Legacy Sites Named One of Best Places to Go in 2025
01.27.25
Southern Living featured EJI’s Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama, as one of the top places to visit this year.
The magazine’s list of The 25 Best Places To Go In The South In 2025 highlights Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, which opened in 2024, as well as the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
Built on the banks of the Alabama River, the 17-acre Freedom Monument Sculpture Park honors the lives and memories of the 10 million Black people who were enslaved in America. Visitors can take a short boat ride on the very river where tens of thousands of enslaved people were trafficked to reach the site, where world-class sculptures and original artifacts create an immersive, interactive journey through history.
Visitors can step inside dwellings inhabited by enslaved people and explore replicas of the rail cars that trafficked men, women, and children on nearby tracks still used today.
At the heart of the site is the National Monument to Freedom, a first-of-its-kind monument honoring four million formerly enslaved Black people who won freedom after the Civil War. Engraved with more than 100,000 family names recorded in the 1870 census, the monument forges a connection to the courage, strength, and resilience of ancestors that visitors can reach out and touch.
As Southern Living noted, EJI’s Legacy Sites have drawn people from all over the world. Millions have visited the sites since they first opened to rave reviews in 2018.
