EJI’s Recovery Room: A Breath of Fresh Air.
On September 11, 2021, I visited the newly expanded Equal Justice Initiative Museum, From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration.
The very end of the EJI’s new museum is a “Recovery Room,” a large hall filled with portraits of folks representing Black excellence in resistance to oppression across American centuries. In some ways, it echoes another of the exhibits, a wall of slightly larger than life-size mugshots of folks arrested alongside Mrs. Rosa Parks in a local act of civil disobedience. In both cases, I’ve rarely seen a more earnest collection of everyday people.
Graciousness.
The “Recovery Room” is a wide, tall hall filled with larger-than-life portraits.
Most portraits are vividly colored and put the black-and-white mugshots in context.
Just like Mrs. Parks that faithful day,
Each face had actively and individually.
Rose against oppression,
In their own light.
I recognized writers, dancers, musicians, and composers.
Inventors, educators, and industrialists.
Poets, painters, politicians, preachers, and teachers.
The enslaved, the emancipated, the entangled, and the freed.
All were activists of all flavors.
We needed this recovery time.
We needed this feast after
The weight of the heavy his-story we’d consumed throughout the museum.
After the opening, near suffocating Middle Passage exhibit.
After the engaging animated short films about open- and cold-cases of racial injustice.
After many canny timelines, pictorial exhibits, and artistic installations.
After the larger-than-life images of mobs of white kids protesting school desegregation.
After the life-size 3D re-enactments of enslaved people giving testimonials, or
Singing hymns we still use today.
After all this, the Recovery Room left us glowing with pride and joy,
Feeling full of fire.
I moaned along with the tunes, there, too.
Look, way up there!
That’s a Revolutionary War soldier I learned about in elementary school.
Wow! there’s that abolitionist writer, and
Next to her is a Black Pantheress I met as a kid!
Nice! There’s the Haitian revolutionary I played in my first Black History month play.
Ooh! Over there’s an author I fell in love with in, high school.
I am so happy to see my favorite writers and collect biography ideas for my reading list.
Yes, there she is!
There’s that mighty share-cropping activist who went toe-toe with Jim Crow in Congress.
And across from her, a young man who years later and miles away did the same.
And we all recognize the face of that Black publisher, painter, movie- or music-maker.
We are surrounded by wonder.
They hover all around us leading us to higher ground.
The Recovery Room is a sort of planetarium of the universe of black stars,
Reminding us not only that we are a small speck in the vast universe -
The universe of resistance -
But we’re vastly inter-connected.
Each shining star shines its light upon another and another.
Even across the ages,
Even without knowing,
Each one matters to the next and to the next and so forth.
Shine your star.
The sofas in the center of the Recovery Room, and its uplifting music allow you to linger.
Your eyes survey each portrait for identification — names of the people and places.
Your mind investigates each corner and crevice of their faces.
Your spirit brightens with each point of recognition.
Adoring the diversity of expressions, period style and attire of the vast array of excellence –
Those who gave much to ‘the cause’,
None of whom we can romanticize as just having lived what bell hooks calls: ‘the good life’.
Or, lived during a romantic time to which we’d like to return,
To make America great again.
Even if given a time machine, we know
Each of those faces survived through times of horror.
The flip side of the museum’s Recovery Room is, of course,
EJI’s Lynching Memorial nearby, which
Guests are invited to visit after the museum.
The project first began by creating murals of jars of dirt collected near every known lynching.
Then, EJI hung a large, rusted iron pillar for each county, listing (known) victims by date.
We can see that, at times, entire families were lynched.
The pillars are hung so cleverly that one has to experience this artistic installation in person.
At some point,
Visiting the Recovery Room becomes a guessing game.
The portraits hang up till the high ceiling,
Beautifully framed, in no particular order, and without labels.
Digital kiosks stand in the corners of the room, allowing us to
Swipe a large screen, pick, and poke at each portrait, and
Dig a little bit deeper into their story.
Why show us so much triumph after exposing so much tragedy?
Why feed us the faces of our heroes after showing all the muck they faced?
Why give us so much sunshine after marching through histories of darkness?
Here, in the museum’s final exhibit, the Recovery Room,
We’re reminded that all these warriors moved forward, even when they (were) stumbled.
We must continue to do the same.
Like lotuses,
Which blossom best in the murkiest of muds,
We rise.
