Ngeri Nnachi - MLMP Community Engagement Manager - Introduces Herself and the Trip!

My name is Ngeri Nnachi and I’m the Community Engagement Manager with the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project. I am excited to join the MLMP 2023 Civil Rights Bus Trip to document this journey of honoring a history that I hold dearly in representing what community means to me. 

I look forward to bringing you all along with me as I speak to critical figures with wealths of knowledge to share and walk sacred ground where many before me took steps toward freedom for me and others. Today we visited the Mothers of Gynecology monument honoring three enslaved women, Lucy, Betsey, and Anarcha, who had their bodies violently sacrificed for science at the hands of J. Marion Sims. Their experience highlights the racial disparities in healthcare that Black women still experience today with our pain being ignored and our abilities to consent being taken away from us.  

Tomorrow we will visit the Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, two powerful commemorations to lynching created by the The Equal Justice Initiative (led by Bryan Stevenson) that opened on April 26, 2018. While I’ve been to both spaces before, the power of the grounds leave me absolutely in awe each time. The Legacy Museum was relocated, expanded and reopened in September 2021 with new exhibits, updated forms of lynching that have happened in present-day, and incredibly compelling imagery including beautiful sculptures from Ghanian Sculptor Kwame Akoto-Bamfo. 

Over the next few days join me as I embark on this experience of identity and strength. Feel free to drop a comment or two letting me know your thoughts. I look forward to you taking this trip along side me.