Category Archives: social justice

Civil Rights Tour # 6 — Selma again

Civil Rights Tour #5 — Selma

This post was gonna have two parts — some history and then personal impressions — but it took so long to put this together, I’ll send personal impressions separately.

Did you know that there were two cancelled marches from Selma prior to the completed, successful one to Montgomery?

Background— January, 1965

“Martin Luther King with SCLC joined SNCC,* the Dallas County Voters League, and other local …activists in a voting rights campaign in Selma where, in spite of repeated registration attempts by local blacks, only two percent were on the voting rolls. SCLC had chosen … Selma because they anticipated that the notorious brutality of local law enforcement …would attract national attention and pressure President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress to enact new national voting rights legislation.” King Institute at Stanford.

Spoiler alert: it worked.

February, 1965

Alabama state troopers broke up a protest in nearby Marion in February with vicious beatings. One cop shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young church deacon, as he tried to protect his mother from a billy club. He died eight days later (also from King Institute).

March, 1965

The first march attempt, on March 7, was organized in response to the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson. However, it didn’t get past the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Troopers advanced against the crowd and brutally beat and gassed them. Cameras were rolling. John Lewis was among the injured.

This violent melee became known as “Bloody Sunday” and was aired on national news.

Governor Wallace used the pretext of preserving safety to deny the protesters all manner of support and a local judge put out a restraining order to prevent the march for a few more days.

As Andrew Young described in the PBS series Eyes on the Prize, since no state or federal support was forthcoming, ‘we sent out the call to people of goodwill.’

That’s when 450 white pastors, nuns, and others committed to social justice arrived from the north.

Rather immediately thugs started harassing them too. On March 7, a group of locals beat the shit out of James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Massachusetts. Reeb died two days later.

This was galvanizing which was a good thing but it was also controversial since it made people wonder why Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death hadn’t garnered a similar response.

The second march started in spite of the judicial ban and the lack of protection but, probably for both of those reasons, it ended before even crossing the bridge. This was quite a moment. Backed by more than 2,000 protestors, Reverend Martin Luther King stopped and then knelt down to pray. The crowd behind him followed suit. He then stood, turned around, and led people off the bridge and away.

At this point in the PBS Show Bridge to Freedom, I learned that MLK had never before violated a federal order and was reluctant to do so. Also around then, President Johnson was pressuring Governor Wallace to do the right thing. When it became clear that he wouldn’t, Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard.

[Aside: in Ava DuVernay’s powerful telling in Selma, some of the most dramatic moments were the conversations between President Johnson and MLK and the president and Wallace].

March 15

President Johnson addressed Congress with an impassioned speech about the “crippling legacy of bigotry” and called on members to draft voting rights legislation (you know — that landmark law that the Roberts court has been systematically dismantling).

President Johnson’s use of the language of liberation (“we shall overcome”) at the speech’s end was heard loud and clear and cheered by Black citizens.

MLK had been asking and asking for this legislation and Johnson kept putting him off. The time wasn’t right. He couldn’t do it so soon after the Civil Rights Act, etc. But the shared experience of watching the shameful and shocking violence on national news changed the equation.

[Aside: Think about today, where we don’t watch the same channel, making it hard for a single event to galvanize the nation. A recent exception: the nine minute video of Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd].

The day after Johnson’s address to Congress, ‘demonstrators submitted a … march plan to Judge Johnson, who approved the demonstration and enjoined Governor Wallace and local law enforcement from harassing or threatening marchers.’ (the Stanford King Institute).

March 17

Johnson submitted voting rights legislation to Congress.

March 21

On this the third try, the march began and continued all the way to the state capitol, Montgomery. Fifty four miles. Four days. According to the King Institute, by the end there were 25,000 participants.

BTW — you know that iconic image of MLK linked arm in arm at the front of the march, with others wearing suits? That was by design. Credible death threats against King were circulating at the time and so, since ‘they can’t tell us apart’ (Andrew Young interview, Eyes on the Prize), it was decided to dress many of the men out front like the Reverend.

Sources:

The movie Selma by Ava DuVernay (Netflix)

Eyes on the Prize, Season One: The Bridge to Freedom. (you can watch on PBS. Or Prime, I think)

The Stanford King Institute.

National Geographic article full of history about the March from Selma to Montgomery, voter registration efforts, and the Montgomery bus Boycott.

You can read or listen to an interview with Andrew Young from the PBS show here.

*SCLC = Southern Christian Leadership Conference

SNCC = Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Civil rights tour #4 – Montgomery continued

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As stunning and moving as the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice were, Montgomery offered more to see.

We visited: the Rosa Parks Museum, the Civil Rights Memorial of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Dexter AME where Rev. Martin Luther King preached, plus our hotel was not far from the site of the waterfront Montgomery River Brawl.

The Rosa Parks Museum was about to close when we got there, but since it was small and the front desk clerk was gracious, we dashed in. It houses the actual bus where Rosa Parks famously sat up front and refused to move to the rear. There is also a lot of documentary and photographic ephemera associated with the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

By this hour, my brain was a little fried, but one indelible fact popped — how supporters used vehicles like hearses or commercial vans to secretly transport protestors, many of whom had 90-minute (or longer) walks to get home after a long day of menial labor.

Why? To avoid violence of course.

This strategy reminded me of the folks trying to leave Florida during the Great Migration as described by Isabel Wilkerson.* Because white “employers” would exert undue pressure or worse to keep their cheap, indentured workforce, Black Floridians had to secretly or slowly sell their belongings and then depart surreptitiously. One person had themselves nailed into a coffin to avoid detection.

Earlier that day, we went to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial. You might have laughed at us circling the block a few times trying to locate the building. Around and around we went.

Unfortunately that famous and beautiful granite water feature out front was dry for repairs, but the inside, though small, did not disappoint.

You entered into a cavernous space papered with historic photos. Then a sound track started while lights illuminated relevant photos.

That table you see was dedicated to “the Martyrs.”

Next, in an auditorium a film about civil rights played, covering much of what we’d been seeing but also addressing George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement.

At the end, a darkened room offered memorial-goers an opportunity to add their names to a scrolling visual display of supporters. It was one of those clever interactive exhibits that pulls people in and lets them feel part of something. Or at least, it did me.

There was no place to make a donation there, which I kind of expected, but since I’ve been a card-carrying member of the SPLC since 1990, I didn’t feel too bad.

Charles M. Blow: many Black people, in particular, saw it [the violent tussles] as an unfortunate but practically unavoidable response to what can feel like an unending stream of incidents in which Black people are publicly victimized, with no one willing or able to intervene or render aid.

Here’s a link to his oped with the paywall removed: New York Times Opinion.

And here’s a screen shot from Rolling Stone:

Rolling Stone link.

Anyway, I’m surprised that no one thought to artfully position a folding chair next to this statue of Rosa Parks, just blocks from the waterfront.

* The Warmth of Other Suns, the Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson.

Civil Rights Tour #3

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Montgomery, Alabama

Statue outside the National Memorial for Peace and Justice

Site of The Legacy Museum and the six -acre National Memorial for Peace and Justice (aka the Lynching Memorial). These were the main reasons for making the trip and they did not disappoint.

Photos were not allowed inside the museum, so I’ve embedded one of their Instagram posts.

The excitement started before we even entered the exhibits. A hubbub. Early — not even 9:30 am — and ticketed entrants spilled out of the foyer, many more waiting outside. I would’ve loved to know where people had traveled from to be there.

The museum is huge and comprehensive, covering the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, the prison pipeline, and more. Every inch of the museum is designed to appeal to both emotion and intellect, offering the visitor images, text, and audio. Some exhibits were duplicated on both sides of a small space and entries were timed, so you really could take in the displays (or try to). Other exhibits were cavernous, like the area with replicated runaway slave notices stretching 15 feet up and wrapping around stand-alone display walls.

It’s too much to convey here but let me at least describe the entry and first exhibit.

After passing through security, you enter a small dark room with one wall dedicated to a video of the ocean. It’s probably twenty feet tall. The waves are coming at you. Crashing and swelling. You feel a sense of scale — both the enormity of the ocean and the smallness of your body. And then, projected onto the waves you see a few statistics about the slave trade. Numbers of bodies kidnapped. Numbers of lives lost in transit. The scale of the tragedy is almost impossible to take in.

A powerful way to begin.

Next up, right after the waves, probably my favorite space. Again, it’s small and dark. This time water is projected onto the floor. It’s a luminous blue gridded with white light and it washes over the floor and then recedes. Mirrors amplify the effect. On the floor, as if emerging out of the ground or water: clay heads and busts. They are life-sized. Some are in chains, some wear iron-spike collars or ripped tunics. Others are naked. All express agony or bewilderment. Each is distinct and you cannot stop looking at them. The sparkling water washes over them then recedes, illuminating them and then leaving them in darkness. It’s astonishing.

Scattered throughout the interior are viewing rooms. In one room, there was a video about the artist who made these clay forms. Kwame Akoto-Bamfo. He is from Ghana and you can read about his work here.

The outdoor memorial also uses scale to convey the mind-bending levels of violence perpetrated by white people on Black people. The shed is huge. The down-hanging blocks represent counties, with names of known lynching victims etched upon them. They are not organized by state and so you get this dizzying impression of murder being everywhere — an unavoidable and relentless violence.

D is from Georgia and so photographed her county.

The site is not a static memorial. Each block hanging in the shed has a duplicate version stacked up out on the lawn. If a county is prepared to go through a process of public acknowledgement, they can take their block to their county and post a landmark. The plaques below are copies of such acknowledgments. They are not formulaic. I got the impression each was informed by a thorough and deep community process.