SOUTHERN CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY TOUR

Day 6 Montgomery

If a Martian asked me for a snapshot of US racial history I would say that it all started in the early 1600s when black people in Africa were kidnapped, chained, stuffed into the holds of ships and brought across the Atlantic to make money for white people while being treated like farm animals only with greater cruelty and inhumanity. Then in 1861, 11 Southern states went to war to destroy the United States to protect their economic, social and political system that got its oxygen from treating black people as less than human. That war ended but racial terror, violence and murder continued as if it didn't. For the next two centuries the treatment of people of color as less than human defined the architecture of our daily life, our politics and our legal system. Race determined where people lived, worked, whether and where they went to school and their life trajectories. Today, just about every American political, economic and social issue is infected with the legacy of this 400 year old fight for people of color to be treated as full human beings.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the Lynching Museum in Montgomery sits atop 6 acres overlooking the Alabama state capital. The Memorial and The Peace and Justice Memorial Center downtown are the creation of Bryan Stevenson and a group of lawyers dedicated to victims of white supremacy. Anthony Hinton, a man who spent 30 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit and exonerated only after 15 years of work by Stevenson, tells his story in a video projected from behind plexiglass in a recreated prison visiting room. As Mr. Hinton puts it, what used to be justice from men in white robes was, in his case, administered by men in black robes.

The Peace and Justice Memorial Center and the Lynching Museum should be part of everyone’s education, but more urgently no man or woman should put on a judicial robe or be given a badge and a gun without first spending a day there.

Here’s a link to the NY Times article about its opening in 2018.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/us/lynching-memorial-alabama.html

A lot has happened in Montgomery, Alabama. Dr. King was born here and preached at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church

which is amazingly one block from the Alabama State Capital where Alabama voted to leave the United States in 1861.

In that same building George Wallace was sworn in as Governor in 1963 and in the rotunda from the exact place where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as the President of the Confederate States of America, Wallace declared:

In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.

The Rosa Parks Museum and the Freedom Riders Museum

At the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery a reenactment captures the rising tension of the moment that ignited the tinderbox and launched the Civil Rights movement. Within three days the boycott was launched with the help of thousands of mimeographed leaflets, a network, of activists, lawyers and pastors including a 26 year old Martin Luther King Jr.

Rosa Parks did not just get on and sit in the white section. According to the reenactment, she was sitting more in the middle with other black people when the bus started to fill up. When white people could not find seats the bus driver told all the black people to get up and move back. The other black people got up and moved back, Rosa Parks refused to move. The driver walked off the bus full of passengers, went to a payphone and called his dispatcher who called the cops.

The Freedom Riders Museum is the actual Montgomery Greyhound Bus Station building, with its “colored” entrance and waiting room where in 1961 Montgomery cops stood by as thugs viciously beat the arriving Freedom Riders, including John Lewis. The reporters and photographers waiting for the bus to interview the arriving freedom riders were the first ones beaten. To make sure there were no pictures the photographers were beaten with their own cameras.

Hank Williams Museum

In the world of white southerners before Elvis there was the Grand Ol Opry and superstars like Hank Williams.

The Hank Williams Museum is in a modest storefront in downtown Montgomery where you can stroll past all of his memorabilia and watch young Hank introduce his 1952 hit “Cold Cold Heart” with an intro that went a little something like this -

“I’ve got a song here that I'd like to do that’s been awful kind to me and the boys — it’s bought us quite few beans and biscuits ”.