EDITORIAL
By Courtney D. Lee, Deputy Director of Staff, Equity, and Culture
Alliance for Early Success
Last year, our Executive Director shared a Juneteenth reflection that named the Alliance’s commitment to equity-centered action and pointed to the Alabama Experience as a meaningful step on that path. Last fall, I had the opportunity to be part of that journey—walking alongside our grantees, staff, board, and partners through a place where so much history, pain, and resistance still echo.
We went as a group to Montgomery. We stood in places built to disappear people—enslaved people, freedom fighters, children. We stood in places built to resist that disappearance. And we stood in place with one another.
It was not a quiet journey.
At the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery—where the Freedom Riders were brutally attacked for daring to integrate interstate travel—we didn’t just learn history. We saw how white supremacy had been designed into the space itself: where walls were placed, where windows weren’t, how the layout channeled fear, power, surveillance.
That same theme of deliberate design echoed through the Legacy Museum. Its curation was masterful and unrelenting—charting a clear, unbroken line from enslavement to convict leasing to mass incarceration. What it made visible was the role of law, policy, and institutional choices in codifying racial control. These weren’t unintended outcomes. They were options. Design decisions. Legal architectures.
It became painfully clear: oppression isn’t accidental. It’s designed. Engineered. Rehearsed. Reinforced.
And that clarity brought forth questions—not only “how do I live with this knowledge,” but how do I interrupt it? How do I design for inclusion, for truth, for liberation?
Months later, we learned that the Freedom Rides Museum—the very site we had stood on—was nearly lost, briefly listed by the federal government as “underutilized” and slated for possible sale. It took a bipartisan push to preserve it. That news, arriving less than a year after our time in Montgomery, was a sobering reminder: even our efforts to remember can be quietly dismantled. And protecting what holds truth—whether it’s a building, a narrative, or a community—requires more than memory. It takes coordination. It takes vigilance. It takes a shared belief in what’s worth keeping; and what we value has to live in action.
In their powerful series of reflections, our partners at Voices for Virginia’s Children described how the weight of history—etched into the columns of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, imprinted in the red Alabama soil—doesn’t just settle into memory. It settles into the body. And from there, it can move us into action.
As Megan Mbagwu wrote, “Systems that were built with intentionality must also be broken down intentionally”. [Read the series: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.]
That’s what this Juneteenth is asking of me.
Not just to remember. Not just to mourn. But to design differently. To notice where systems, meetings, policies, or partnerships echo the same patterns of erasure and separation—and to choose another way. With the same level of intention. With care. With accountability.
This is not abstract work for us at the Alliance. It’s daily. It’s in how we support grantees, how we structure decision-making, how we understand power, and how we show up in coalition.
We are learning—imperfectly, but urgently—that equity isn’t just a value we name. It’s a structure we build. And it’s a practice we share.
This Juneteenth, I’m grateful for the chance to share that practice with our staff, board, and partners—not just on the road to Montgomery, but in the work ahead.
Because if oppression can be designed, so can liberation. And we have work to do.
Courtney D. Lee is Deputy Director of Staff, Equity, and Culture, Courtney at the Alliance for Early Success, where she leads the development and implementation of the Alliance’s human resources strategy and fosters the ongoing development of the organization’s workplace culture of purpose, continuous learning, innovation, and belonging. Prior to joining the Alliance, Lee served as Chief of Staff at Education Leaders of Color and as Director of Talent and Culture at TNTP, a national nonprofit working to ensure that students from underresourced families and traditionally marginalized groups get equal access to effective teachers.
