Down a dark hallway, images of slaves talking are projected on walls behind cell bars, and they address the visitors standing before them. The first is of a woman pleading for the children who were taken away from her. In another, two children huddle against each other.

“Momma, momma… Have you seen our mother?” they call out.

A wall is lined with jars of dirt taken from the sites where lynching victims were murdered. In another exhibit, visitors are invited to take a Jim Crow-era literacy test in order to register the vote.

“How many jelly beans are in the jar in front of you? How many seeds are in a watermelon?

Stevenson’s early legal work focused on representing death row inmates, winning exonerations for people wrongfully convicted, and he has described how some judges presumed he was the defendant because of the color of his skin. His memoir Just Mercy became a movie by the same name.

Stevenson said he came to believe that slavery didn’t disappear but evolved, meaning that the elaborate myth of the inferiority of Black people used to justify slavery centuries ago didn’t just vanish in 1865.

“And even with the passage of the civil rights laws, we still presume things about Black people, when we see them, and that’s part of the reason why there’s so much frustration around: Black people being arrested for sitting in a Starbucks or being in a library or, you know, walking down the sidewalk,” Stevenson said.

The Equal Justice Initiative opened the Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in 2018. The memorial commemorates 4,400 black people who were slain in lynchings and other racial killings between 1877 and 1950. Their names, where known, are engraved on 800 coffin-shaped columns.

The organization is aiming to create a space for people to confront and “deal honestly with this history,” just as South Africa has sites about apartheid and Germany memorializes victims of the Holocaust.

“One of the things we say is that the purpose of the museum is to create a society where the children of our children are not burdened by this history of racial inequality, are free to move throughout their lives without any presumptions being made, based on their color,” Stevenson said. “But to get there, we’ve got some work to do and I hope this inspires people to do that work.”