Between 1501 and 1867, nearly 13 million African people were kidnapped, forced onto ships, and trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. Two million people died during the barbaric Middle Passage.
The Legacy Museum
The Legacy Museum
The Legacy Museum offers a powerful, immersive journey through America’s history of racial injustice.
On the site of a cotton warehouse where enslaved Black people were forced to labor in bondage, the Legacy Museum tells the story of slavery in America and its legacy through interactive media, first-person narratives, world-class art, and data-rich exhibits.
Travel through a comprehensive history of the destructive violence that shaped our nation, from the slave trade, to the era of Jim Crow and racial terror lynchings, to our current mass incarceration crisis—and find inspiration in our soaring Reflection Space and world-class art gallery.
Continue your journey of learning and reflection outside the museum
Steps outside the Legacy Museum is our memorial honoring victims of racial terror lynchings between 1865 and 1876.
Five hundred documented victims and more than 30 massacres during the Reconstruction era are memorialized here.
Located next to the museum, Legacy Plaza is a 2.5 acre park where visitors can gather to reflect and discuss their experiences at the sites.
A digital billboard and sculpture honors local civil rights legends Claudette Colvin, John Lewis, Rosa Parks, E.D. Nixon, Joanne Robinson, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Jonathan Daniels.
Grab a quick and delicious lunch at the Legacy Café food truck and eat at shaded picnic tables.
Located in the museum building, Pannie-George’s Kitchen features soul food from local award-winning chefs.
From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration
From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration
An elaborate and enduring mythology about the inferiority of Black people was created to legitimate, perpetuate, and defend the violent, brutal realities of slavery in America over the next two centuries.
During Reconstruction, the 12-year period following the Civil War, lawlessness and violence perpetrated by white leaders created an American future of racial hierarchy, white supremacy, and Jim Crow laws.
Lynching emerged as a vicious tool of racial control in the South after the Civil War. Lynchings were violent and public events designed to terrorize all Black people in order to re-establish white supremacy and suppress Black civil rights.
Most white Americans supported segregation. Millions of white parents voted to close and defund public schools, transferred their children to private, white-only schools, and harassed and violently attacked Black students while their own children watched or participated.
The false racial narrative that justified slavery evolved into a presumption of guilt and dangerousness that makes people of color vulnerable to racial violence, wrongful convictions, and unfair treatment today.
A tragic, false narrative of racial difference was created in America that has resulted in centuries of racial bigotry and injustice.
This belief in racial hierarchy was used to legitimate, perpetuate, and defend slavery—and it survived slavery’s abolition, fueling racial terror lynchings, demanding legally codified segregation, and spawning our contemporary mass incarceration crisis.
The Legacy Museum traces the evolution of this dehumanizing myth from our nation’s founding to today.
