‘You will find us still in cages’: Re-narrativizing African American History at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice
The Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, re-dramatizes America’s national narrative by leading visitors on a journey not from slavery to freedom but from slavery to mass incarceration. Rather than focusing on the ‘feel-good story’ of ‘courageous civil rights activists’, writes EJI founder Bryan Stevenson, ‘we want to tell not only the story of how destructive and traumatising slavery was but also the story of how it evolved’.[1] As opposed to the many Black history museums that centre an uplifting and progressive narrative, the EJI memorial foregrounds the continuation of racial violence and oppression in the United States. The idea is not to show how far we have come, but how far there is yet to go. However, the EJI’s focus on racial violence risks contributing to what Elizabeth Alexander calls the public ‘consumption’ of ‘Black bodies in pain’.[2] Visual vocabularies established by […]