We spend the hour with civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. In 2018, the organization opened the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, to tell the history of millions of enslaved Africans who were abducted and trafficked across the Atlantic to the Americas by European powers, and to chronicle the legacy of slavery, racism, lynchings and segregation in the United States. The Legacy Museum has just opened its first international exhibition as part of the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland.
“In putting together the content we have at the Legacy Museum, you begin to appreciate just how global the institution of slavery was,” Stevenson tells Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman in Edinburgh. “We were eager to have an opportunity to present this content on this continent, which … hasn’t done very much to acknowledge this history.”
Stevenson details the Equal Justice Initiative’s goal of educating the public about racial iniquities, as well as his own family’s connection to slavery. “My foreparents did not come to this country seeking greater opportunity. They did not come seeking shelter from some distant threat. They came in chains. They were victims of a brutal abduction,” he says.
