Bryan Stevenson Says a Quest for “Historical Authenticity” Inspired the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park

Millions of people are already familiar with Bryan Stevenson for his work on the Equal Justice Initiative or his memoir, Just Mercy, which was adapted into a SAG-nominated film starring Michael B. Jordan. For the past two years, Stevenson has been pouring himself into another artistic extension of his advocacy, the newly opened Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. The park, seated on 17 acres along the Alabama River, has a deep-rooted historical significance as a place where enslaved African people were once trafficked. The park is the third of EJI’s Legacy Sites, which also include the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, all in the city known as the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement.

At the park, the history and life stories of enslaved and Indigenous people are told alongside beautiful works of art by Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, Alison Saar, Kehinde Wiley, and many others. Simone Leigh’s “Brick House,” which Stevenson first saw in Venice during the Biennale, sets the stage: a magnificent 16-foot bronze bust of a Black woman with an afro framed by two cornrows with cowrie shells at the end.

Hank Willis Thomas, whose work is also featured in the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, contributed a large sculpted piece called “Strike” made of stainless steel (a smaller version appears in the Giants exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum). Inspired by printmaker Louis Lozowick, it depicts one arm poised to strike, while another arm holds it at the wrist.

“I always see myself as a brushstroke on Bryan’s canvas,” says Willis Thomas. “I think of him as the conceptual artist and the landscape of Montgomery, Alabama is his canvas. He’s telling stories using various artists and their practices and doing it in a masterful way. I see my work in service of the mission of the Equal Justice Initiative, and I hope that that is how it is perceived.”

The culmination of the sculpture park is the “National Monument to Freedom,” a 43-by-155-foot monument designed by Stevenson himself. The monument lists 122,000 last names that were taken by formerly enslaved people and listed in the 1870 census: Easley, Hamilton, Morgan, Richmond, Tolliver… In front of the monument are four pillars: perseverance, hope, strength, and faith.

“No matter where you are in the park, even when you’re in the midst of really tough stuff, looking at the laws of slavery, the holding pen, you can see in the horizon on the other side, that monument to freedom,” says Stevenson, who said the height of the monument felt crucial to him. “You know that freedom is coming. Which is not what our enslaved foreparents knew. They didn’t have the monument there because it was a visible demonstration that it was coming. But we do.”

Ahead, read the full interview with Stevenson.

Vanity Fair: Where exactly did the inception of the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park begin?

Bryan Stevenson: It began really during the pandemic when we had some content in the museum that I had developed, which was critical of plantation tourism. I went to Charleston, I went to places all across the country, and I was really struck by how almost impossible it is to tell an honest story at these spaces where the built architecture is so committed to racial hierarchy. The big house dominates everything, and the lies of the enslavers are the things that become the focus of these spaces. The lives of Black people are literally marginalized. Then I started thinking, well, what would it take to create a space where we talked honestly about the legacy of slavery and the institution of slavery? That started me thinking about finding a place that had some historical authenticity that wasn’t dominated by this built environment, which just inverts the story that we’re trying to tell.

Courtesy of Equal Justice Initiative ∕ Human Pictures.

I had been doing a lot of work and just talking about my own history; my great-grandparents were enslaved in Caroline County, Virginia, and my paternal great-grandparents were enslaved in Maryland. When we found this land, I thought, yeah, we could do something here.

I began to think if we had a park that was filled with great art that helps you both understand the brutality of slavery, but also the humanity of the enslaved, it would be a way of helping people navigate this hard history that leads up to this triumphant, extraordinary emancipation that represents so much more than we’ve acknowledged.

How long did it take you to start to gather and put the pieces together?

It’s been pretty quick. We bought the space two years ago. We acquired the space and then immediately started thinking about a narrative for the space. I knew that because of its proximity to the river, I would want to talk about the history of Indigenous peoples before Europeans came. I’ve been frustrated about the narrative landscape that exists because it always starts with the arrival of Europeans, as if there were no Indigenous peoples here before. And we worked with a community [the Muscogee], not far from here, that are creating a pre-colonial existence for native people. And we also wanted to talk about Africa before Europeans, when you have elected officials saying, “Oh, slavery did good things for Black people, they learned skills.” It’s just so ignorant and misguided, that talking about the empires of Africa and their achievements in metallurgy and astronomy and agriculture long before Europe, was a really important part of the narrative we wanted to develop. And then just the relationship to the African continent.

The national monument was really the beginning. When I discovered the 1870 census and thought this is a really important moment in the history of people who are descendants of enslaved folks. A monument that allowed people to see their name, could be really, really, really powerful. And first it was going to be ten feet tall, then it was going to be 20 feet tall. And I said, “It needs to be big.” We had a lot of names that we had that we wanted to put on. And I said, “No, we have to put all of them on.”

I’m really happy with the way it came out. You know my thought was this is a book on history that no one has opened, so we’re going to open the book.

In the afternoon, because it faces west, when the sun shines through the trees and you see all of these shadows of trees on the wall, and it gets these bright gold spots, it becomes almost dynamic, on fire, the way it looks. There’s something appropriate about that.

Now, something that was going through my mind as we’re in Montgomery and as we’re coming upon a crucial election—what’s the reception been like from the community?

We were very covert. We didn’t tell people what we were doing in 2018 when we opened the museum and the memorial, because I didn’t want them to react to the idea with so little preparation. Our schools haven’t prepared us for that. What we wanted them to react to was the experience. When we opened, we had a concert. We had all these great people come—Stevie Wonder and Dave Matthews—and people were really excited about that. So the first emotion, to their shock and surprise, was excitement. And then hundreds of thousands of people started coming to Montgomery, and the restaurants got full, and there was a need to build more hotels, and the airports were full, and all of these local businesses started to emerge. Transportation, tour guides and people were very excited about that. People were much less comfortable badmouthing it when it was filling. I get stopped every time I leave from all kinds of people saying, “I think what you’re doing is great.” So it’s been a lot better than I feared, to be honest. I think a lot of it has to do with just sort of our approach. This is for everybody. I think we’re all burdened by this history of racial inequality—everybody, white people, Black people, immigrants, everybody. We all can get to someplace better if we’re willing to talk honestly and reckon with this.

What are you hoping visitors will take specifically from the park experience?

I hope they’ll take from it that we owe the people who were enslaved in this country more recognition, more acknowledgment, more honor and that if we can create that relationship with that community, then we’ll have the courage to learn more about why they should be honored; why their decision to commit to America, and community and citizenship after emancipation instead of retribution and revenge is so remarkable. And I think if we can face the ugliest parts of the history of slavery, then we will gain a sort of power to not be intimidated by truth-telling, broadly speaking. And that I think will lead to a new era. I’m hoping we create out of this experience an era of truth and justice, truth and repair, truth and reconciliation, truth and restoration. I also hope for Black Americans that there will be an opportunity to discover that we’re not just the heirs of enslavement and bondage and pain and suffering and lynching and segregation. We are that, but we’re also the heirs of people who found a way to persevere, to stand strong, to hold on to their dignity, to love in the midst of sorrow. And that legacy of hope and strength and capacity is something that we need to embrace. And we need to understand that we have a lot coursing through our body and our DNA that that gets us not just to trauma, but to triumph. There’s a trauma story, no question, but there’s also a triumph story. I tell my young clients, you shouldn’t underestimate your ability to overcome anything, given who you are and what made you. I just think that’s something we need right now, to be reminded of.

Was there any part of putting this park together that was hard for you?

I think the law of slavery section was something I had encountered earlier when I was doing some writing, but it’s really challenging because you begin to see and understand so much that most of those laws empowered any white person to have the authority to create punishment for any Black person, free or enslaved. So it didn’t end with emancipation. When you see the laws codifying that kind of violence against Black bodies, you begin to recognize in a different way just how we’ve come to be where we are.

I go to prisons today, I stand with people who have been condemned. I see so much pain and suffering in the places where I work. And I think it’s only when we begin to understand how much damage we’re doing that we have any chance of improving these conditions. I think that’s true for the history of slavery. When we understand the brutality of it, we’ll begin to understand that there are remedies that we still need to create to recover from such a brutal history.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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