We talk a lot about why some places "feel like home" while others are very different. After our experience in Georgia, we thought we were prepared for a lot more of the latter. We were both right and very wrong.
The Civil Rights Trail
Through the South now there is a string of landmarks called the Civil Rights Trail which we began hopscotching in ernest after returning to Doris in January. If you don't know about the Civil Rights Trail, you can be forgiven because it's very new. It began life around 2015 with a request from President Obama to create more diversity among the UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the U.S., with a focus on Civil Rights. However, it seems to have been pushed forward by the tourism departments of all the states involved and was "launched" with a website (check it out here) in 2018. Then COVID happened, but the trail continued to evolve with more sites being included and tours, books, and sponsorships being added to fill out the experience. Now, there appear to be more than 60 sites and while we have so far hit only a small subset of those, they are amazing. Period. Everyone should visit them and immerse themselves in the history. Yes, we got some of this in history class when we were growing up, but not nearly enough. No, you can't take an AP class on this in Florida.
However, the lessons are intense. It's emotionally draining in the way that ripping off a bandaid is stressful. You know it's important and necessary, but you need a little time between experiences. We didn't start out intending for a particular rhythm to the trip, but we came to realize that the emotional intensity of the experiences and the reflections meant that we bounced back and forth between something "heavy" and something relatively "light". I suppose that subconsciously that gave us space to process. It's hard to say why it happened that way, but it did.
Atlanta, GA - MLK birthplace, memorial, and National Park
First we visited Dr. King's house, the MLK National Park, and the Ebenezer Baptist Church where he was pastor. We thought we'd seen enough of "So & So's house" (Jefferson, Washington, Edith Wilson, etc.) and we might have been a little jaded about the importance of seeing where someone grew up.
What's particularly interesting about Dr. King's house though is the neighborhood. "Sweet Auburn" was the black section of Atlanta when he grew up. By all accounts it was a vital, bustling, interesting, and vibrant section of the city. White Atlanta didn't go there and didn't seem to pay it much attention, allowing it to grow and thrive on its own. Around the mid 1960's a number of things happened, but one of the most important was the construction of the freeway cutting through Auburn. It's a heinous, but sadly common story. (More detail on the demise of Sweet Auburn is here ). Today, the businesses that were killed are commemorated with signs on the underside of the freeway overpass (which is truly gigantic.
The King memorial and the exhibits at the National Park turned out to be a great introduction not only to Dr. King as a person, but also, importantly, to the chronology of the Civil Rights movement as a whole. In retrospect, sitting in the old Ebenezer Baptist Church, imagining Dr. King in the pulpit, then walking down Auburn past the offices of the SCLC. felt like a beginning. It was like an introductory chapter where the themes are introduced, the characters debut, and the stage is set.
The next course then had to be a taste of modern day Atlanta. Well, it turns out there was this terrific food mart JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE of that freeway overpass. It was a literal smorgasboard of just about any delicious morsel you can imagine. (of course, the best part for Randy was the pizza place called "Pi's R Squared")
And, how did we finish that off? Well, with a visit to the Olympic park and then the World of Coca Cola of course. What could be more modern day Atlanta? We topped the day off with a dinner of fried catfish and then spent the night at a Cracker Barrel before heading to Alabama.
Anniston & Birmingham, AL - Freedom Riders, 16th street Baptist Church & Bull Connor
On the highway from Atlanta to Birmingham, one passes the tiny town of Anniston Alabama. As a result of the Supreme Court ruling in Boynton v. Virginia (1960), segregation was outlawed in restaurants and in the interstate bus system. During much of 1960, lunch counter sit-ins were organized across the South and then, in May of 1961, two busses set out from Washington, D.C. with a group of trained volunteers hoping to challenge Southern non-enforcement segregation on the bus lines. One of the busses passed through Anniston where Birmingham and Anniston police had reportedly arranged to allow a mob to attack the bus and put an end to the trip. The descriptions of the subsequent events are often all slightly different, but as described on the Equal Justice Initiative site they are as follows.
On Mother's Day, May 14, 1961, a Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders arrived at the Anniston, Alabama, bus station shortly after 1 pm to find the building locked shut. Led by Ku Klux Klan leader William Chapel, a mob of 50 men armed with pipes, chains, and bats smashed windows, slashed tires, and dented the sides of the Riders' bus. Though warned hours earlier that a mob had gathered at the station, local police did not arrive until after the assault had begun.
Once the attack subsided, police pretended to escort the crippled bus to safety, but instead abandoned it at the Anniston city limits. Soon after the police departed, another armed white mob surrounded the bus and began breaking windows. The Freedom Riders refused to exit the vehicle but received no aid from two watching highway patrolmen. When a member of the mob tossed a firebomb through a broken bus window, others in the mob attempted to trap the passengers inside the burning vehicle by barricading the door. They fled when the fuel tank began to explode. The Riders were able to escape the ensuing flames and smoke through the bus windows and main door, only to be attacked and beaten by the mob outside.
After police finally dispersed their attackers, the Freedom Riders received limited medical care. They were soon evacuated from Anniston in a convoy organized by Birmingham Civil Rights leader Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.
There is now a National Park site at the bus station in Anniston. TBH it could use a little more fleshing out, but the rangers are great and helpful and the exhibits' text and pictures tell you all you need to know.
In Birmingham, there was a similar incident when the second bus arrived at that bus station. Yet Birmingham was the site of so much more. It's hard, and perhaps not my place to go through the whole of the events in Birmingham. The Civil Rights museum there does an excellent job of that. At this point in our journey, there were a number of things that really had an impact on us and it's probably more useful to paint the picture of our route into the story.
(Parenthetically: I should note that we've decided it's most fun to park well away from where we want to go. Not only is it often easier to find a nice parking spot for Doris, but it's also more interesting to see almost any town on foot.)
As we walked across Birmingham to the Civil Rights Institute, we accidentally discovered the site of the Birmingham attack on the second Freedom Riders bus (it's now a Wells Fargo Branch). Then, not knowing yet about the history of Kelly Ingram park, we decided to cut across it to get to the museum more quickly, but we were met by the most unique man. He was a formerly homeless (or occasionally homeless, it wasn't clear) man who'd been tutored by a local social worker to have an understanding of the history of the park and the various park statues commemorating those event. He proceeded to give us a tour of the statues in the most detailed and thoughtful manner. So, HE was our introduction to:
Bull Connor, the Birmingham police chief
Rev Fred Shuttlesworth , Ralph Abernathy, Dr. King and the Birmingham campaign to bring attention to the local discrimination and violence against blacks
The student protests of 1963 in which thousands of high school & college students were hit with water cannons, arrested, and jailed.
The 16th street Baptist Church bombing that killed four young girls (Sept. 1963)
It was in the early part of this campaign (early 1963) that Dr. King wrote his famous "Letter from the Birmingham Jail". There are a number of striking thoughts and emotions in the letter, but the most famous is obviously that "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." However, the one that stuck most with me was:
"We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." - Dr. Martin Luther King
Along the way from Atlanta though, we also had a few other less emotional ventures. In the little town of Tallapoosa, AL, we spotted a giant park full of army jets, tanks, and artillery. Upon stopping there, we ran into Sammy Robinson, the head of the local veterans organization who had spearheaded the effort to find and restore these pieces and then get them installed. Given that Joan's brother Jerry served in the Navy in the 60s and her father served in the Navy in the 40s, it was a hoot to talk with Sammy about his service and the details of the restoration. Chalk up one more spontaneous, small town, just-met-the-guy-and-we-talked-for-30-minutes conversation.
Then, continuing our drive through downtown Tallapoosa, we spotted a TINY hole in the wall, deep in the back of a parking lot. It was the Turn Around BBQ and, well, it's hard for us to pass up any barbeque around the lunch hour, so we stopped. . . . The verdict? Very good, but still not up to the bar that was set for pulled pork in Georgia and for ribs in South Carolina.
Lastly, we FINALLY found a bike shop that would service our electric bikes. There are very very few dealers who can competently service the GoCycles we brought. Yet, in Birmingham there was a dealer, Bob's Bikes, who'd completed TWO separate courses on these weird little bicycles. We stopped and dropped them off for a few days and explored the town of Homewood. Weirdly, nothing we've seen so far has felt more like Menlo Park than Homewood did.
Montgomery, AL - The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace & Justice
We'd been told that these two Equal Justice Initiative sites in Montgomery were excellent -- they are each only ~5 years old, so not well known -- but nothing could really have prepared us for the experience.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is the perfect follow on to the Legacy Museum and on our cold and rainy Montgomery day it made a particularly strong statement. The memorial is really a park with multiple installations all tied together with historical text and quotes. The EJI website description is helpful here: than any other museum we've ever been to. It begins from the origins of the slave trade and continues, mixing art, history, words, images, and multi-media, through the evolution of the southern economy, the Civil War, Reconstruction & Jim Crow, 20th century's legacy of lynching & racial violence, and our long history of a dysfunctional system of incarceration. We'd both seen Ava DuVernay's terrific movie 13th, but as good as that film is the Legacy Museum had dramatically more impact on both of us.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice was the perfect follow-on to the Legacy Museum and on our cold and rainy Montgomery day it made a particularly strong statement. The memorial is really a park with multiple installations all tied together with historical text and quotes. The EJI website description is helpful here:
"Set on a six-acre site, the memorial uses sculpture, art, and design to contextualize racial terror. The site includes a memorial square with 800 six-foot monuments to symbolize thousands of racial terror lynching victims in the United States and the counties and states where this terrorism took place. The memorial structure on the center of the site is constructed of over 800 corten steel monuments, one for each county in the United States where a racial terror lynching took place. The names of the lynching victims are engraved on the columns. The memorial is more than a static monument. It is EJI’s hope that the National Memorial inspires communities across the nation to enter an era of truth-telling about racial injustice and their own local histories."
Each county where a documented lynching took place is represented with a large steel box that is symbolically hanging from the ceiling of the structure. As you walk among them you notice the names of each lynched person and the date of their death is cut into the steel. The floor slowly slopes downward until the boxes you're passing are hanging in the air several feet above your head.
Then, as you emerge from the structure, there are additional copies of each box laid out, in alphabetical order by state & county so that you can stroll among them, say, finding counties that you know or considering each name more carefully. We found of course a lynching in the county were Emily is at school currently in North Carolina. We also found counties with 20+ lynchings. (All tolled there are more than 6,000 documented cases and fewer than 1% resulted in any conviction of the perpetrators.) And the most recent documented case we found was from 1949, when my parents were 8 years old and Joan's brother Jerry was 3.
It's profoundly scary, sobering, and deeply saddening to realize that this heinous part of our nation's history just wasn't all that long ago.
More information about the site is available here from the Equal Justice Initiative
From Montgomery, we dropped down to the Flori-Bama coast. We played golf in Pensacola and camped at Gulf State Park on the Alabama side. In spring, this is collegiate party-central, but this time of year, we were DEEP in the "Snow Bird" culture among the FIVE HUNDRED rv's at the park. Almost everyone was a refugee from Michigan, Iowa, Indiana, or some other "northern" state and was escaping winter. There were daily exercise classes, volleyball games, game nights, nature walks, and lots and lots of people walking or riding their electric bikes around the park. As Joan would say, "It was a total hoot!"
My two favorite of these pictures are the last two. In the left one, there's a fellow out getting his exercise on a recumbent bike, but in case he needs to get off and walk somewhere, he has his walker carefully strapped to the back. In the right hand picture, our "neighbors", Dave and Rose Anne, both retired teachers from Wisconsin are typical "snow birds". They are spending the winter in Gulf Shores, Alabama (3-4 months!) before they head back home. Rose Anne, close to 90 years old, does the early bird exercise classes and they both love to ride & walk around the park. In the evening, they retire to their recliners in their trailer to watch tv. They look so cozy!
Mobile & Dora, AL and a little something different.
From Gulf State Park we had a very short drive over to Mobile, a town we knew literally NOTHING about. It turns out Mobile has the oldest Mardi Gras celebration in the country. Their partying dates back to 1703 when Mobile was the capital of French Louisiana. As you would then expect, Mobile has a lot of New Orleans character, including the beignets and wrought iron balconies. It's a very cute little town that was also having an evening "Art Walk" while we were there. But the best part for Randy was that they had this great men's clothing store that sold anything you might want to wear for Mardi Gras. So he got all decked out. We took a great pic with the nice ladies who picked it all out for us, but we'll save the "big reveal" for next month. :-)
As the very last act of our time in Alabama, we stopped in Dora, AL on our way back to Tennessee. Dora had a cute little golf course and was happy to have us spend the night in their parking lot before a little morning golf. The golf was actually nice, we joined up with a couple -- Jody and his wife Kristina. Jody was playing by himself and Kristina was just riding in the cart to keep him company, all wrapped in a big blanket to stay warm.
It was a ridiculously cold and frosty morning, so there weren't too many people around. However, as we finished our 9 holes there were lots of players mingling around. On the way out the door Randy noticed we were getting a lot of side-eye from the other players. Suddenly we realized that everyone playing this course was a guy. When we asked why there were so few women we were told,
"Women don't really play golf around here."
Hmmm.
Thought for the Day: Do we have to "own" our mistakes to learn from them?
It's impossible to visit these three towns -- Atlanta, Birmingham, & Montgomery -- and not ask this question. Stone Mountain, confederate statues in city parks, and middle schools named for confederate generals all made us wonder, "What was learned from the civil war?" We're just Californians, not steeped in this history every day, so I'm sure we're missing large parts of the picture, Yet, the history of being black in the 100 years after the war feels like the conflict didn't end, but instead continued as guerrilla warfare. Was it really only in the 1960's that the tide in that war began to turn?
Every year, as a nation we seem to suddenly understand the pain of slavery just a little more. We seem to suddenly realize the words, images, ideas, and policies that are slavery's semi-acknowledged legacy. Joan & I keep having this discussion about "Why is it 150 years after the war that we've 'suddenly' got a Legacy Museum?"
When my students take a test, we always do test corrections and spend time answering 3 questions for every one of our mistakes: "What did I do? What should I have done?" and "What did I learn?"
Sometimes the "What did I learn?" is that you need to work on fractions or maybe that you need to find ways to calm your nerves during tests. But one of the most common comments is that "I did this last time and I need to figure out how not to repeat this mistake!" Invariably, the discussion that we have revolves around "owning the mistake". Usually 9th graders want to just set aside the old test and pretend that they would never be so "stupid" as to make that mistake again. However, if they don't "own the mistake", they don't remember it and invariably it comes back to haunt them.
I have to wonder if this is the US experience with discrimination. Did we never really own the mistake? Is that perhaps the 9th grade way of describing the lasting long-running horror show of Jim Crow? As a nation we've never really taught our kids about the legacy we have with discrimination. We've never been honest with ourselves and our children about all the devastation that we've wrought. If each generation were shown the lynchings, discrimination, literacy tests, and race riots as a path to understanding who we were and who we should be, wouldn't we be in a much better place as a society than we are now? Wouldn't we have an easier time avoiding the repeats of that history?
Wow. Another great, informative post! thanks Randy. so much to think about