Civil Rights

Taking a trip into the deep south of the United States to explore some of the sites that defined the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s is not a lighthearted proposition. It involves dealing with some pretty unpleasant issues like abduction, torture, death, subjugation, humiliation, voter suppression, beatings, abuse of power with no consequences, rape, castration, lynching and much more. It's uncomfortable. It's upsetting. It's shameful. The stories of the Civil Rights Movement are brutal and disgraceful to the ideals that the United States claims it stands for. But after the presidency of Donald Trump and the events of 2020, it seemed like the right time to take this trip. We dipped our toes into these waters in March with a trip to Richmond, Virginia and then a bit further west to Farmville. Memphis, Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama would be for the most part an entirely different sort of America from Richmond.

I think it's worth spending a few words on just how segregated America was in the 20th century. There is a chapter in Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste where she writes about a meeting held by a committee of Nazi bureaucrats in Berlin in June of 1934 to determine how to institutionalize the inferiority of Jews into the Third Reich. They started by studying the United States. You read that right; the Nazis admired the racial separation in the USA. They were apparently fascinated by the way America could be held up worldwide as a beacon of absolute democracy while simultaneously legally separating black people from the rest of its society. This was their starting model. They studied how America classified people as black vs. white and thought that might inform their own efforts to classify Germans as Jewish or non-Jewish. Ultimately, they rejected America's classification rule that even one drop of African blood in your ancestry meant you were black; they thought it was too harsh. 

Don't believe it? I don't mean the June 1934 meeting (they took minutes after all). I mean America as a legally separated and unequal society. There was a time when I was a lot younger that I wouldn't have either. It sounds farfetched. It sounds like some sort of delusional conspiracy theory. But it's real. Think about it. Talk to people who don't look like you. Put yourself in someone else's shoes. America, the self-proclaimed land of the free and home of the brave, was an obviously segregated society. 

And guess what? It still is. Maybe not so much legally today but all men (or women) are still not created equal even in 2021. If we had made this trip 60 years ago, it would have been way more obvious. We'd have been in a part of the country where laws and the attitudes of society would have made it clear that white folks and black folks are distinctly different classes of people who should not under any circumstances mingle in any way resembling equals. It sounds stupid, doesn't it? It was very, very real.

16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, AL where four little girls were killed in a bombing in 1963.

Statue of Rosa Parks, Montgomery, AL near the spot where she boarded a bus and refused to give up her seat in 1955.

So I can admit I'm not likely the best person to write about the Civil Rights Movement. I'm a white man who grew up in the mostly white suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut. I had no non-white friends growing up in this country. My upbringing was free from prejudice based on my appearance. Race relations were not something I had to deal with before attending college, so I formed my own opinions from the zero experience I had with it as I grew up. I'm only writing all this because I feel inadequately experienced to write about the subject I'm writing about today and for the next few weeks. I do not claim to be an expert or feel anything like the pain someone non-white might feel on a trip like this. On the other hand, nobody else is going to write about my trip and experiences in my blog. So I bring whatever unconscious bias to my experience based on my background.

Our journey this month started in Memphis. From there we made day trips into Arkansas and Mississippi and retreated back to Bluff City for the night. Eventually, we drove east and south for good, stopping overnight in both Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama. The number of sites we visited was extremely limited. We only had a bit more than a week down south. At the same time, we stopped at so many places that bore the scars of segregation. It was staggering. It was everywhere. And that's because it really was everywhere. It was an integral part of society. Everywhere. And yes, even today.

I am not going to write about every site, every building, every museum that we visited. Instead, I'm going to concentrate on the experiences that had the greatest impact on me rather than giving a blow-by-blow of every stone of history we unturned. That's not intended to diminish or minimize some of what we saw. Instead, I see it as placing emphasis to differentiate the most uncomfortable, upsetting and shameful events that we learned about. And I really do mean those words. For the most part, the most cruel, the most visceral and most bloody events are the ones that I'll elaborate on in more detail. They stuck with me the most.

Separate and very unequal drinking fountains at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

This was not my first shot at some of the places we visited. I'd toured through the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis in 2018 and walked around Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham a little more than two years before that. Those experiences, along with our March trip to Richmond and Farmville this year, allowed me to start to connect the dots of this movement in ways I could not before this spring. My second trip through the National Civil Rights Museum was invaluable as an overview of the history not only of the Civil Rights Movement but of the events decades and centuries that laid the groundwork for a United States distinctly separated along racial lines.

There's also nothing like being where history happened. I know it's been between 50 and 70 years since the events we learned about occurred in the towns, cities and countryside we drove through, but the atmosphere, the vibe and the details made an impression and heightened the experience. Reading about history is one thing. Being where it happened drives concepts and moods home like nothing else.

We love to travel and we were for sure looking forward to this trip after many months effectively confined to our home during the global pandemic of the last 15 to 16 months or so. At the same time, there was a good amount of apprehension. We knew it wouldn't be as enjoyable as a trip to see wildlife or nature or sports or architecture or any of the other amazing things we've done over the past almost eight years I've been writing this blog. But it had to be done. We did manage to sprinkle in some other themes like music and food. I'll blog about those too.

The focus here for sure was on a lot of suffering. The difficult part about the entire trip is there was never any real victory. Sure, some laws changed in significant ways but there was never a feel good moment when it felt like the war was won. It is difficult to claim that countless black men and women dying and suffering other inhuman abuses was worth it to get to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which is where a lot of the narratives about the Civil Rights Movement end. On the other hand, their deaths and suffering definitely paved the way for change, as callous as that seems. As we've seen in 2020 and 2021 and 2019 and pick any year really between now and then, the issue of racial inequality in this country is still not solved. At what point do we stop taking incremental steps forward and then ignoring the issue for a couple of years at a time?

Most posts I've written on this blog have been fun and easy to write. These next few posts will not be like those other posts.

The balcony outside Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. Memphis.

I Am A Man Plaza next to Clayborn Temple in Memphis used as a rallying point for the 1968 sanitation workers' strike.

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How We Did It

There is so much to explore in the South related to the Civil Rights Movement. There are museums and statues and buildings and memorials and signs and just open fields or corners of streets seemingly everywhere that had an impact. Something happened seemingly everywhere. Some of these places are shown in or suggested by the photographs above. I'm also electing not to devote future posts to these places.

For a pretty complete overview of the Civil Rights Movement from the landing of the first slave ship in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, I'd suggest a visit to the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The centerpiece of the Museum is the motel wing including the balcony where Dr. King was shot by James Earl Ray's bullet from an adjacent boarding house (the boarding house is also part of the Museum). That event is the terminus of the Museum's timeline and the end point of the exhibits. There is a ton of information to digest in the Museum; we spent a little more than five hours (that time admittedly includes a stop for lunch at the nearby Central BBQ) on this trip. You could easily spend a couple more hours and still miss some things. The Museum is currently open Thursday through Monday.

If you are ever in Birmingham, Alabama, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute offers similar subject matter as the NCRM but with a distinctly Alabama focus. We spent a little more than 90 minutes in the Institute which is located across the street from both the 16th Street Baptist Church and Kelly Ingram Park (which contains a Freedom Walk documenting some of Birmingham's troubled history). The Institute is currently open Thursday through Saturday.

The 16th Street Baptist Church was the target of a Ku Klux Klan bombing in 1963 that killed Addie Collins, Carol McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley (aged between 11 and 14). Under non-global pandemic situations, there are tours of the Church available. The KKK members who planted the dynamite that killed the girls were not even charged until 1977 and it took almost 40 years to get a conviction despite pretty overwhelming evidence of who was responsible for the crime. 

One of the best museums we visited on our trip was the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. It details the story of Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat in the non-white section of a Montgomery city bus in December of 1955. It's a little confusing to visit (you have to buy a ticket then go outside to the other side of the building then go back to the original side where tickets are sold) but it tells the story of Mrs. Parks and events leading up to the more than one year long Montgomery Bus Boycott in an interactive way that we didn't get in other museums on this trip. There's a Rosa Parks statue on the corner of Dexter Avenue and Commerce Street near where she boarded the bus.

The last picture in this post is of the I Am A Man Plaza in Memphis. It's a monument to the men involved in the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers who went on strike to protest unequal pay and benefits for non-white sanitation workers. It's located at the side of the Clayborn Temple in Memphis where the workers gathered before marching to protest the unequal treatment they received. During the protest, most strikers wore signs reading I Am A Man. Clayborn Temple is located at 294 Hernando Street just a short walk from Beale Street in downtown Memphis. The Plaza tells the story of the strike through a timeline around the Plaza's edge.

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