But he says no attraction has taken the point of view visitors will encounter at the National Peace and Justice Memorial.

"Most museums are somewhat objective and benign," Sentell says. "This one is not. This is aggressive, political. ... It's a part of American history that has never been addressed as much in your face as this story is being told."

Stevenson acknowledges the experience will be painful to encounter, but he says there are models where the same thing happens, such as the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the Apartheid Museum in South Africa.

"Why would you talk about the difficult past?"

The Equal Justice Initiative is also opening a Legacy Museum that draws a direct line from slavery to lynching and to issues the country faces today, including mass incarceration.

"There's a lot of conflict. There's a lot of tension," says Stevenson. "We're dealing with police violence. We deal with these huge disparities in our criminal justice system. You know, if everything was wonderful you could ask the question, 'Why would you talk about the difficult past?' But everything is not wonderful."

The museum is downtown, in a building that was once a slave warehouse.

"When people come in and they see the statement on the wall that says, 'You are standing on a site where enslaved people were warehoused,' it just puts a different consciousness in your mind of the connection and the history," says Sia Sanneh, a senior attorney with the Equal Justice Initiative.

The first exhibit is a series of slave pens, where ghostlike figures speak from behind bars, telling stories taken from slave narratives about being separated from their families by slave traders. There's a wall constructed of jars of soil collected from lynching sites around the country. And representing the modern era, a replica of a prison visitation booth where you can hear a former inmate describe being on Alabama's death row for 30 years before his conviction was overturned.

Both the museum and the memorial are being welcomed by the downtown business association. President Clay McInnis says it's time for a reckoning.

"I'm a millennial. I think our generation is ready for real and honest conversation," he says. "Do we want to get farther apart from each other or closer together?"

McInnis, who is white, is third generation in a family that exemplifies the forces that have shaped Montgomery — one grandfather was an ally of segregationist Gov. George Wallace; the other, a friend of Frank Johnson, the Alabama federal judge who dismantled segregation.

"How do you reconcile that on the third generation?" he asks. "You have conversations about it."

McInnis says EJI's new cultural spaces are a way of "putting our city on therapy, and our country."

Along with the dialogue, the memorial has also served as a catalyst for activity in the surrounding neighborhood where historic homes had been deteriorating for years.

"You can actually see the memorial through the trees here," says Justin Hampton, looking out a window on the second story of the circa-1900 simplified Victorian home he and his wife are renovating.

Hampton is African-American and runs a community development organization. The house is on a street that was all-white when his mother was growing up nearby.

"She would walk by; she would be called n*****," he says. "And would have rocks thrown at them."

Hampton says his family living here is a turning point — part of the changing narrative.

"It's told that slaves were actually walked up this street," he says, pointing to the plantation house at the end of the block.

Hampton says that history and the culture of being separated by skin color have perpetuated.

"The lifestyles we live are still segregated and siloed, especially in the South, especially in this city," he says. "So that leads to a continuation of the sort of patterns of access to things that have always been."

Hampton says it's time to face those demons, and the memorial can help both emotionally and with the physical transformation that's happening around it.

"It's just a good feeling to know that you're a part of change," Hampton says. "On the front end of seeing some things happen in this neighborhood, and for it to be something that hasn't been. Not that it hasn't been — that it never was."

The National Peace and Justice Memorial includes a section where counties can claim a replica of their lynching monument — to take home and start similar conversations throughout the country.

Copyright NPR 2021.