After reading Just Mercy, I knew I had to add The Legacy Museum to my most recent visit to Alabama. It was only an hour and a half from where we were staying, so we made a day trip out of it. I thought I was going to learn something, but I quickly realized I was walking into a truth big enough to rearrange my spirit.

The Legacy Museum is easily the most powerful interactive learning experience of my life, and we did not even finish it. The museum is closed on Monday and Tuesday, so I went on Wednesday. It was not too crowded. The space is designed for large groups, but it felt like we had the museum to ourselves.

The total cost of the museum is five dollars, but you will want a little money for food and souvenirs. You will want a five dollar mug and a twenty dollar hoodie. Bryan Stevenson has some of the best quotes, and I want to promote his message and the legacy of this museum the way I promote a Beyonce album. I am so proud.

The museum is a combination of multiple sites, and it stretches across hours and acres of heartbreaking art that confronts you at every turn, filled with unforgettable images and sounds of racial terror. I was in pieces, trying to convince myself not to lose my eyelashes. It is a confirmation of our suffering as a people, documented systemically across time, place, and the law.

There are very few places where you can use your camera, so be sure to bring a notebook and a pen. It is too much to remember without writing things down. The interactive introduction is moving, but the next art installation is grippingly terrifying. These are some of the most important images in the entire experience, especially when paired with the boat ride across the Alabama River.

There are walls that show a timeline of injustice after injustice. There is dirt collected from more than four hundred lynching sites across America.

There are interactive exhibits on voting, incarceration, and the handwritten letters to Bryan that stop you in your tracks.

There are jail cell phone calls that shake you.

There are videos, mixed media installations, and documents of injustice made plain, with the laws that upheld it all engraved throughout.

Reading personal accounts of being auctioned off, or ads searching for family who had been sold, was overwhelmingly sad. I could not unsee any of it, and my soul caught a fire.

After that, we spent time in the gold reflection room. I could not help but smile when I saw Zora Neale Hurston, and Mama said she was glad to see Sam Cooke. It reminded me of how amazing and resilient we are.

By then we needed something sweet and salty to simmer our pain. We grabbed something to eat, and of course they have a soul food restaurant right there. We ended up venturing off site to get doughnuts at Hero. It gave me the sugar rush I needed to catch the shuttle to the boat.

Freedom Monument Sculpture Park

At The Legacy Site, you take a boat over to the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. When the boat turned, I could feel the spirit of my ancestors and their fear swishing through the night. My heart started to beat fast, and the low rumble of the water moved in sync with my stomach.

I got teary eyed when I saw the brick mason exhibit. I could see Grandpa Gilbert, who was a brick mason in the 1940s. He once told me that as a woman I was spoiled because my school had a gymnasium. He reminded me that women would give birth to babies and then go straight back to the fields. Seeing that exhibit brought his memory alive for me in a new way.

At one point we walked through the heart of a Black woman, a truth I will never forget as I stood in the slave quarters.

You can take a picture when you first walk in, but not again until you reach these walls, taller than the eye can see and covered in the last names of enslaved people. I wandered straight over to my maiden name like it was calling me.

I dropped a red snipped carnation to honor the lives and legacy of my family, a ritual that feels like acknowledging my own survival.

A Lasting Impact

I plan to finish my visit in January 2026 by returning to these sites after I see the last Legacy location. This museum has made a lasting impact on me. This was not a museum visit. It was a reckoning, an American memorial, a truth telling too heavy for me to turn away from. I know now that this place is its own kind of Mecca, more sacred than I could have ever anticipated.