Grappling with a difficult legacy

By Summer Cuatepotzo Perez

Impactful. Speechless. Astounded. Disgust. Anger. Confusion. Sadness.

None of these can describe how emotionally overwhelmed I personally felt, my physical response- tears. You ask… where in the world did you experience this? Or what happened that made you feel this way? The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, which offers the cruel American history of racial injustice. This museum is unique because it’s like you have traveled back into history to see the cruel truth that has been hidden but the only constraint is that you can not do anything to change the past or even help those who were suffering. I invite anyone that has the chance to come down to the Legacy Museum!

With a narrative of wanting more power and to be wealthy at the cost of others and degradation of the environment. What surprises me the most is that European settlers came to conquer the America’s at the cost of millions of indigenous tribes killed, losing their homes and forced into labor and widespread diseases. In the report called The Transatlantic Slave Trade, published by Equal Justice Initiative, the Historian David Briton Davis called this time “the greatest known population loss in human history” once this population went down they had to look for another source of slavery that would help them get rich. You know how the story goes and is currently still an issue that has led to greater problems towards people of color and low income communities which leads us further into the bigger issue of social injustice.

The sad truth is that the European settlers came to the Americas to look for freedom and equality but resorted to cruelty by separating families, millions of people losing their homes, the killing of both innocent kids and adults, lyching, sexual assault, auctioning people, and disenfranchisement.