The Struggle for Freedom and Equality March 29, 2017
"...until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." Martin Luther King
I hadn't known what to expect in Alabama. Bruce and I have traveled very little in the south, never in this state. It has a pretty horrible history in the human rights realm, especially during the time of the civil rights movement. This is the state where George Wallace reigned supreme in his hateful, strong-arm governance. There's a reason that so many of the civil rights sites are clustered in Alabama, places fraught with incidents of unimaginable violence. Even now, it's where our current President has gone looking for his Attorney General, an allegedly racist individual. (BTW, today we stumbled across a beautiful college campus in Montgomery and discovered that Jeff Sessions is an alum!) I guess that I did have expectations, after all. But, it's been many years since most of those egregious events took place. And, the other side of the hateful history is a story of towering courage and human dignity. What would Alabama look like, feel like now?
One of the first hopeful signs as we traveled north on the interstate highway from Florida was the happy discovery that National Public Radio has a strong presence in Alabama! Yay! We were headed for Montgomery which we hoped to use as a hub for our civil rights tour. It's within a reasonable distance from Selma, Birmingham, and Tuskeegee, which were also on our tentative agenda. We booked 4 nights in an Airbnb in Montgomery which turned out to be one of the best we've ever stayed in!
Alabama State capital building in Montgomery
Montgomery is the capital of the state of Alabama, situated about a third of the way up from the southern border of Florida's panhandle. Its population is about 200,000, a bit smaller than Birmingham, which is to its north. I tell you all of this because I, myself, wasn't familiar with Alabama before we arrived. I did know that Montgomery is the location of a cluster of sites which were important to the civil rights struggle - and that's why we're here. These include the Dexter Street Baptist Church and its parsonage, where ML King preached and lived with his family as a young minister just out of seminary. At great personal peril, he was called upon to lead the bus boycott that resulted, after 13 months, in desegregating local buses.
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church which a young M.L. King served as pastor.
Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white person in 1955, brought the struggle to a head, has a museum dedicated to her in Montgomery. The Southern Poverty Law Center, long an advocate for social justice, has created a wonderful Civil Rights Memorial Center there, dedicated to 40 people who lost their lives during the civil rights movement. There is also a museum honoring the Freedom Riders, young folks who risked their lives by riding buses into the south in an attempt to desegregate interstate transportation. These brave kids were brutally beaten in both Montgomery and Birmingham. The 1960's era effort to secure voting rights for black citizens in the south, punctuated with murders of political activists and ordinary people trying to secure this most basic right, ended with the famous march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery. Obviously, this city had a lot to see and absorb about that pivotal time in our nation's history.
Rosa Parks statue at the museum honoring her in Montgomery
On a spring Saturday in 2017, more than 50 years after these struggles, there were not a lot of people visiting the museums in Montgomery. We visited both the Rosa Parks Museum and the Civil Rights Memorial Center in one day. Both were impressive buildings with thoughtfully presented information. Reading the personal stories of the victims and seeing the number of individuals who lost their lives in this struggle is compelling. The Civil Rights Memorial, while focused on American blacks, also reminds us, through its displays, of the civil rights of other groups - immigrants, gays and transgendered people, Muslims.
Beautiful memorial designed by Maya Linn to commemorate people & events of the civil rights movement. It's located at the Civil Rights Memorial & Museum in Montgomery, sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center, headquartered across the street.
Two days later, Bruce and I went to the small town of Tuskegee, about a half hour east of Montgomery. The town itself is pretty shabby with boarded up homes, empty storefronts, two Dollar Stores, and a big Piggly Wiggly. We were to learn later, as we traveled across the state on secondary roads, that Tuskegee's look of poverty and abandonment, is typical of many towns in rural Alabama. Our actual destination, however, was outside of town. The Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site is where the US Army had hosted an experiment during WWII to see if African-Americans had the mental and physical abilities to become fighter pilots. The Tuskegee Airmen became celebrated, skilled, and fiercely courageous pilots. They were fighting for a "double victory", both to help win the war and to improve the situation for blacks at home. They returned to humiliating conditions of segregation, and worse.
Tuskegee Airmen training for duty in WWII
We also visited Tuskegee Institute, another National Historic Site and the college founded by Booker T. Washington. It is a thriving college on a beautiful, historic, 5000 acre campus. We ate lunch in a lovely dining room in the Kellogg Conference Center (established by the Kellogg Foundation) where students who are studying the hospitality industry or nutrition can get hands-on experience. Arriving a bit late on a Monday, there was only one other couple eating there. It was quiet but delicious.
Detail from the amazing stained glass window in the Tuskegee Institute Chapel, featuring bits of lyrics of black spirituals.
Our Montgomery story wouldn't be complete without a description of our Airbnb there. It's one of the best we've ever stayed in, and we loved it! It's a former in-law space on the back of a 1930 home in the Capital Heights historic area. Because it's owned by a young art history professor and her sculptor/carpenter husband, it's very artsy and beautifully appointed. We had our own entrance with an outside lawn area where we could sip our evening white wine. And it was reasonably quiet, despite being fairly close to downtown.
Note the piggly wiggly painting - on cardboard - above the bed :) and all the natural light!
On Tuesday, we left Montgomery, heading toward Memphis, our final civil rights stop. Montgomery had been surprisingly pleasant - traveling as a privileged white couple in 2017. It has lovely wide boulevards and pretty, historic neighborhoods. We hadn't made it to Birmingham or all of the sites that we had hoped, but it was time to move on. We are anxious to get back home. And we have a few more intriguing places to visit first.
On our way west, about 50 miles from Montgomery, we planned to stop in Selma, the famously significant town in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Although blacks had had the right to vote at that time, they had been prevented from doing so by a culture of terrorism, not to mention various impediments such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and other laws.
The Selma story unfolds along the 50 miles of Highway 80 that leads to the state capital of Montgomery. This is where the march in support of voting rights took place, over the course of 4 days. It had begun in Selma, some time after Bloody Sunday, when local police had beaten back marchers with billy clubs and dogs and tear gas. When ML King asked for clergy from throughout the country to march with him, the group grew eventually to 25,000. The Voting Rights Act was signed by President Lyndon Johnson as a result.
Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, over which the civil rights marchers traveled.
I must say that the National Park's Historic Sites has done a fabulous job of documenting this historical era. All of the museums that we visited were extremely well designed with a plethora of informative pamphlets available. And it is all FREE! Even the two private museums that we visited were either free or very inexpensive. I have never visited a city/state with as many public tablets situated along the streets, describing events and neighborhoods and important buildings. We are learning so much, backing them up with google searches!
We traveled through many Alabama towns as we wended our way west on secondary roads. We seemed to be seeing the un-doing of rural, small town America. Between down-trodden towns, the countryside seems to be keeping up with the times. We passed many large fields, flooded with water to raise catfish and tilapia. The land is flat and gently rolling. Rare is a real hill. Springtime is brightening the fields and bringing forth hopeful tiny green leaves on trees. While we drive, we're listening to Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, a fascinating memoir of growing up in Appalachia.
Looking at the map, we had decided to break the trip into two days. Oxford, Mississippi, seemed like an interesting place to stop for the night. It's the home of Ol' Miss University, where William Faulkner lived and taught for many years. As we were to be reminded, it also has a strong civil rights connection as the school where James Meredith's effort to study broke down another barrier to blacks. In 1962, when Kennedy was President, James Meredith took it upon himself to move the ball forward by applying to Ol' Miss, a bastion of whiteness. It took the power of the courts and US Marshalls and a resulting campus riot and the death of a French journalist, but he finally was admitted and graduated. Nothing has come easily in this struggle!
So, here we are in Oxford, staying in the Airbnb, serendipitously, of a music-loving young journalism professor at Ol' Miss. He's gone off to teach and left us with a houseful of wonderful books! We may never get on the road :).
I hadn't known what to expect in Alabama. Bruce and I have traveled very little in the south, never in this state. It has a pretty horrible history in the human rights realm, especially during the time of the civil rights movement. This is the state where George Wallace reigned supreme in his hateful, strong-arm governance. There's a reason that so many of the civil rights sites are clustered in Alabama, places fraught with incidents of unimaginable violence. Even now, it's where our current President has gone looking for his Attorney General, an allegedly racist individual. (BTW, today we stumbled across a beautiful college campus in Montgomery and discovered that Jeff Sessions is an alum!) I guess that I did have expectations, after all. But, it's been many years since most of those egregious events took place. And, the other side of the hateful history is a story of towering courage and human dignity. What would Alabama look like, feel like now?
One of the first hopeful signs as we traveled north on the interstate highway from Florida was the happy discovery that National Public Radio has a strong presence in Alabama! Yay! We were headed for Montgomery which we hoped to use as a hub for our civil rights tour. It's within a reasonable distance from Selma, Birmingham, and Tuskeegee, which were also on our tentative agenda. We booked 4 nights in an Airbnb in Montgomery which turned out to be one of the best we've ever stayed in!
Montgomery is the capital of the state of Alabama, situated about a third of the way up from the southern border of Florida's panhandle. Its population is about 200,000, a bit smaller than Birmingham, which is to its north. I tell you all of this because I, myself, wasn't familiar with Alabama before we arrived. I did know that Montgomery is the location of a cluster of sites which were important to the civil rights struggle - and that's why we're here. These include the Dexter Street Baptist Church and its parsonage, where ML King preached and lived with his family as a young minister just out of seminary. At great personal peril, he was called upon to lead the bus boycott that resulted, after 13 months, in desegregating local buses.
Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white person in 1955, brought the struggle to a head, has a museum dedicated to her in Montgomery. The Southern Poverty Law Center, long an advocate for social justice, has created a wonderful Civil Rights Memorial Center there, dedicated to 40 people who lost their lives during the civil rights movement. There is also a museum honoring the Freedom Riders, young folks who risked their lives by riding buses into the south in an attempt to desegregate interstate transportation. These brave kids were brutally beaten in both Montgomery and Birmingham. The 1960's era effort to secure voting rights for black citizens in the south, punctuated with murders of political activists and ordinary people trying to secure this most basic right, ended with the famous march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery. Obviously, this city had a lot to see and absorb about that pivotal time in our nation's history.
On a spring Saturday in 2017, more than 50 years after these struggles, there were not a lot of people visiting the museums in Montgomery. We visited both the Rosa Parks Museum and the Civil Rights Memorial Center in one day. Both were impressive buildings with thoughtfully presented information. Reading the personal stories of the victims and seeing the number of individuals who lost their lives in this struggle is compelling. The Civil Rights Memorial, while focused on American blacks, also reminds us, through its displays, of the civil rights of other groups - immigrants, gays and transgendered people, Muslims.
Two days later, Bruce and I went to the small town of Tuskegee, about a half hour east of Montgomery. The town itself is pretty shabby with boarded up homes, empty storefronts, two Dollar Stores, and a big Piggly Wiggly. We were to learn later, as we traveled across the state on secondary roads, that Tuskegee's look of poverty and abandonment, is typical of many towns in rural Alabama. Our actual destination, however, was outside of town. The Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site is where the US Army had hosted an experiment during WWII to see if African-Americans had the mental and physical abilities to become fighter pilots. The Tuskegee Airmen became celebrated, skilled, and fiercely courageous pilots. They were fighting for a "double victory", both to help win the war and to improve the situation for blacks at home. They returned to humiliating conditions of segregation, and worse.
We also visited Tuskegee Institute, another National Historic Site and the college founded by Booker T. Washington. It is a thriving college on a beautiful, historic, 5000 acre campus. We ate lunch in a lovely dining room in the Kellogg Conference Center (established by the Kellogg Foundation) where students who are studying the hospitality industry or nutrition can get hands-on experience. Arriving a bit late on a Monday, there was only one other couple eating there. It was quiet but delicious.
Our Montgomery story wouldn't be complete without a description of our Airbnb there. It's one of the best we've ever stayed in, and we loved it! It's a former in-law space on the back of a 1930 home in the Capital Heights historic area. Because it's owned by a young art history professor and her sculptor/carpenter husband, it's very artsy and beautifully appointed. We had our own entrance with an outside lawn area where we could sip our evening white wine. And it was reasonably quiet, despite being fairly close to downtown.
On Tuesday, we left Montgomery, heading toward Memphis, our final civil rights stop. Montgomery had been surprisingly pleasant - traveling as a privileged white couple in 2017. It has lovely wide boulevards and pretty, historic neighborhoods. We hadn't made it to Birmingham or all of the sites that we had hoped, but it was time to move on. We are anxious to get back home. And we have a few more intriguing places to visit first.
On our way west, about 50 miles from Montgomery, we planned to stop in Selma, the famously significant town in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Although blacks had had the right to vote at that time, they had been prevented from doing so by a culture of terrorism, not to mention various impediments such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and other laws.
The Selma story unfolds along the 50 miles of Highway 80 that leads to the state capital of Montgomery. This is where the march in support of voting rights took place, over the course of 4 days. It had begun in Selma, some time after Bloody Sunday, when local police had beaten back marchers with billy clubs and dogs and tear gas. When ML King asked for clergy from throughout the country to march with him, the group grew eventually to 25,000. The Voting Rights Act was signed by President Lyndon Johnson as a result.
I must say that the National Park's Historic Sites has done a fabulous job of documenting this historical era. All of the museums that we visited were extremely well designed with a plethora of informative pamphlets available. And it is all FREE! Even the two private museums that we visited were either free or very inexpensive. I have never visited a city/state with as many public tablets situated along the streets, describing events and neighborhoods and important buildings. We are learning so much, backing them up with google searches!
We traveled through many Alabama towns as we wended our way west on secondary roads. We seemed to be seeing the un-doing of rural, small town America. Between down-trodden towns, the countryside seems to be keeping up with the times. We passed many large fields, flooded with water to raise catfish and tilapia. The land is flat and gently rolling. Rare is a real hill. Springtime is brightening the fields and bringing forth hopeful tiny green leaves on trees. While we drive, we're listening to Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, a fascinating memoir of growing up in Appalachia.
Looking at the map, we had decided to break the trip into two days. Oxford, Mississippi, seemed like an interesting place to stop for the night. It's the home of Ol' Miss University, where William Faulkner lived and taught for many years. As we were to be reminded, it also has a strong civil rights connection as the school where James Meredith's effort to study broke down another barrier to blacks. In 1962, when Kennedy was President, James Meredith took it upon himself to move the ball forward by applying to Ol' Miss, a bastion of whiteness. It took the power of the courts and US Marshalls and a resulting campus riot and the death of a French journalist, but he finally was admitted and graduated. Nothing has come easily in this struggle!
So, here we are in Oxford, staying in the Airbnb, serendipitously, of a music-loving young journalism professor at Ol' Miss. He's gone off to teach and left us with a houseful of wonderful books! We may never get on the road :).
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