“The Museum sits at the heart of one of the most active and prominent sites of trafficking, selling, and abuse of enslaved people in America. The Museum is designed as an engine for education about the legacy of racial inequality.”

Key Questions :

• The Legacy Museum is a narrative museum, with a beginning, middle, and end. The narrative begins in the first room, with overwhelming images of the Atlantic Ocean and text emphasizing the cruelty of “separation forever” for millions of kidnapped men, women, and children.
  • How do the opening images of the Museum serve as an introduction not only to enslavement but also to the eras of racial terror, segregation, and mass incarceration explored within the Site?
• The Legacy Museum documents and describes the ways “slavery in America did not end; it evolved.” Look carefully at the “slavery evolved” corridor and the various ways the Museum defines the relationship between enslavement, racial terror lynching, segregation, and mass incarceration.
  • How does the Museum explore the effects of this history on Black families? As you think about this question, identify and analyze specific exhibitions, videos, sculptures, or photographs in the Museum.
• Reflect on images of children presented and documented in all eras of the Museum.
  • How do these images and videos contribute to our understanding both of the trauma endured by Black children and the indoctrination into intolerance, violence, and trauma for white children?
• Reflect on the courage, strength, resilience, resistance, and heroism of the Black community in its confrontation with violence, terror and cruelty.
  • What aspect of this history of racial injustice was unfamiliar to you before you visited the Museum? Why do you think such gaps exist in our understanding of this history?
  • How does the Museum depict the Black community’s strength, faith, perseverance, and hope?

Additional Reflection:

• The Legacy Museum is a site that features first-person narratives that share authentic voices and experiences from Black victims of brutality and violence. As you study the Museum and its theatres, identify and reflect on the voices you hear, the narratives shared, the history documented.
• How are these voices in each era related and connected to each other? What is the cumulative effect of these voices?
• How does the Legacy Museum depict the violence and brutality of each era? What ideology, what goals fueled the violence, and what narratives were used to justify such kidnapping, displacement, cruelty, mob terror, intolerance, and incarceration?

Curated by EJI Education Department