[2] The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) was founded in 1989 in Montgomery, Alabama, by attorney Bryan Stevenson, who has served as the organization's executive director ever since.

"[3] It has worked to eliminate excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerate innocent death row prisoners, confront abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aid children prosecuted as adults.

"[5] EJI argued in US Supreme Court cases Miller v. Alabama and Jackson v. Hobbs that the mandatory sentences constituted "cruel and unusual punishment" and were therefore unconstitutional.

[1] In Montgomery v. Louisiana (2016), the Court ruled that the decision in Miller v. Alabama had to be applied retroactively, and required those sentencing to consider "children's diminished culpability, and heightened capacity for change.

In April 2015, EJI won the release on different grounds of Anthony Ray Hinton, a black man who had been on death row in Alabama for nearly 30 years; he had continued to maintain his innocence.

The report classified the lynchings as racial terrorism, designed to suppress the African-American community, especially as the southern legislatures were passing new laws and constitutions to disenfranchise most blacks at the turn of the century.

Stevenson and EJI staff believe this past must be acknowledged and commemorated "with memorials and monuments that encourage and create space for the 'restorative power of truthtelling' ", as has been done by other countries and communities.

Rather than ending, according to Equal Justice Initiative's head Bryan Stevenson, slavery "evolved": sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration, convict leasing, and lynching.

The museum reflects "Stevenson's view that, unlike in [post-Apartheid] South Africa or post-Nazi Germany or many other societies traumatized by history, we've hardly begun to grapple with ours — and so cannot yet get beyond it.

"[14] Opened on April 26, 2018, also in Montgomery, the Memorial is intended to call attention to "an aspect of the nation's racial history that's discussed the least", according to Equal Justice Initiative Bryan Stevenson: the 4,400 victims of "terror lynchings" black people from 1877 through 1950.

"[15][16] Starting in 2021, EJI acquired 17 acres in Montgomery on the Alabama River to erect the National Monument to Freedom, a 43 feet tall, 155 feet long wall depicting 122,000 surnames adopted by the 4.7 million formerly enslaved African Americans listed on the 1870 United States census, the first census to list African Americans entirely as free people.

The park also includes various sculptures created by Charles Gaines, Alison Saar, and Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, Simone Leigh, Wangechi Mutu, Rose B. Simpson, Theaster Gates, Kehinde Wiley, and Hank Willis Thomas.