The old reason campaigns still spend most their ad budget on TV
Plus: There’s going to be a new monument sculpture park, to freedom
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There’s going to be a new monument sculpture park, to freedom
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There’s going to be a new monument sculpture park, to freedom
The group behind the Montgomery, Ala., Legacy Museum about slavery and mass incarceration and a memorial to the Black victims of lynching has announced it’s opening a new monument, to freedom.
The non-profit Equal Justice Initiative, or EJI, said Tuesday it plans to open a 17-acre Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery next spring. The park will be home to a 43-foot-tall National Monument to Freedom, which will be inscribed with the surnames of more than 100,000 Black families from the 1870 census, the first following Emancipation.
The park will also display sculptures by Kehinde Wiley, Hank Willis Thomas, and other artists, according to images on the group’s website and media reports, as well as artifacts related to slavery in the U.S., like original dwellings (below) and a replica of a railroad car used to traffic enslaved people (above).
“People will learn a lot about the lived experience of people who were enslaved at this park,” EJI executive director Bryan Stevenson told the Montgomery Advertiser. “We’ll have some art animations that explain aspects of that, but just to see, and touch and feel these spaces in a place where there's a larger narrative being provided about the life of enslaved people, the labor, the way people had to navigate violence, the way people had to hold on to family members. All of that will be presented at the park.”
EJI opened the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in 2018. Stevenson said the addition of the sculpture park creates a space for the descendants of enslaved people and “for all Americans to have a deeper appreciation of the way four million formerly enslaved people embraced emancipation, embraced freedom, and embraced America.”
Freedom Monument Sculpture Park is expected to open in 2024 but does not yet have an official opening date.
The old reason campaigns still spend most their ad budget on TV
