New venues to tell Black history
From a wooden bench at the edge of the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama, visitors can see the Alabama River, where enslaved Africans were transported and sold into a life of forced labor.
The sculpture park opens this month, one of a growing number of sites across the country unveiled in the past decade to preserve and celebrate Black History and the Black experience in America. Some are multimillion-dollar museums, while others are housed in small interpretive centers.
In Mississippi, there is the Civil Rights Museum in Jackson and the B.B. King Museum in the blues legend's hometown of Indianola. In Alabama, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice tells the story of the nation’s history of lynching, and in Charleston, South Carolina, there's the new International African American Museum.
And advocates say these institutions matter even more today as lawmakers in some states push to restrict the teaching of Black history and ban some books that tell this history.