On last Friday’s History Now segment, Equal Justice Initiative’s Bryan Stevenson talks about opening his museum “From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration” in Montgomery, Alabama that will connect the end of the Civil War to the present-day epidemic of mass incarceration in the nation.
In the 4-minute video, Stevenson says that slavery in this country did not end in 1865, it just evolved into the current prison system. The attorney walks cameras through a gutted-out building showing where each exhibit will be situated. There will be a slave warehouse near the entrance, a lynching exhibit, a segregation exhibit, and then an exhibit on mass incarceration.
“There is a line from slavery to racial terrorism through segregation that is evident in what we see in our criminal justice system today,” Stevenson believes. “I am persuaded that we really won’t eliminate the problems of discrimination in the criminal justice system, in the education system, and in the employment system until we change the narrative of racial difference that we have all accepted.”
