The Equal Justice Initiative announced Wednesday it is building a 17-acre park to memorialize the history of slavery in America – including a monument to the 4 million enslaved African Americans emancipated after the Civil War.

The Freedom Monument Sculpture Park will be on the Alabama River in Montgomery. The centerpiece will be a 43-foot-tall, 150-foot long National Monument to Freedom. The monument will feature more than 120,000 unique surnames of former slaves documented at the time.

EJI said visitors to the interactive park will have gain insight into the lives of 10 million Black people who were enslaved in America. They can step into a train car like the ones used to traffic enslaved people to Montgomery and see an authentic slave dwelling.

The Freedom Sculpture Monument Park will open in early 2024, EJI said. The park will become the third component in the EJI’s Legacy Sites in Montgomery, joining the Legacy Museum, which examines the history of slavery and its aftermath, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, an outdoor memorial to victims of lynching, which opened in 2018. EJI opened an expanded Legacy Museum in 2021.

“In order to deepen our collective understanding of racial injustice and its impact on contemporary issues, our country must reckon with the painful history and legacy of slavery,” Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of EJI, said. “Historical examination and memorialization are critical to help move us forward and build healthier communities, and we’re honored to work with some of the greatest contemporary artists to provide a cultural space for all visitors to engage with this vital part of history.”

The Freedom Monument Sculpture Park will feature newly commissioned works by artists Alison Saar and Kwame Akoto-Bamfo and sculptors Wangechi Mutu, Rose B. Simpson, Theaster Gates, and Kehinde Wiley .

A plaza will include writings by Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and James Weldon Johnson. Visitors can honor the formerly enslaved people by placing flowers in a stream that flows by the monument.

Stevenson founded EJI in 1989, won national acclaim as a lawyer representing death row inmates and others, and wrote the best-selling book, “Just Mercy,” the story of exonerated death row inmate Walter McMillian, which was developed into a movie starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx.

EJI is a nonprofit organization that says it is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, challenging racial and economic injustice, and protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable.

“Slavery touched almost every corner of the world — from the Americas to Africa and Europe —and we invite everyone to visit Freedom Monument Sculpture Park for a profound experience that will illuminate challenging aspects of our past, while inspiring a more hopeful future shaped by truth and justice,” Stevenson said.

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