The visit begins with a river crossing. Visitors to the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park are taken across the Alabama River to reach the 17-acre site on its banks - the same route that enslaved Africans once traveled by boat and rail to reach downtown Montgomery, where families were separated and sold. Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, designed the experience to begin with that disorientation, that physical crossing into a landscape shaped by a history most American memorials have refused to confront. Stevenson told W magazine that the park was inspired by his first-ever visit to a former slave plantation in 2021. What struck him was how the site marginalized the enslaved people's experience in favor of the slaveowner's mansion architecture. He decided Montgomery needed a place that reversed that priority entirely.
The centerpiece of the park is the National Monument to Freedom: a wall 43 feet tall and 155 feet long, inscribed with 122,000 surnames. These are the last names that 4.7 million formerly enslaved African Americans chose for themselves and registered on the 1870 United States census - the first census to list African Americans entirely as free people. Enslaved people had been denied surnames, or given their owners' names; after emancipation, choosing a name was an act of self-determination. The monument honors that act. QR codes near the wall allow visitors to search later census records for other African Americans who share each surname, connecting the names on the wall to the generations that followed. The scale is deliberate: 43 feet tall because the enormity of 4.7 million lives demands physical enormity in return.
Beyond the monument wall, the park holds objects that most museums have never displayed. There are 170-year-old dwellings brought from nearby cotton plantations - not the grand houses visitors typically tour, but the quarters where enslaved people actually lived and worked. Objects made by enslaved persons are displayed alongside replicas of the rail cars and holding pens used to transport and confine human beings for sale. Audio recordings play the Muscogee language, the tongue of the indigenous people who inhabited this land before the cotton economy consumed it. The park confronts two erasures at once: the indigenous people displaced to make room for plantations, and the enslaved people forced to work them.
The Equal Justice Initiative commissioned works from some of the most significant contemporary artists working today. Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, whose sculptures of enslaved people at Ghana's Cape Coast have become internationally recognized, created pieces for the park. Simone Leigh, the first Black woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, contributed work, as did Kehinde Wiley, known for his portrait of President Obama. Wangechi Mutu, Rose B. Simpson, Theaster Gates, Hank Willis Thomas, Charles Gaines, and Alison Saar round out a collection that transforms the grounds into an outdoor gallery where art and history refuse to stay in separate lanes. The sculptures are not decorative - they are testimony rendered in bronze and steel.
The Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, which opened on March 27, 2024, is the third of EJI's Legacy Sites in Montgomery. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, opened in 2018, was the nation's first memorial dedicated to victims of lynching, with 800 hanging steel monuments representing the counties where racial terror occurred. The Legacy Museum, housed in a building where enslaved people were once warehoused, traces the line from slavery through lynching to mass incarceration. Together, the three sites form a constellation of reckoning in a city that was once both the first capital of the Confederacy and a major hub of the domestic slave trade. Montgomery has more history per square mile than almost anywhere in America. EJI has made sure the parts that were deliberately forgotten are no longer invisible.
Located at 32.39°N, 86.31°W on the banks of the Alabama River in Montgomery, Alabama. The 17-acre park is visible along the river's edge southwest of downtown Montgomery. From the air, look for the cleared parkland along the river bend - the 43-foot-tall National Monument to Freedom wall may be visible at lower altitudes. Nearest airport: Montgomery Regional Airport (KMGM) approximately 5 nm southwest. The Alabama River's distinctive bends through downtown Montgomery are the primary navigational reference.