“You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance... You have to get close.”[1]
- Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
_____
“If anything happens to me, just know I did not resist arrest or lynch myself.”
That is what I half-jokingly told my cousins before departing for Montgomery, Alabama—a state with a long history of racism and injustice toward individuals who look like me. Alabama, like much of the Deep South, is often associated more with Black pain and suffering than with Black defiance and freedom.
That is how I viewed Alabama—until I went.
Now, I cannot stop thinking about Montgomery and the history held within it.
What began as a work trip became a pilgrimage. I came to see Montgomery as a Mecca. It is not simply the “Cradle of the Confederacy.” It is a place of Black pride, resistance, endurance, and liberation.
You have to get close to see it.
_____
When I first learned we were going, I asked myself: Why Montgomery?
Once I arrived in Montgomery, it did not take long for me to understand why.
The city felt different. The air felt different, but in a good way. I could feel the weight of the history and the presence of the ancestors. As we moved through Montgomery, I realized that I was standing on holy ground and that this trip would be unlike anything I had experienced before.
Part of our time together would be spent visiting the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Sites: the Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, and Montgomery Square. Together, these four spaces tell a 400-year story of Black suffering, resistance, and liberation—from enslavement and racial terror to mass incarceration and the modern civil rights movement.
Our first stop was the Legacy Museum.
As soon as you walk inside, you are taken aboard a slave ship. You hear the roaring water. You read about and witness the horrors of the Middle Passage. The experience is an immediate gut punch.
From there, you walk through the plantation. You hear the stories of people who endured the whip and the chain. You hear songs of sorrow and survival. You continue through the nadir of American race relations, racial terror lynchings, and Jim Crow. Toward the end of the museum, you enter a section dedicated to mass incarceration.
Whenever I visit museums like this, I see myself somewhere in the exhibits.
But this one hit differently.
One immersive feature allows visitors to hear the stories of incarcerated people. You sit as though you are visiting someone in prison. You pick up the phone, look through the screen, and listen as they tell you their story.
In that moment, I remembered just how close I had come to being on the other side of that screen.
This history knew my name.
_____
Tears welled in my eyes as I was instantly taken back to 2018.
That year, I was arrested for a crime I did not commit—a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison. I spent a weekend in jail and 14 months on house arrest. My daughter was temporarily removed from my home, and I lived in uncertainty for nearly four years while on pretrial release.
During my weekend in jail, I met men who had accepted their fate because they could not afford bail. Even a short period of incarceration can result in job loss, housing instability, debt, and family separation. Those men had no real choice but to give in to a system designed to destroy them.
As Michelle Alexander said in The New Jim Crow:
“Today’s lynching is a felony charge. Today’s lynching is incarceration.”[2]
My felony charge left me dangling in the wind for nearly four years.
The noose of public shame and embarrassment tightened around me. I was unemployed, with no money or healthcare, as my mental health deteriorated. I was left dangling, my fate uncertain.
I was offered a plea deal twice.
Take five years of probation, accept a reduced charge, and try to move on with your life. That is essentially what they offered me.
I refused.
The final offer came one day before they dropped the charge against me. They were willing to let me plead guilty to a crime they knew I did not commit. But that is how the system works for too many Black Americans. It is not designed simply to determine guilt or innocence. It is designed to punish. To control. And, as the exception written into the Thirteenth Amendment reminds us, to enslave.
Even after the charge was dropped, the punishment remained. I was left with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and years of lost time. I wore an ankle monitor for 14 months. Although it was removed six years ago, sometimes I can still feel it around my leg.
I survived—but barely.
_____
Ultimately, that is what I took away from the Legacy Sites: survival.
I saw myself in those exhibits because they reminded me that Black men and women who came before me survived horrors I cannot imagine.
We survived the Middle Passage.
We survived slavery.
We survived lynchings and Jim Crow.
We survived the war on drugs.
We are surviving mass incarceration, police brutality, the erasure of our history, and renewed racial hostility.
But Montgomery also reminded me that survival is not the whole story.
We did not only survive. We resisted. We organized. We built communities. We created culture and influenced every aspect of American society. In the middle of pain and despair, we found ways to make joy, art, music, faith, family, and freedom.
Montgomery is filled with evidence of what was done to us, but it is also filled with evidence of what we did in response. That is what I could not see from a distance.
I went to Alabama expecting to encounter history.
Instead, I encountered a history that knew my name.
______________________________________________________________________________
Publisher’s Note
Brandon J. Sutton is a U.S. history professor at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) and the author of three books, most recently Musings of a Black Man in Trump’s America. He holds a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Applied Social Science in Political Science from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, as well as a Master of Divinity from Liberty University.
This essay reflects the author’s personal experiences, analysis, historical interpretation, and moral judgment. References to institutions, policies, and events are presented within the context of personal narrative and political critique and are informed by publicly available information, historical scholarship, and contemporary commentary. The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the positions of any employer, educational institution, or organization with which he is affiliated.
[1] [1] Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Spiegel & Grau, 2014, p. 14.
[2] Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press, 2012, p. 164.
- Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
_____
“If anything happens to me, just know I did not resist arrest or lynch myself.”
That is what I half-jokingly told my cousins before departing for Montgomery, Alabama—a state with a long history of racism and injustice toward individuals who look like me. Alabama, like much of the Deep South, is often associated more with Black pain and suffering than with Black defiance and freedom.
That is how I viewed Alabama—until I went.
Now, I cannot stop thinking about Montgomery and the history held within it.
What began as a work trip became a pilgrimage. I came to see Montgomery as a Mecca. It is not simply the “Cradle of the Confederacy.” It is a place of Black pride, resistance, endurance, and liberation.
You have to get close to see it.
_____
When I first learned we were going, I asked myself: Why Montgomery?
Once I arrived in Montgomery, it did not take long for me to understand why.
The city felt different. The air felt different, but in a good way. I could feel the weight of the history and the presence of the ancestors. As we moved through Montgomery, I realized that I was standing on holy ground and that this trip would be unlike anything I had experienced before.
Part of our time together would be spent visiting the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Sites: the Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, and Montgomery Square. Together, these four spaces tell a 400-year story of Black suffering, resistance, and liberation—from enslavement and racial terror to mass incarceration and the modern civil rights movement.
Our first stop was the Legacy Museum.
As soon as you walk inside, you are taken aboard a slave ship. You hear the roaring water. You read about and witness the horrors of the Middle Passage. The experience is an immediate gut punch.
From there, you walk through the plantation. You hear the stories of people who endured the whip and the chain. You hear songs of sorrow and survival. You continue through the nadir of American race relations, racial terror lynchings, and Jim Crow. Toward the end of the museum, you enter a section dedicated to mass incarceration.
Whenever I visit museums like this, I see myself somewhere in the exhibits.
But this one hit differently.
One immersive feature allows visitors to hear the stories of incarcerated people. You sit as though you are visiting someone in prison. You pick up the phone, look through the screen, and listen as they tell you their story.
In that moment, I remembered just how close I had come to being on the other side of that screen.
This history knew my name.
_____
Tears welled in my eyes as I was instantly taken back to 2018.
That year, I was arrested for a crime I did not commit—a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison. I spent a weekend in jail and 14 months on house arrest. My daughter was temporarily removed from my home, and I lived in uncertainty for nearly four years while on pretrial release.
During my weekend in jail, I met men who had accepted their fate because they could not afford bail. Even a short period of incarceration can result in job loss, housing instability, debt, and family separation. Those men had no real choice but to give in to a system designed to destroy them.
As Michelle Alexander said in The New Jim Crow:
“Today’s lynching is a felony charge. Today’s lynching is incarceration.”[2]
My felony charge left me dangling in the wind for nearly four years.
The noose of public shame and embarrassment tightened around me. I was unemployed, with no money or healthcare, as my mental health deteriorated. I was left dangling, my fate uncertain.
I was offered a plea deal twice.
Take five years of probation, accept a reduced charge, and try to move on with your life. That is essentially what they offered me.
I refused.
The final offer came one day before they dropped the charge against me. They were willing to let me plead guilty to a crime they knew I did not commit. But that is how the system works for too many Black Americans. It is not designed simply to determine guilt or innocence. It is designed to punish. To control. And, as the exception written into the Thirteenth Amendment reminds us, to enslave.
Even after the charge was dropped, the punishment remained. I was left with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and years of lost time. I wore an ankle monitor for 14 months. Although it was removed six years ago, sometimes I can still feel it around my leg.
I survived—but barely.
_____
Ultimately, that is what I took away from the Legacy Sites: survival.
I saw myself in those exhibits because they reminded me that Black men and women who came before me survived horrors I cannot imagine.
We survived the Middle Passage.
We survived slavery.
We survived lynchings and Jim Crow.
We survived the war on drugs.
We are surviving mass incarceration, police brutality, the erasure of our history, and renewed racial hostility.
But Montgomery also reminded me that survival is not the whole story.
We did not only survive. We resisted. We organized. We built communities. We created culture and influenced every aspect of American society. In the middle of pain and despair, we found ways to make joy, art, music, faith, family, and freedom.
Montgomery is filled with evidence of what was done to us, but it is also filled with evidence of what we did in response. That is what I could not see from a distance.
I went to Alabama expecting to encounter history.
Instead, I encountered a history that knew my name.
______________________________________________________________________________
Publisher’s Note
Brandon J. Sutton is a U.S. history professor at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) and the author of three books, most recently Musings of a Black Man in Trump’s America. He holds a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Applied Social Science in Political Science from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, as well as a Master of Divinity from Liberty University.
This essay reflects the author’s personal experiences, analysis, historical interpretation, and moral judgment. References to institutions, policies, and events are presented within the context of personal narrative and political critique and are informed by publicly available information, historical scholarship, and contemporary commentary. The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the positions of any employer, educational institution, or organization with which he is affiliated.
[1] [1] Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Spiegel & Grau, 2014, p. 14.
[2] Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press, 2012, p. 164.
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