Montgomery is like a city of ghosts. Walking the streets and breathing in the air from the Alabama Riverfront is like communing with them. Being in the city calls to mind the lives and activism of Rosa Parks, Claudette Colvin, Mary Louise Smith, Martin Luther King, Jr., and countless others, both named and unnamed, known and unknown, heralded and ignored. To visit Montgomery as a tourist is to confront painful legacies and to unabashedly look them straight in the face.
Montgomery is not a special case nor an anomaly. Many destinations in our country have an ugly past, especially as it relates to southern cities, including many which built their entire economies upon the labor of enslaved Africans. As a black woman, a daughter of the South with ties to Alabama on my mother’s side, I wanted to revisit Alabama to reacquaint myself after not visiting for close to a decade. I’d also never been to Montgomery.
And so as I drove from Georgia, I saw the water, the Alabama Riverfront, in the distance. It lines the shores of Gun Island Chute, a tributary feeding into the larger Alabama River, and was the site where thousands of Africans were trafficked into the state. It was their point of entry before being shuttled to a holding warehouse blocks away, the same building which now houses the Legacy Museum. These facts are integral to understanding the history of Montgomery because by the year 1860, the city was the capital of the domestic slave trade in the state and a major hub.
This history, albeit well-known and accepted, is quieted. The area has been transformed into something else, something scenic but also obscuring. Tourists now refer to it as Riverfront Park, and catch the Harriott II Riverboat to sail across the river in either the late afternoon when the sun is most overbearing or a sunset cruise with dinner and drinks.
On land, throngs of mixed groups of both black and white residents jovially walk to bars side-by-side and sit at shared tables in the bars and restaurants—Mellow Mushroom, Central, Sa Za, Aviator Bar, to name a few. There is a very different, unexpected energy here, knowing mere decades ago some of these same scenes would have been illegal due to corrosive Jim Crow legislation.
When I was in town for the Legacy Museum’s one-year anniversary, I grappled with these sights—and the complicated feelings that came with them.
I mostly stayed within the downtown entertainment district, less than a five-minute walk to the Riverfront. I couldn’t bring myself to walk there because I couldn’t stop thinking about my ancestors arriving chained, confused, disconnected, far from home. I was postponing feeling the gravity of it, giving myself some more time. For whatever I tried to avoid, visiting Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice surely mounted all my apprehension into emotional overwhelm. But it was important to me to visit these places and these sites, to be a witness to the history which I am tied to.
The museum, while profoundly moving due to the vast amount of information in the videos and various exhibits, rattled me in a way that has stayed with me since. My hometown of Stone Mountain, and its family-friendly park of the same name, was depicted at the Legacy Museum in a video. I cried through most of it as I watched, self-consciously wiping tears, trying to appear unmoved as people moved around me.
Close to the video was an interactive map of DeKalb County, where I grew up and went to school in my formative years. I learned four documented lynchings took place in my county between 1877 and 1950, the most recent in 1945.
That same day, hours later at the Memorial for Peace and Justice, I stood feeling small as rust-colored structures hanging high above my head, symbolic of racial terror lynchings, with the names of those four people killed in my home county memorialized. I solemnly wondered if the soil I’d played with as a child, the Georgia red clay I kicked around in a game of kickball or tag, was the same soil that cradled the death and violence of innocent people who were only guilty of being Black.
Montgomery is in the midst of a renaissance of sorts. EJI reported more than 400,000 tourists visited the city to walk through the same museum I did. Hotel after hotel is popping up in the downtown area as the city tries to reimagine and reposition itself as a tourist attraction. The city’s only production brewery, Common Bond Brewery, opened last year.
It is a city trying to find its way in this new millennium tinged with the horrors of its all too recent history. Many travelers, like me, don’t have the luxury of forgetting these things. My time in Montgomery was a reminder of how crucial it is to cling to sacred remembrance and confront those ghosts of a troubled past. It’s a difficult space, but it’s also one where the act of remembering honors the struggles of the past—while leaving room for transformation and healing in the present.
