SOUTHERN CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY TOUR
Day 7 Last day / Nashville
57 years after the Civil Rights Act -Jim Crow 2.0?
Nashville was the last stop on our tour.
In 1960 sit-ins targeted segregated Nashville lunch counters followed by arrests and large demonstrations. Nashville was the first city in the segregated South to integrate its lunch counters.
The beautiful public library downtown, designed by Robert A.M. Stern, features a permanent Civil Rights Room, displaying literature, photos and historic videos including one that tells the story of the 1956 Nashville desegregation struggle during which a nighttime bombing blew up an unoccupied elementary school, lifting the building off of its foundation.
On the list of take-aways from this trip about the Civil Rights movement is that John Lewis was everywhere.
Nashville is also the home of The Grand Ol Opry, where country music made the leap from front porches to the radio.
Today Opryland is a large complex 9 miles outside of town with a theme park, roller coaster, museum, hotel and performance venue.
The Country Western Hall of Fame, downtown, offers a walk through country music history from its roots . . .
to the present. Darrius Rucker is the newest member of the Country Western Hall of Fame
57 years after the Civil Rights Act -Jim Crow 2.0?
As Aretha Franklin belted out in her 1968 hit single “Think”;
I ain’t no psychiatrist, I ain’t no doctor with degrees
But, it don’t take too much high IQ’s
To see what you’re doing to me
People with credentials who study this stuff will have to explain the trajectory of the last 6 decades from the Civil Rights Movement to the present. Even a fast moving tourist, who ain't no political scientist with fancy degrees, is left with some distinct impressions after a week on the road south of the Mason Dixon.
Politicians gather on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama to have their pictures taken at the place where John Lewis and the Freedom Marchers were savagely beaten in 1965. When the speeches end and the crowds go home Selma returns to its sad, depressed state and the bridge is still named for a Confederate brigadier general who was the head of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan — in other words a terrorist who tried to destroy the United States in order to preserve the right to enslave black people.
“Colored Only” signs may be down but we are now living through a historic arm wrestle with the Trump cult and an emerging new incarnation of Jim Crow. State statutes are being passed to stop black people from voting and with sickening frequency, citizen videos expose the common police practice of relying on lethal force against unarmed black men — the new version of attack dogs and fire hoses. Legislation is being passed barring teachers from telling kids about the connection between America’s racial past and present — laws straight from a Margaret Atwood dystopia.
We have been home for a week. One question keeps surfacing. Why haven’t we heard from the old men who were racist, violent, thugs in their 20s in the era of the Civil Rights movement? Where have those guys been as they grew old in the last 5 decades, with their perspectives tempered by age and hindsight? Where is the spirit of truth and reconciliation and restorative justice? Is the deafening silence reflective of historians’ oversight or a window into the soul of an America that would have re-elected Trump but for the pandemic?
Postscript
On the subject of “where are the apologies”, this week former Alabama Governor John M. Patterson (1959–1963), a friend of the Klan and a “defiant segregationist”, died at age 99. According to his NYT Obituary,
he claimed that he had to be a segregationist to survive politically but wasn't really a bigot and he voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Sounds like not much truth and very little reconciliation in the spirit of Donald Trump's claim to be the “least racist person you’ll find anywhere in the world’.
