In December 2019, I was in the Deep South for the first time in my life. I came from California, bluest of the blue states, to Alabama, one of the reddest of the red. I came because after watching the HBO documentary True Justice several months earlier, I felt compelled to visit Montgomery, Alabama. Before the credits had stopped rolling, I knew I had to see the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice created by Bryan Stevenson, the subject of the film. Stevenson is the founder of the offices of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), which provides legal services to the poor, to children being tried and incarcerated as adults, and to inmates on death row. 

Montgomery celebrated its bicentennial in 2019. Situated in the southeastern part of the state near the Alabama River, the city became the state capital in 1846. The telegram ordering Confederate troops to fire on Fort Sumter, sparking the Civil War, was dispatched from Montgomery. The first White House of the Confederate States of America was established there and still stands across from the state capitol building. Montgomery is also considered the birthplace of the modern civil rights movement, the turbulent and bloody period from 1954 when the Supreme Court of the United States outlawed school segregation to the April morning in 1968 when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis. 

Downtown is dotted with historical markers that tell Montgomery’s story. When the Civil War began, Alabama had one of the largest slave populations in America for two reasons. One, Congress had banned the importation of slaves from Africa in 1808, shutting off supply from that continent. But the 1803 Louisiana Purchase added thousands of square miles of land to the U.S., much of which was cleared for cotton cultivation. As a result, slaves from upper southern states were relocated, many of them to Alabama. Two, cotton was the most important commodity in the world at that time, and Alabama had particularly fertile soil in which to grow the plant. Cotton was the raw fuel of the Industrial Revolution, and the demand for the fiber from mills in England drove an incessant and urgent need for slave labor in America. With enough land and enough slaves, a planter could make a fortune. Montgomery was a key hub in this trade. In half a century, slave traders moved thousands of people from the Upper South to the Lower South, swelling Alabama’s slave population from fewer than 40,000 to more than 400,000.