A few years ago, when I was in Montgomery, Alabama, I visited the The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. It was an extremely sobering experience.
The inside of the memorial is filled with 800 monuments that are six feet long and hang from the ceiling. Each one of them represent a county in the US where an African American was lynched. I will be sharing some of the photos I took inside the memorial in another post, but for this post I wanted to focus on the statues that were outside of the memorial.
In school as I was growing up, I was taught about the history of slavery here in the US, but they never really tried to show how brutal the whole thing actually was. It was more of a watered down history, so places like this that show the brutal truth of slavery are so essential to teaching people about the actual history and the long term effects that slavery has on people.
The artist that created these statues did an amazing job to show some of the emotion that these people must have been feeling as they were shackled in chains and torn from family members. It is a truly heartbreaking site and I could not imagine the fear that these poor people felt.