[5] The memorial is connected to The Legacy Museum, which opened the same day, near the site of a former market in Montgomery where enslaved people were sold.

EJI hopes that the memorial "inspires communities across the nation to enter an era of truth-telling about racial injustice and their own local histories.

[5] The six-acre site includes sculptures and displays from Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, Dana King, and Hank Willis Thomas.

There are writings and words from Toni Morrison, Elizabeth Alexander, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. A reflection space is located on the memorial site in honor Ida B.

[10] By studying records in counties across the United States, researchers documented almost 4400 racial terror lynchings in the post-Reconstruction era between 1877 and 1950.

[11][3][12] A conversation about the difficulty of doing research on lynchings and racial terror violence was started when an error was found at the memorial not long after its opening.

[2][19] Hank Willis Thomas's sculpture, Rise Up, features a wall, from which emerge statues of black heads and bodies raising their arms in surrender to the viewer.

The Equal Justice Initiative is asking representatives of each of the counties to claim their monument and establish a memorial on home ground to lynching victims, and to conduct related public education.

The sculpture, seven shackled figures of all ages and genders interlocked together, is part of larger project Akoto-Bamfo began in Accra, Ghana where he creates clay busts of formerly enslaved people in an attempt to preserve their memories and livelihood, a common tradition practiced by the Akan people in Ghana.

[27] American artist Dana King's Guided by Justice is a rendering of the Montgomery Bus Boycott during the Civil Rights Movement.

[28] King's sculpture aims to have viewers reconsider the mythology of the heroines of the bus boycott: mythologizing historical figures like Rosa Parks draws attention away from the thousands of other black people who were central in the success of the bus boycott; the three anonymous figures and the adjacent footprints demonstrate the importance of these "silent activists".

Though most of their bodies covered, their hands are clearly visible, referencing the many stories of unarmed Black men being shot and brutalized by the police despite their innocence.

The National Memorial uses Thomas’ sculpture as a connection to the present, a kind of call to action that the fight for justice and liberation is ongoing.

[28] Prior to the 1990s, there was limited acknowledgement in Montgomery of the painful legacy of slavery and racism, although the city had numerous monuments related to the Confederacy, many erected by private organizations.

[31] Lee Sentell of the Alabama Department of Tourism acknowledged that the National Memorial offers a different and painful encounter: "Most museums are somewhat objective and benign...This one is not.

[33] Publishers of the Montgomery Advertiser, prompted by the establishment of the memorial, reviewed and formally apologized for its historic coverage of lynchings, which was often inflammatory against black victims, describing it as "our shame" and saying "we were wrong".

[17] The museum features artwork by Hank Willis Thomas, Glenn Ligon, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Titus Kaphar, and Sanford Biggers.

One of its displays is a collection of soil from lynching sites across the United States, a step in EJI's Community Remembrance Project.