As I mentioned last month, I’ve now been a part of Facing History & Ourselves for two entire years. And what better way for me to celebrate this milestone on a personal level than by connecting and learning with the entire organization face-to-face?
For those of you who may not know, 194 Facing History & Ourselves staff members—from 30 US states, Canada, Mexico, and the United Kingdom—met in person late last month for our All-Staff Summit in Montgomery, Alabama. This was our first chance to convene in such large numbers since 2023, a time period during which the organization has experienced everything from joy and growth to challenges and sorrow.
With a workforce as distributed as Facing History’s, I have come to value the times we can all gather in one place as vital to our work and culture. I know my colleagues feel the same way—it made me deeply happy to see so many faces light up as Facing History staff members were able to share space together. We are truly our best selves when we can take advantage of the opportunity to commune with one another, something that grounds us and inspires us to do our best work toward our ultimate goal: serving schools, teachers, and students.
Under the theme of "Navigating as a Community Toward Justice," we chose Montgomery, AL as the location for our summit due to the influence it has had on US History from the Reconstruction Era through the civil rights movement, and its influence today as a state capital. From Rosa Parks and the Bus Boycott to the Freedom Riders and the March from Selma, Montgomery is—in the words of one featured speaker from the Summit—a place where "the veil of history is thin." Although we focus a great deal of our time on analyzing the civil rights era, many of our staff members had never actually walked the streets and breathed the air from this part of the country. I’m proud to say: Our people really showed up.
We were all willing students, completely open to contributing and learning from each other. Staff members not only led expert facilitation sessions that helped us better understand Reconstruction and civil rights history, but also introduced ways to empathetically communicate with each other and foster respectful dialogue on difficult subjects. We even had the chance to host a panel of Facing History teachers from Tennessee who spoke to their personal journeys and experiences with Facing History curriculum, professional development, and pedagogy. While many of our staff members work hand-in-hand with schools and districts, as well as in classrooms with educators and students, I know it was enlightening and gratifying for the entire group to hear directly about our positive organizational impact from the mouths of those whom we work to support every single day.
At the risk of repeating myself, it’s hard to overstate how significant the week was for Facing History as a collection of living, breathing human beings. While each day was full of fascinating learning opportunities (some of us toured the SPLC’s Civil Rights Memorial Center, the Rosa Parks Museum, the Alabama Archives, or other locations), of particular note was the day that the entire organization visited the Legacy Sites founded by lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative: the Legacy Museum, Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. If you’ve been to these places before you know exactly what I’m talking about, so I’m sure you’ll understand if I describe them a little bit for readers who are not familiar.
Built inside a former cotton warehouse, the Legacy Museum covers 400 years of history—from the origins of the transatlantic slave trade through racial terrorism, the Jim Crow Era, and mass incarceration. Not only did we experience so much first-person history through primary sources and data, but the museum is full of evocative art installations and interactive exhibits that truly forced us to reckon with the human aspects of the atrocities that can feel dry or distant in a history book. After confronting the staggering numbers and details of the slave trade, we walked through a room full of crashing digital waves and sculptures of Black bodies buried in the sand—a poignant visual reminder of those who perished en route to lives of bondage. One exhibit included countless actual historical newspaper ads for enslaved people who were to be listed for sale at auction, while another heartbreaking display focused on the post-emancipation attempts of the formerly enslaved to find loved ones from whom they had been forcibly separated earlier in their lives. An especially meaningful moment for me was seeing a display of jarred soil collected from lynching sites across the country—backed by Billie Holiday’s iconic "Strange Fruit"—which truly hammered home the importance of shining a light on tragedy to illuminate a path to a brighter future.
Next we headed to the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, which lies along a bend of the Alabama River—a waterway commonly used to transport enslaved people to Montgomery's downtown market—and is filled with art as well as original historical pieces. Walking silently as a group through these 17 acres, we had the opportunity to step into original 170-year-old cotton plantation dwellings while reading first-hand accounts of those who attempted to flee the very land we moved across. Sculptures by acclaimed artists like Alison Saar and Hank Willis Thomas tied our experience to the land and the people, once again bringing our hearts to the forefront to join our intellectual selves. Our visit ended in front of the National Monument to Freedom, a stunning 43x155-foot wall covered with the 122,000 surnames adopted by the 4.7 million emancipated Black people first listed in the 1870 Census.
We finished our day at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a site to commemorate the victims of racial terrorism and lynching. We first moved past a sculpture by Kwame Akoto-Bamfo dedicated to the memory of the victims of the slave trade that depicts shackled statues of all age groups, mothers and babies alike. This piece struck me and has stayed with me in the weeks since. I'm not an “artistic” person—but there's just something beyond words about art that resonated with my emotional core. It's one thing to read a book describing the horrors, but another thing altogether to see the terror and pain depicted on human faces. Entering the memorial itself, the path takes visitors slowly through 805 hanging steel rectangles designed in the shape of coffins, each etched with the location and name of the Black victims of lynchings. As we continued into the memorial the floor began to slope down, creating the illusion of the "coffins" rising up—physically evoking the devastating act of hoisting a body into the air. We moved reverently through this space as a group, necks craned up or eyes downcast, and more than a few tears were shed as the experience began to overwhelm us.
It can be jarring to study atrocities through the lens of your own identity. While compartmentalization can sometimes be the way I choose to cope with these hard histories as a Black man, our week in Montgomery reminded me of the necessity of sitting in these spaces—of not divorcing myself from my own humanity, of giving myself up to the power of learning in context.
We know how the story of America began, and we know pieces of the journey that took us to where we are today. We can’t forget that so much of our work is about filling in those gaps, and I was unbelievably proud to see my colleagues engaging with each other, reflecting on these moments, and refusing to get trapped in bifurcation, oversimplification, or a “we vs. they” mentality. At Facing History & Ourselves, we center ourselves as learners—it takes something truly special to serve your colleagues the same way you serve educators and students, and to show up always willing to learn and have your perspective changed.
It was bittersweet to part ways with our colleagues at the end of the week as we all headed back to our homes across the globe to resume our work. But I am feeling humbled, I am feeling full of grace and understanding, and I am feeling full of joy. I am inspired and motivated to take the lessons learned in Montgomery and apply them to our mission of building a democracy free of bigotry and hate, one where hearts are filled with grace, understanding, and light—despite the dark histories we cannot ignore.
About the Author: Desmond K. Blackburn, PhD is President and Chief Executive Officer at Facing History & Ourselves, a national nonprofit organization that works with school systems to use lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to bigotry and hate. He has spent nearly 30 years as a career educator (teacher, principal, superintendent, adjunct professor, author). To find out how Dr. Blackburn and the Facing History team can support you, reach out to support [at] facinghistory.org.
