Montgomery was one of the largest domestic slave-trading hubs in the American South. Enslaved people arrived by river and road, were held in warehouses and pens along Commerce Street, and were auctioned to buyers from across the region. The Legacy Museum's expanded location, which reopened on October 1, 2021, sits directly on one of those sites. The museum does not let visitors forget this geography. Technology brings the past into visceral proximity: in one exhibit, holographic figures of captured and chained Africans stand behind bars, their eyes meeting yours. Opposite them, a group of men stand with arms raised at the moment of arrest. The parallel is deliberate. The 47,000-square-foot space -- roughly five times the size of the original 11,000-square-foot museum that opened on April 26, 2018 -- uses immersive installations, historical archives, and world-class art to make history feel present and personal.

Bryan Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative to provide legal representation to death row inmates and others failed by the justice system. His work freed Anthony Ray Hinton, who had spent thirty years on death row for a crime he did not commit. That kind of case -- where the system fails catastrophically and no one in power notices or cares -- drove Stevenson to build something that would force a broader reckoning. The museum and its companion site, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, were developed with $20 million raised entirely from private donations and charitable foundations. No public funding was accepted. The opening ceremony in April 2018 drew speakers including Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and former Vice President Al Gore. Admission to both sites costs just five dollars, a deliberate choice to keep the history accessible to everyone.

The museum's final galleries shift from documentary evidence to artistic response. Works by Hank Willis Thomas, Glenn Ligon, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Titus Kaphar, and Sanford Biggers line the walls -- artists who have spent their careers interrogating race, identity, and American history through paint, sculpture, and mixed media. The art does not illustrate the exhibits so much as extend them. Where the historical rooms present facts and testimony, the galleries offer something harder to categorize: grief processed through creative vision, anger transmuted into beauty, absence made visible. The museum understands that some truths resist the documentary form and require the language of art to fully register.

The Legacy Museum is not alone. It anchors a growing constellation of sites the EJI has created across Montgomery. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened the same day as the original museum, stands on a hilltop nearby -- over 800 steel columns hang from the ceiling, one for each county in America where a racial terror lynching took place. In March 2024, the EJI opened the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, a seventeen-acre park along the Alabama River where enslaved people were trafficked, featuring art installations and original artifacts. Together, these sites transform Montgomery -- the first capital of the Confederacy, the city where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, the city where Martin Luther King Jr. led the bus boycott -- into a place where America's racial history is not hidden but confronted in stone, steel, and soil.