as a ruse to prevent the history of America’s racist past being taught in schools.
It will open its doors less than a year after a white mob spearheaded by far-right groups and fueled by white supremacist anger stormed the US Capitol, egged on by the then US president.