Legacy in montgomery

From the outset of our trip planning, we put The Legacy Museum in Montgomery AL on the must-see list. Laura’s Museum Group colleagues visited several years ago and found it transformative. Since then, numerous friends have visited as part of civil rights tours. Bryan Stevenson was a student of our friend Betsy. So expectations were high. And they were met. We found the experience of the museum and of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice sobering and moving. It was a brutally honest portrayal of the experience of African Americans - slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, lynchings, mass incarceration - and brutal is the operative term throughout. It makes you think about how hard fought the gains that have been made were, the courage of those responsible for that progress, and how fragile those gains can be. And we could not help but wonder if this honest depiction of history would be countenanced in places like Florida today. If you are not familiar with the museum, the memorial, or Stevenson’s work, you can follow these links.
https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/museum
https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/memorial
https://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice
 
It’s Palm Sunday and downtown Montgomery was deserted at 9:30 this morning. At a local breakfast spot, Laura had her first biscuit and pimento cheese of the trip. (Ed is not a big fan of pimento cheese.) It was our second meal with fried green tomatoes – both the breakfast biscuit and the BLT had them. 
 
Dinner was barbecue. Like so many other places, the restaurant was understaffed and overrun so we couldn’t eat there, but they packed it up and we took it back to the room. Not elegant, but satisfying.