Day three of the 2025 Civil Rights Trip

Day three of the Civil Rights Trip was spent exploring the work of Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative.
 

When Gordon first met with lawyers from EJI in 2016, it was a successful law office with an interest in expanding its work in advocacy and education.
 

Since then, that work had grown tremendously, in response to the power of their storytelling and its ability to explain some of our nation’s most stubborn divides.
 

The day began at the riverside with a pontoon boat ride to EJI’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park.

 

The sculpture park, where photography is limited, includes a dizzying range of work in cast bronze, welded steel, brickwork and stone, wood and concrete. 

 

Styles range from surreal allegory to the straightforward realism of unrenovated, decaying plantation quarters, relocated from outside Montgomery and recontexturalized to tell a new story.
 

Gordon students made a quilt of caring in Kindergarten, drew posters defending marine habitats in second grade, sang freedom songs in fifth grade, and roleplayed the European colonization of North America in seventh grade.
 

They understand the role of the arts in social justice work.
 

As with every EJI project, the history is carefully documented at the sculpture park; alongside the art, there are quotes, statistics and maps everywhere, and this may be the only sculpture park in the world that offers a bibliography.
 

It culminates with the National Monument to Freedom, which has the surnames of all the formerly enslaved people listed in the 1870 census, the first census that allowed the victims of enslavement to be listed by name.
 

Like many EJI projects, it illustrates the titanic scale of enslavement’s legacy while also allowing for victims to remain visible, one by one, as individual humans with their own stories.
 

A list of one hundred thousand names is longer than you might expect.
 

And yet it’s hard not to try to read every name
 

to search for familiar names and consider the unusual ones
 

and wonder which names were chosen names, which ones were carried over from enslavement, and which ones might bear an echo of an Africa.
 

Next stop was the Legacy Museum, which draws a throughline across US history that connects the eras of enslavement, racial terrorism and segregation to the industry of mass incarceration in America today.
 

It’s an immersive, intense experience (which also does not allow photography), with walls covered with quotes from primary sources, images from paintings, newspapers, and court sketches, and interactive screens drawing on databases full of census information and economic statistics.
 

The story begins with the slave ports in Biloxi, New Orleans and Mobile.
 

But also the ones in Warren, Bristol, and Providence, Rhode Island.
 

And it makes an undeniable case for the legacy enslavement as an American problem, not a Southern one, and one that persists into the present day.
 

The final stop of the day was the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the United States’ only memorial to the victims of lynching and racialized violence.
 

Throughout the memorial, there are hundreds of pillars representing individual US counties.
 

On each one, there are the details of lynchings and incidents of racial violence that the researchers at EJI were able to establish.
 

Taken as a whole, the weight of it all can be overwhelming.
 

Taken one pillar at a time, individuals begin to emerge.
 

It begins to be possible to imagine this tragedy as a collection of stories
 

and the monument begins to function as a true memorial.
 

Why would this county only have one name listed?
 

Why do all these names share one date?
 

What’s it like to see a county you’ve visited many times?
 

What’s it like to see your own last name?
 

It was a long day, with a lot of information, about history that is emotionally challenging.
 

By weaving in the names of the individuals, the hands of the artists, and the details of each story, the EJI is able to sustain the visitors’ connection with the material, and keep it from collapsing under its own weight.
 

ahead to day three

back to day two

more photos from day three

more about Gordon's Civil Rights Trip