It is Alabama's version of progress, featuring a revitalized downtown that has helped put this city on The New York Times list of top destinations to visit in 2018.
I get into a cab and ask the older, black woman driving me how she likes this new Montgomery.
For her, the new Montgomery can't eclipse the old. She has a story at the ready, recounting how her father, a veteran, tried to buy a house on a certain block.
The local newspaper covered his aspiration with a warning: "Block Going Black."
"That was in 1970," she said.
All of this uniquely American history makes this city a hard and necessary place to visit. And with the April 26 opening of two new venues — The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration — the history told in this city is both more complete and less triumphant.
The memorial captures the brutality and the scale of lynchings throughout the South, where more than 4,000 black men, women and children, died at the hands of white mobs between 1877 and 1950. Most were in response to perceived infractions -- walking behind a white woman, attempting to quit a job, reporting a crime or organizing sharecroppers.
Bryan Stevenson, a Harvard University-trained lawyer who created the Equal Justice Initiative in 1994 to fight for justice for people on death row, found himself transfixed by the South's history of lynching African Americans.
Stevenson and a team of researchers spent years documenting those lynchings, combing through court records and local newspapers -- which often notified the public that a lynching was coming -- and talking to local historians and family members of victims.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/lynching-memorial-montgomery-alabama/index.html
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