A museum in Louisville, Kentucky, is giving visitors a unique and powerful way to understand the experience of enslaved Africans. The Roots 101 Museum has shackles made 400 years ago in Ghana on display, and visitors can even try them on.

A Deep Learning Tool

Lamont Collins, the founder of the museum, believes that the shackles are a deep learning tool. He says that by putting them on, visitors can feel the reality of what enslaved people went through. The shackles were used to restrain and dehumanize over 12 million Africans across three centuries.

For European and American slave traders, iron shackles were just tools to help run the transatlantic slave trade. They were made for wrists, ankles, waist, and neck, and even came in children’s sizes. The shackles were a punishment and a deterrent, and some even had bells or spiked ends to help track runaways.

Collins has had visitors from all backgrounds try on the shackles, including white men and women who have cried after experiencing the weight and restriction of the shackles. He believes that this experience starts a conversation about the history of slavery and its impact on American society.

Original reporting: KTBS 3 (Shreveport) — read the source article.