Why is Montgomery, Alabama so hard to reach?

No direct flights from Chicago, New York, San Francisco. You have to hopscotch into this Ground Zero of Civil Rights through Charlotte, Atlanta, D.C. Maybe it’s because many Americans want to forget this place.

Forget that this city was once one of the busiest slave-trading hubs in the country. Forget the bus boycott led by Rosa Parks. Forget the marchers led by Martin Luther King, Jr. across the Edmund Pettus Bridge heading toward the Alabama capitol while George Wallace stood on those steps saying, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

I am here over the weekend with a foundation that usually meets twice a year in one of the two cities where it works. Neither city is Montgomery. But the Board chair came here two years ago, had a transformative experience, and made the case that the times we’re in now demanded we come—to remember, not forget, and fuel present and future work. It was vital, both for the sake of our organization’s work and for the sake of our roles as residents and citizens of this country.

As we walk through the Equal Justice Initiative Museum tracing the arc from slavery to Reconstruction to civil rights to mass incarceration, I carry my own Catholic liberation-theology lineage into this—where justice is sacred, where God is not neutral, and where current lopsided outcomes and treating people as less than human are evidence that things are not as they were intended to be.

Every day I feel the tectonic pressure of two forces grinding into each other: from my inner depths, my justice purpose which wakes me up every morning, and from outer depths, the return of racial supremacy into the mainstream.

Every day I feel the tectonic pressure of two forces grinding into each other: from my inner depths, my justice purpose which wakes me up every morning, and from outer depths, the return of racial supremacy into the mainstream.

Disparity and Prosperity Affecting Us All

Why is it that so few get outraged that the United States, with 1.8 million incarcerated, which has the largest per capita level of imprisonment in the world, jails Black and Latino people at disproportionate levels—nearly 70 percent of the total?

The inequities are not siloed. The justice gap is only part of the story. When we add in health disparities, wage gaps, employment barriers, and wealth-and-investment exclusions, we can see the magnitude of the overarching economic impact. Health inequities alone cost the U.S. economy well over $400 billion a year. Labor-market racial and gender gaps led to $2.6 trillion in lost output in a single year. The racial gaps in income, home ownership, and business ownership have cost the economy up to $3.9 trillion in unrealized potential.

This points to an entire nation performing at a fraction of its capacity.

On top of the economic cost is the price we pay in polarization and dehumanization. The American Psychological Association finds that three out of four adults now cite the current political climate as a significant source of stress.

The American Psychological Association finds that three out of four adults now cite the current political climate as a significant source of stress.

And yet, the story can’t end at inequity, or collective loss, alone.

Black achievement is one of the most powerful counterforces to the nation’s deficits.

Collective Freedom

Across science, medicine, technology, public policy, and the hard sciences, Black innovators have shaped the modern world. From George Washington Carver’s agricultural breakthroughs—credited with generating hundreds of billions in long-term value—to the Black mathematicians whose calculations underpinned a $200-billion space program, to the Black scientists who have driven breakthroughs in immunology and environmental science. Black achievement has generated multi-trillion-dollar economic impact over the past century. Black entrepreneurs have built industries, not just companies. McKinsey notes that Black participation today drives more than $1.6 trillion annually, and the nation could gain another $1 trillion each year by removing the structural barriers that continue to limit Black innovation and opportunity.

Walking through the Equal Justice Initiative Museum’s low-light exhibits, with videos spilling the voices of enslaved people, civil-rights protesters, and people jailed for life for nonviolent crimes, I feel the collision of my lineage with my present. A lineage that believes social prosperity comes from justice and a present where personal prosperity comes from checks paid by a system that still perpetuates inequality.

This is why not overlooking Montgomery matters. Why not forgetting matters. Why this moment matters. And why, ultimately, the choices we face ahead matter.

This is why memory matters. Why this not forgetting matters. And why, ultimately, the choices ahead of us matter.

Silence about exclusion is chocking our vitality. And the legacy approaches—megaphone activism on one end and corporate coded-speech on the other—are not enough. Something new has to take shape. Something grounded in truth, clarity, courage, and pragmatism.

Addressing racial injustice is a collective act of survival and thrival. Currently polarization is ripping our social fabric. Regardless of our politics, do we really want to keep living this way?

The way forward is to find common cause—because that’s the path toward a country that works for all.

And this is what Montgomery doesn’t want us to forget.