They Look Like My Girls. And For Them, We Fight On.
The Legacy Museum in Alabama reminds us that the aim of keeping Blacks in the United States inferior has never really gone away, only the methods have evolved.
By Shalise Manza Young
The faces of agony.
The faces of despair.
On a few, the face of resignation and peace.
Dozens of them, floating in a virtual ocean.
Within the first few minutes of a recent visit to the stellar Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, I almost turned around and walked out after turning a corner and seeing this exhibit, representing the estimated 2 million trafficked Africans who died during the Middle Passage, the 5,000-mile journey across the Atlantic Ocean.
The men, women, and children had familiar faces, reminding me of the people I know and love now: full lips, wide noses, hair in twists or Bantu knots, locs, or close-cropped coils. The beauty that has been passed on for generations.
Several had punishment collars secured around their necks, one of the many barbaric means used to abuse the enslaved for any and all manner of transgressions or, often, for no transgression at all.
My eyes filled with tears the moment I took in what was in front of me, wanting to head for the exit but also unable to move. I have never been so affected by a museum exhibit, and I doubt I will again.
Of the 12.5 million believed to have been stolen and put on those ships, a great many didn’t survive. But for those kidnapped Africans who survived, being on one of the thousands of ships sailing to the Americas was only the beginning of the torture .
Most who died succumbed to the horrifying conditions aboard the boats. Men were chained together, forced to lie head to foot, the cabins so small they couldn’t sit upright. The heat was suffocating, disease rampant. Women and children were kept in a separate cabin, though what they endured was no less cruel.
Others threw themselves overboard, preferring a cold death in the ocean to the slow deaths they watched on the ships. They knew they were destined for an existence of unspeakable suffering — physical suffering, mental suffering, emotional suffering — in an unknown land.
So they gave themselves to the sea, to the black depths, people who had been deemed “black” and kept in black shackles, lashed with black whips by men with black hearts.
The vestiges of slavery remain all over downtown Montgomery. The Equal Justice Institute, which created the Legacy Museum and a growing number of sites around the city, provides the unvarnished truth about what happened not just there in Alabama’s capital city but throughout the Southern states and beyond. The savagery of enslavement and Jim Crow, the endless laws written and unwritten that maintained the lie of whites being superior, the stories of men and women who were lynched and shot and burned in front of cheering crowds — they are all there.
As is the truth about how the aim of keeping Blacks in the United States inferior has never really gone away, only the methods evolved.
The museum sits on the site of a former cotton warehouse worked by the enslaved, just a couple of blocks from the Alabama River waterfront. In the 19th century, steamships packed with Black persons from the north and south (this is where the phrase “sold up/down the river” originates) unloaded in Montgomery, and the people were marched up Commerce Street, shackled and caged in brick buildings (some of which are still standing) until it was time for them to be sold at market.
Montgomery is also where the Civil Rights movement took root, from the bus boycott that lasted more than a year, to the Greyhound terminal where Freedom Riders were welcomed by supporters and billy clubs, to the steps of the massive State Capitol building where the 54-mile march from Selma ended.
This, too, is the history of America, the history that won’t be recognized by many who gather to celebrate the 250th birthday of the country. For some, the history has been intentionally kept out of textbooks and lesson plans; others are ignorant of it by choice, comforted by the lie that it was “so long ago” (it is here I remind them that Mother Lessie Benningfield Randle, a survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, is still alive, and Ruby Bridges, who integrated New Orleans public schools in 1960, is only 71).
And this is why some Black Americans refuse to celebrate the country’s milestone. For decades, we were forced to recite a pledge at the start of every school day that promised “liberty and justice for all” while living a reality that showed “all” comes with an asterisk.
Visiting Montgomery was emotionally taxing. Walking the route from the riverfront to the large fountain where the enslaved were bought and sold, taking in the hundreds of metal columns memorializing the 4,400 known victims of race-based terror lynchings, even realizing that at every site we had to go through bag searches and metal detectors because the violence is never far away took their toll.
Yet I still drew strength from the resilience of the people — my people. Certainly from learning there were seven free and formerly enslaved Black folk with the last name Hazzard living in Worcester County, Massachusetts, at the time of the 1870 census and knowing from research that I am almost certainly descended from all of them.
But also from the images of John Lewis, at the forefront of nearly every major march and protest. And the strength and leadership of Diane Nash, a pillar of the movement who has long been overlooked. And the arresting grace and scale of “Irinkemi Asake,” an homage to Black women across the diaspora.
And even from the sculptures of girls in the unforgiving ocean with Bantu knots. They look like my own girls, and for them I must fight on.
Shalise Manza Young is an award-winning writer focused on the intersections of race, gender, politics, and sports. She is the director of track and field at Phillips Andover Academy. She and her family, including Contrarian Pet of the Week Coco, live in Boston. You can find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.
For years, I have used NEVER AGAIN as my support mantra for Jews. It surely applies as well for black people.
Watching this country backslide beyond the jim crow years of my childhood enrages me.
NOBODY IS COMING TO SAVE US.
STAND UP.
RESIST.
Indescribably moving. Sometimes the images conjured by a few words are more powerful than all the history we've read and seen. Your girls become all our girls. Thank you.