THE ART OF MEMORY

An ambitious new park attempts to tell the history of slavery through sculpture.

- DOREEN ST. FÉLIX

The National Monument to Freedom, in Montgomery, Alabama, is a giant book, standing forty-three feet high and a hundred and fifty feet wide. The book is propped wide open, and engraved on its surface are the names of more than a hundred and twenty thousand Black people, documented in the 1870 census, who were emancipated after the Civil War. On the spine of the book is a credo written for the dead:

Your children love you.

The country you built must honor you.

We acknowledge the tragedy of your enslavement.

We commit to advancing freedom in your name.

The history of slavery is one of elisions and silences, of moving on. The civil-rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, who designed the monument, has taken a different approach, displaying the realities of enslavement on a monumental scale. His colossal book is the centerpiece of the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, which opens in late March. Set on a high bluff overlooking the Alabama River, the park presents a painstaking narrative history of slavery, using first-person recollections, historical artifacts, and more than fifty sculptures. The park is the third site in Montgomery created in recent years by Stevenson and his legal nonprofit, the Equal Justice Initiative.