A Leading Lady Takes a Civil Rights Journey
Dear Leading Ladies,
For a few days last week, two college friends and I were bombarded by the truth. Truth about the history of our country. About slavery and the Middle Passage. About the North’s collusion and support of slavery both in the South and in their homes. About how and why Reconstruction failed and the ways in which slavery didn’t end but rather evolved into mass incarceration.
Although we knew some of these truths, the reality of them hit us more powerfully and viscerally by our experiences during our six days in Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham, Alabama, and in Atlanta, Georgia. What we saw and heard brought us to tears and made us sick to our stomachs. We felt shame and sorrow, fear and helplessness. What we experienced happened against the backdrop of the current news of deportations, arrests of foreign students, cessation of medical research, threats to our Federal Department of Education, and cancellation of programs that aid the most vulnerable in our country, too often, Black Americans.
The only hope we could muster was that if the truth reaches enough people, and motivates them to act, the real change necessary for equal opportunity can occur.
Montgomery
Our primary teacher during the first three days of our journey was Jake Williams, a Montgomery, Alabama, African American who offers civil rights tours in his home state.
Jake, as he insisted we call him, brought us first to the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, part of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) created by Bryan Stevenson in 1989. The park includes multiple sculptures conveying the experiences of enslavement and deprivation, all made by indigenous, African, and African American artists. One piece of an arm resisting assault by another arm holding a cudgel, is the work of Hank Willis Thomas, the artist who created The Embrace, the sculpture of Martin and Coretta King on Boston Common. On the grounds are also former living quarters of the enslaved as well as actual pens where men, women and children were held awaiting auction.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, also part of EJI, was our next stop. There, as the skies darkened and rain started to fall in blinding sheets, we hurried to view the monuments to those 4,400 Black Americans who were lynched between 1877 and 1950. We approached the memorial with our new knowledge that the term lynching does not apply only to hangings; it describes any hate killing. The outdoor memorial consists of more than 800 Corten steel beams the size and shape of coffins, some suspended and others attached to the floor. Each one stands for a county in the United States where lynchings occurred. In the raging storm, we rushed among the columns, overwhelmed by the numbers, until, as we heard thunder and saw lightning, the memorial personnel told us we had to move inside.The pulsing thunder seemed to echo our pulsing hearts.
Photo credit/copyright: Susan Wilson
Before heading to the EJI Legacy Museum, Jake took us for a car tour of his alma mater, Alabama State University, an HBCU founded just after the Civil War by nine formerly enslaved free men who wanted a place to train teachers for the newly freed Black children. Jake, who graduated with a degree in history, showed us the vast campus, noting that graduates like Ralph Abernathy and faculty like JoAnn Robinson played important roles in the Civil Rights Movement. He also pointed out free-standing health “pods” created and underwritten by actor Taraji Henson to provide mental health support to students in the form of counseling, yoga classes, and more. Alabama State is the first HBCU campus I have visited. Because I know schools for young students in all-Black neighborhoods are usually less well resourced than those in affluent white communities, I was impressed by the ASU campus and its comprehensive facilities. Since ASU and other HBCUs are state funded, I couldn't help but wonder how vulnerable they are to cuts like those that are destroying any programs that can be tied to DEI.
In between destinations, Jake shared many anecdotes. About Robert Small, who while enslaved, was able to commandeer a Confederate transport ship and sail it to union controlled waters where it became a union warship. In the process he freed himself, the rest of the enslaved crew and their families. About Rutherford Hayes who promised to take all the Federal troops out of the South in exchange for the electoral votes he needed to win the presidential election, thus virtually ending Reconstruction and all the benefits to Blacks it had ensured. And about Ruby Sales, the young Black freedom fighter from Tuskegee Institute who was grabbed from the line of police fire in Lowndes County while trying to protest unfair treatment by a white grocer. The person who saved her was a white seminary student and freedom worker from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Jonathan Daniels, who died in his act of heroism.
At the Legacy Museum, we entered the first room to face a huge wall-to-wall screen of ocean waves seemingly roiling towards us. Words on the screen spoke of the middle passage voyage of Africans kidnapped and forced onto ships bound for America where they would be enslaved, if they didn’t die during the ocean trips. The next room was filled with perhaps 100 clay heads on an ocean floor with the waves lapping around them (the video technology is truly amazing), conveying all the lives lost before reaching American shores. We were already near tears. Exhibit after exhibit made the lives of the enslaved come to life. Cells with ghostly holograms of the enslaved, some speaking, others singing, were hard to view and harder to turn away from.
Many exhibits detailed the role of the North in slavery. Not only did many Northerners enslave Blacks themselves (though slavery was outlawed in all Northern states by 1804), but many depended on slavery in the South for their livelihood. The enslaved in the South picked the cotton that was sent to the North to be manufactured into cloth, much of which was transported across the seas in ships built in the North and operated by Northern shipping companies.
Over and over, exhibits emphasized that slavery was not an event in our history but part of a long story, beginning with the abduction of Africans from their homes and families. Next came the voyage, then the auction block and more separation from friends and family. Centuries of enslavement and domestic slave trade followed until the Civil War. Though the war claimed to free the enslaved, the newly freed had no money or land; most could not read or write; and their former owners were not eager to share wealth or power. For a few years, Reconstruction witnessed advances for some formerly enslaved in professional careers and even government positions, but that was short-lived. With limp support from white politicians on both sides of the aisle, Reconstruction lasted less than a dozen years and Blacks were again in lowly positions, picking cotton as sharecroppers and forced into virtual servitude when arrested for any crime. The path to a system of mass incarceration was paved by post Civil War laws that made servitude legal for those jailed for the most petty crimes.
Selma
On the way to Selma the next day, we stopped at the National Park Service’s Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail. A ten-minute film, shown as soon as visitors enter, presents a virulent indictment of racism and segregation. All we could think was that we might be among the last people to view this film because our current president would not tolerate the views expressed and he can assume some control here because it is a national park. In fact, when one of us asked the park ranger on duty if she was worried about the park closing, she put her head down and said they weren’t allowed to talk about it.
Jake drove us through Lowndes County where he grew up and picked cotton as a boy. He pointed to the street where his parents bought their first house in 1972, the first home he’d lived in with indoor plumbing. He showed us the location of the restaurant where he had to go around back to pick up his order while the white customers used the front door. He pointed out the area where his great grandfather was enslaved and the cemetery where his family is buried. And the highway that was built in the early 1970s right through the center of the black neighborhood, bisecting the community and displacing 1,800 families. Later on, he showed us where he and his sister joined the March from Selma to Montgomery on day four after a neighbor came by their house in his truck and asked if they’d like to join him. Williams was 12 and says he didn’t understand the importance of what he did until he after started giving these tours.
Photo credit/copyright: Susan Wilson
We walked over the Edmund Pettus Bridge – Pettus had the bridge named after him in proud recognition of his achievements as a grand wizard in the Klu Klux Klan — just as Martin Luther King Jr, John Lewis, and so many other brave civil rights leaders and activists did. Unlike them, however, we were taking no risks, and making no statements that will help anybody. We were marking history, not making it, and pledging ourselves to do more and do better.
Back to Montgomery
Our last stop of the day was the Rosa Parks Museum back in Montgomery. Jake had told us there is some controversy about the central role of Parks in the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, and even some resentment among older Black women of her claim to fame. Nonetheless, the exhibits — including an actual bus like the one Parks rode with projected images of people boarding and exiting — made it clear that Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on the bus she was riding home from work on that day in 1955, whether planned or spontaneous, gave the Civil Rights Movement an opportunity to move boldly forward. Leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) quickly and the lawsuit that was brought against the city gained traction. Soon, the Montgomery bus boycott began, crippling and almost bankrupting the bus companies, lasting 13 months. At that point, desegregation on the buses became law. There was still segregation in the bus depot, but the concession gained was a start. The NAACP had withheld support because they wanted demands to go beyond desegregation on the bus, but the leaders of the boycott savored their win. During the strike, an ingenious and complex system of rides in privately owned cars was devised to get Black boycotters to and from work, with pick-up and drop-off spots at Black-owned businesses where they would not be accused of breaking loitering laws. Like so much in the Black community, the church was the epicenter of this operation. Not everyone rode to work, however. Many walked during the boycott, causing a boon in the shoe repair business!
Photo credit/copyright: Susan Wilson
Birmingham
Kelly Ingram Park sits diagonally across from the 16th Street Baptist Church and across from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. As we entered the park, a life-size sculpture of four little girls greeted us. Pretty little girls playing, the first with her arms raised towards small birds in flight, the third having the sash on her dress tied by the fourth. We quickly realized the sculpture depicted the four little girls killed when the church was bombed by Ku Klux Klan members in 1963. There were several other life-size sculptures in the park, the most disturbing of attack dogs at student protests. One shows three German Shepherds, teeth bared, lunging from two facing walls. Walking between the walls that are perhaps an arm’s length apart, made us feel just a tiny bit of what the protesting children must have felt 60 years ago — the sense of being closed in, unable to escape, threatened, helpless, vulnerable, and frightened.
Photo credit/copyright: Susan Wilson
At the church, the 88-year-old guide, with the help of two films, made sure we knew that there was a fifth girl who survived the bombing with loss of sight in one eye. She is still alive and had just visited the church that morning. We learned that the bombing was motivated by President Kennedy federalizing National Guard troops to enforce desegregation after Governor Wallace defied a Federal court order to integrate public schools. Outrage over the bombing helped ensure the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act during Lyndon Johnson’s administration. Mandated desegregation in the schools, by the way, led to the opening of many private schools for white children, perpetuating de facto segregation.
Photo credit/copyright: Susan Wilson
We learned that two Black boys also died in Birmingham on the day of the bombing, one out riding bikes with his brother and shot by a white boy, one with a group of boys in a fracas with white boys and shot by police.
At the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, two exhibits transfixed us. The first was the recreated cell of Martin Luther King Jr. accompanied by a recording of King reciting his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In this letter, King argued for the necessity of nonviolent action, for breaking unjust laws, and for not waiting for justice through the courts. The second was an exhibit of artifacts from Denise McNair, one of the girls killed in the church bombing: her shoes, her purse, a children’s bible, and a cross she wore around her neck.
Photo credit/copyright: Susan Wilson
The central role of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth in the Civil Rights Movement was referenced often in our travels. We were surprised since we had never before heard of him. That reminded us that history finds its heroes and icons but often leaves many foot soldiers behind in obscurity. Shuttlesworth founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and then co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) which helped organize the Selma to Birmingham walk as part of the voting rights campaign. It was he who invited MLK to the March.
On to Atlanta
Jake drove us two-and-a-half hours to Atlanta to complete our trip on our own. Entering the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King was associate pastor, we heard a recording of one of his last sermons, referred to as his drum major sermon. He preached that it is natural for all people to want the attention that drum majors receive and to be first and prominent. He insisted, in the sermon, that people use their drum major instincts for good, for justice, and to do good for others. He seemed to foreshadow his own death by saying he hoped he’d be remembered as a drum major for good and not petty acts.
Photo credit/copyright: Susan Wilson
At the Martin Luther King Jr. National Park, we saw the outside of the home where MLK was born and lived for his first 12 years. The inside is being renovated, so we went next door to a home now serving as the store for the park site and almost identical to the King home in structure and design. There, a park ranger told us tales of MLK’s youth, stories he had heard from the great leader’s sister.
Inside the center we saw yet another compelling video about MLK and the movement. Displays and historical news footage in the center reinforced and expanded what we had heard and seen before, like a planned spiral curriculum. Next door, the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, founded by Coretta Scott King, was closed but we were able to see the long cascading reflecting pool with the side-by-side tombs of Martin and Coretta King in the middle. On different levels of the pool are carved the words, “We will not be satisfied/until justice rolls down.” Nearby is an eternal flame.
Photo credit/copyright: Susan Wilson
Our last day in Atlanta was supposed to be spent at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. We were a little embarrassed to admit that we were relieved the Center is closed for renovations until the fall. We were not sure our hearts and brains could take in and process much more. We spent the day at the Atlanta Botanical Garden surrounded by beauty and grateful for it.
Perhaps it was only fitting that our trip should end with an exhibit at the Atlanta airport about John Lewis, longtime member of the House of Representatives from the state of Georgia, one of MLK’s inner circle, founder and chairman of SNCC, and the leader of the first Selma to Montgomery march (Bloody Sunday). Through photos, audio recordings, artifacts, news clippings, and written descriptions, Lewis comes alive, from his days as a young boy helping care for the chickens on his parents’ sharecropping farm and sneaking off to school when he was supposed to be working, to developing his sense of justice and the need to take action and engage in what he called “good trouble.”
Photo credit/copyright: Susan Wilson
The exhibit, both gripping and informative, had another effect. It provided another reminder that in the South, there are many private (Bryan Stevenson’s EJI, the King Center for Nonviolent Change, for example), and public (National Parks) sites that tell the truth about both the South's and the North’s history of slavery and racism, more than we have seen in the North.
Our trip changed us. We want everyone to experience all that we saw, and we may become mouthy about it. Be forewarned.
If you’d like to learn more about how to get in touch with our tour guide, Jake, visit https://www.mymontgomerytours.com/
All the best,
Judy (she/her/hers)
Therese (she/her/hers)
Didi (she/her/hers)