Understanding America: A Civil Rights Journey
Helen and I, along with our friends
Louise and Matt Myers, spent four days in Birmingham and Montgomery Alabama. We
were motivated by a desire to visit the new National Peace and Justice Memorial
(Lynching Museum), but we did much more. We want to share some stories from our
deeply moving and deeply disturbing experience. We hope that you will be
encouraged to go.
Thursday: Birmingham.
As we walked through the Kelly Ingram Park, I could picture the water hoses, vicious dogs and police clubs that attacked African-American young
people. We remembered how important the Children’s
March was to the movement in
Birmingham. A sculpture of two young people bears the
inscription, “We ain’t afraid of your jail”.
At the 16th St. Baptist Church, we stood in the spot where the bomb was planted by the KKK that
took the lives of four beautiful young girls. We learned that one girl’s sister
is still alive and that all the perpetrators of this heinous crime were not
brought to justice until nearly 40 years later.
Shortly after, at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute we found ourselves watching a video of life there from
1871 to 1921. As the curtain went up we walked into history but we could not
walk out until we walked through. (For some, this will recall the experience at
the Holocaust Museum). We walked through slavery, reconstruction, re-enslavement, (a far less
well-known phenomenon), Jim Crow, mass incarceration, voter suppression, renewed
racism and more.
We have read a lot of history and asked
a lot of questions. That is part of why we took this trip in the first place.
But actually hearing audio and video stories from a diverse group of Birmingham
citizens made us realize even more how deeply racist the attitudes of most people
were and how courageous African Americans were, and still are, in the face of deep
hatred and violence.
The librarian who manages the museum’s
wide array of oral histories told us that some teachers who bring their
students to the Institute often just sit on the sidelines rather than actively
engaging with their students. Sad to hear that such an important educational
resource is not being fully utilized.
Our day ended at coffee with Peggy
Sparks, a member of the original board of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute
and Marty’s colleague in the community schools movement; Peggy’s friend Leon
Evans joined us. Peggy, a member of the original board of the Institute, explained
how the Institute’s planners visited numerous museums during the planning
phase; including the Holocaust Museum where they have an ongoing
relationship Leon told us how his
mother refused to call her teachers Ma’am. He dislikes the term minority too, because
it implies a significant power differential.
Friday: Montgomery
Montgomery is a riverfront city of
nearly 200,000 where history is literally all around you. We started at the Freedom Riders Museum where we saw the courage of the more than 400 riders, black and white; liberal and conservative; Catholic, Protestant, and
Jew. In addition to again witnessing the brutal acts against the riders, we were reminded of the brilliant organizing work of Diane Nash of the Nashville
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who ensured a continuing flow
of riders into the jails of Jackson, Mississippi tying up the criminal justice
system and ensuring continuing public attention to the Rider’s mission. Many
riders spent time in the Penitentiary at Parchman Farm, a notoriously violent
and abusive prison, where some were placed in the maximum security
unit on death row, while others were subject to solitary confinement.
After hearing the story of the
Freedom Riders, it was time to visit the National
Peace and Justice Memorial. We had read about
the memorial, its development and opening, but being there was a deep emotional
experience that cannot be forgotten. As we walked into the Memorial we faced
memorials organized by state and county to the 4,000 people
lynched between 1877 and 1950. The county Memorials,
imprinted with the names of the lynching victims and the years of their
murders, appear like hanging coffins.
Walking forward, we saw a family who
had driven from Atlanta – grandmother, mother and two daughters, huddled around
one memorial. They had come to remember their two uncles who were among five
people lynched in 1898 in Edgecombe County, North Carolina. They told us their
story. I thanked them for sharing. They thanked me for hearing their story.
Moving through the Memorial we felt the
individual county memorials gradually rise above us, giving us the sense of
people being hung. And we saw the some of the obscene reasons why … Elbert Williams was lynched in Brownsville
Tennessee in 1940 for working to register black votes as part of the local
NAACP; after a white man attempted o assault Jack Brownlee’s daughter in Oxford
Alabama in 1894, Mr. Brownlee was lynched for having the man arrested. The words of Ida B. Wells rang in our ears,
“Our country’s national crime is lynching.”
The Legacy
Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration is also part of the Memorial. Located a block from one of the most prominent slave auction spaces in America,
the Legacy is also steps away from an
Alabama dock and rail station where tens of thousands of black people were
trafficked during the 19th century. In a different way than the Birmingham Institute, it chronicles in
painful detail what we saw in Birmingham -- our history of slavery, re-enslavement, Jim Crow, and
mass incarceration. It is stomach-turning.
Saturday: Montgomery
We began the day at
the Parsonage of the Dexter Baptist church where Dr. King and his family lived.
An elderly volunteer, who was a member of Ms. King’s women’s group, brought
the parsonage to life as she described the black middle-class neighborhood that
existed in the 50’s. We saw the dining room where King and his allies planned
the Montgomery bus boycott and watched African American members of our tour touch
the table. We stood in the kitchen listening to an audio of Dr. King mulling
over whether to leave the movement on the night of the bombing of his home. We touched the
stove where he made coffee and felt the tension he must have experienced that
day, and many days thereafter.
We walked outside to
the Parsonage’s Memorial Garden. As we did Helen checked her phone to learn that
11 people were killed in the tragic anti-Semitic slaughter in a Pittsburgh
synagogue. Devastated, but deeply engaged in our immediate experience with historical
trauma, we moved on to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.
In 1879 Trustees of
the Dexter Church paid $270 for a lot at the corner of what is now Dexter
Avenue and Decatur Street, just a stone’s throw from the Alabama state capitol.
Not everyone was pleased, of course, but the deal went through.
Our visit was
marked by the music of a children’s choir rehearsing for the Sunday morning
service. In keeping with a visitor tradition, Helen stood with Matt at the
podium that Dr. King used in the church when he spoke at the end of the Selma to Montgomery march and repeated the words he spoke, “how long,
not long“ to describe how soon true freedom would
come to African Americans.
Leaving the church
a docent gave us a five-minute history of African American life in America quickly
moving from slavery to re-enslavement, to Jim Crow, to lynchings, to the civil
rights movement, mass incarceration and today’s struggle to ensure that black
lives matter. It was another sharp and personal reminder of our nation’s
history and connected our present is to our past.
After a quick lunch
at Chris’s
Hotdogs we walked up the street to the Alabama State Capital. The docent, a former Air Force colonel who marched from Selma
to Montgomery, regaled us with stories of a Capitol that is now virtually a
museum with only 21 people, including the Governor, working there. We saw the
room where the southern states declared the confederacy; we saw murals in the
rotunda that gave nary a hint of the relationship of Alabama to its black
citizens. And we looked at the statue of Jefferson Davis still standing in
front of the Capitol.
That evening Sophia Bracey Harris, a colleague of
Helen’s in the early childhood community, brought the civil rights struggle
home in a personal way. Sophia along with her older sister, were among the
students who integrated Wetumpka High School in 1968. Soon after they started
school her home was firebombed by 3 Molotov cocktails, and burned to the ground.
Luckily all of her family escaped. Sophia went on to found FOCAL a network of community-based
child care centers in rural Alabama and the Black Women's Leadership and
Economic Development Project to help support
black women's self-sufficiency and provide leadership training.
Sunday:
Montgomery to Selma (and back)
It’s amazing how moving
it can be just to stand in a historic place.
As we stood on the Edmund
Pettus Bridge we looked for the spot where
Alabama law enforcement officers had charged the marchers clubbing John Lewis and so many others; we watched the peaceful
Alabama River go by. We chatted with African-American families from California
and Texas doing the same.
As we walked
through town we visited with two white church members acting as security guards
in front of their church and told them about our journey. They were welcoming. One
said forthrightly, “Oh yes, my grandfather was among the deputies on the bridge
on a horse with a club that day, and I’m sure he wore a sheet on other
occasions. [sic]” Imagine.
And finally at the
Brown AME Church where the Selma to Montgomery march began, we heard the pastor
asking “can you hear me? We wondered when all Americans will be ready to truly
hear and absorb our own history. It was an echo of the lovely words I heard at
the Memorial, “Thank you for hearing me.”
We stopped briefly at the Montgomery
riverfront a beautiful place as most riverfronts are. But as the historic
plaques told us, it was also the place where many slaves came to Montgomery and
from where bales of cotton, the product of slave labor, were shipped for sale.
Our last stop was lunch at Martha’s Place,. Sophia Bracey Harris brought us there. Martha Hawkins
the owner was involved with the Black Women’s Leadership and Economic
Development Project. Fighting depression, she raised four successful sons while
on welfare. She founded and continues to run an extraordinary successful
restaurant. Her book, Finding Martha's Place: My Journey Through Sin, Salvation, and Lots of
Soul Food is an inspiration. We were delighted to
end our journey with a delicious soul food meal.
