Southern Music Playlist

For years now, I've toyed with the idea of creating music playlists for some of the trips that I've taken over the last eight or so (or more, even) years. You know, location-specific tunes to listen to while we drive around discovering whatever new place it is we are exploring. Maybe albums that were recorded or written in the city, state or country where we happen to be spending a few days or week or fortnight or whatever. Or music made by the place's native sons or daughters. Or even just songs about wherever it is we happen to be. It's a good idea, right? 

I always thought so, anyway.

I've never done it. 

But if there was ever a trip that called out for a need for a playlist, it was our tour of the American South, just because of the richness of musical history in that area. There's a first time for everything. This had to be done! So I made it so.

The idea was the simple part. The assembly of a list would be more complicated.

My initial idea was to make a list of 52 songs (one for each full year I've been on the planet) from my own music collection that represent to me the city of Memphis and the states of Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama with an emphasis on the four recording studios we planned to visit over the little more than a week we were spending down south. No new songs. No new purchases. Just stuff that I love and which are indisputably part of music history where we were headed.

I thought 52 was a good number but I also feared editing would be a bit of a problem on this sort of exercise, which is probably a big reason why I've never done this before. My list filled up pretty quickly and easily. I managed to find a good amount (but not too much) of music recorded in Memphis or northern Alabama or songs by artists from the places we visited. It worked. I made a couple of last minute changes but 52 came together well.

But then I thought there was some room for some extra stuff that would fit the mood of the trip (told you editing was an issue). So I added five wildcard songs that have a lot of meaning but maybe don't fit my initial criteria. 

Here's what ended up on my 52 (plus 5) song playlist. And no, I'm not writing something about every song. Or even every artist.

• Robert Johnson: Cross Road Blues / Ramblin' On My Mind / Love In Vain
• Sonny Boy Williamson: One Way Out / Checkin' Up On My Baby
• Muddy Waters: Rollin' Stone / I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man / Standing Around Crying
• Elmore James: The Sky Is Crying / Dust My Broom
• B.B. King: It's My Own Fault / Help The Poor
• Willie Nelson Featuring B.B. King: The Thrill Is Gone

So much of the story of American music started in Mississippi so it seems like the logical place to start my playlist. Without blues being sung by black musicians who were sons and daughters of sharecroppers who were sons and daughters of slaves, there might not be any rock and roll today. Black families fed up with a life of perpetual poverty and effective indentured servitude headed north along Highway 61 to Chicago, some to work in factories in the city and some to seek their fortunes making music. Some of those that didn't make it all the way to Chicago stopped and stuck in Memphis. 

All the artists above were born in Mississippi with the exception of Willie Nelson; I felt that Willie and B.B.'s version of "The Thrill Is Gone" would add another classic voice into the mix on my playlist. Sonny Boy Williamson and Muddy Waters are more famous as Chess Records (out of Chicago) artists, but Sonny Boy was instrumental in broadcasting music across the Mississippi Delta through his King Biscuit Time radio station broadcast out of Helena, Arkansas on radio station KFFA to black and white kids everywhere the signal would reach.

The most legendary of these musicians has to be Robert Johnson, an itinerant and ordinary guitar player who disappeared from Mississippi only to return as the most important blues musician of his time (and perhaps ever). That astonishing transformation led some folks to speculate that Johnson had sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads of Routes 49 and 61 in exchange for his talent. Johnson didn't dispute the story for as long as he lived. Which wasn't long. He died at age 27, which likely helped keep the crossroads mythology alive.

• Jackie Brenston with His Delta Cats: Rocket "88" 
• B.B. King: B.B. Blues
• Howlin' Wolf: How Many More Years
• Elvis Presley: That's All Right / Good Rockin' Tonight
• Johnny Cash: Cry, Cry, Cry / Guess Things Happen That Way / Ballad Of A Teenage Queen
• Jerry Lee Lewis: Great Balls Of Fire / Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On
• Live: I Walk The Line

First stop on our trip: Memphis, home of the blues and the birthplace of rock and roll. Its location at the north end of the the Mississippi delta (and within reach of KFFA's signal) allowed black musicians a place to play and make money and white kids to steal that music and transform it into something different which eventually would become rock and roll. I don't use "steal" in a judgmental way there because much of the history of rock and roll is adapting what those before you laid down as a foundation. But it was stealing.

All the tracks above were recorded at Sam Phillips' Sun Studio (or Memphis Recording Service as it was known before Phillips re-branded it) with the exception of "I Walk The Line" by Live. I think it was important to strike a little bit of a balance between the Jackie Brenston / B.B. King / Howlin' Wolf tracks and the later Sun tracks recorded by white musicians. All of them are excellent. If there's a regret here, it's that I didn't put B.B. King's "3 O'Clock Blues" on the playlist because I think it's far superior to "B.B. Blues". However, I didn't own it and so didn't include it. In fact, I still don't.

So about that Live track...

Live's version of Johnny Cash's "I Walk The Line" was pulled from the Good Rockin' Tonight: The Legacy of Sun Records album. My dad bought that album for me for Christmas years and years ago and features artists I love re-recording songs originally recorded at Sun Studio. It's an awesome album which would be even awesome-er if I could lop off the Kid Rock track at the end. Not because his version of "Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee" is a bad song but just because I object to all things Kid Rock. The best track on the album is Live's interpretation of "I Walk The Line". It's sinister and mean and I love it. Had to put that song on the playlist despite the fact it wasn't actually recorded in Memphis. Sometimes you have to bend the rules.

• Booker T and The MGs: Green Onions
• William Bell: You Don't Miss Your Water / Any Other Way 
• Sam And Dave: Hold On! I'm Comin' / Soul Man
• Eddie Floyd: Knock On Wood
• Johnny Daye: What'll I Do For Satisfaction
• Otis Redding: Respect / I've Been Loving You Too Long / (Sittin' On) The Dock Of the Bay
• Albert King: Born Under A Bad Sign / Laundromat Blues

There were two great record labels in Memphis in the 1950s and 1960s: Sun Studio downtown and Stax Records on the south side of town. Sun gets 11 tracks on the playlist; Stax gets 12. It's not a competition. It just worked out that way. But it does speak to the strength of Stax's catalog and my love for parts of that catalog that there are more Stax tracks than Sun. 

My favorite Stax artist is Albert King. There's no question about it. His voice and his guitar playing are so smooth and completely unlike anyone else. I could have stuck his entire Born Under A Bad Sign album (which is really just a collection of singles) on the playlist and been happy. But there had to be cuts, so Albert ends up with just two tracks. Stax was a family through and through. If you need any proof of that, look no further than the authors of the titial song of Albert King's album: William Bell and Booker T. Jones, who also have tracks on the playlist.

Two other notes about the Stax portion of my playlist. First, Otis Redding is just incredible. Among all the young deaths in music history, Otis' has to be one of the least well known. 26 years old. And he was just getting warmed up. Second, there is no situation that I wouldn't listen to the two Sam and Dave tracks on this list. These two songs always make me feel better.

• Aretha Franklin: I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You / Do Right Woman, Do Right Man
• Wilson Pickett: Mustang Sally
• The Rolling Stones: Brown Sugar / Wild Horses / You Gotta Move
• Paul Simon: Loves Me Like A Rock / Kodachrome

The Muscle Shoals portion of my playlist could have been a lot longer, but unlike Sun and Stax, most of the artists who recorded at FAME Studios and the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio were not from one of the states we visited. So I decided to just crop it at the best of the best.

Because they ended up on two of my favorite albums ever (with Sticky Fingers being THE favorite ever), I elected to include every song recorded by Aretha Franklin and The Rolling Stones on my playlist. But if there's a favorite story about an artist traveling to Muscle Shoals to record some music, it's Paul Simon visiting there in 1973 to record one song for his There Goes Rhymin' Simon album.

Simon booked four days in Muscle Shoals to record his song "Take Me To The Mardi Gras" with the black musicians he had heard on the Staple Singers' Be Altitude: Respect Yourself album. He got surprised twice in Muscle Shoals: once when he found out none of the musicians he heard on the album he loved were black and again when the band nailed his song in a half a day. He ended up recording half his album in the studio with the leftover time. I think it's worth watching the Youtube video of the four band members discussing Simon's visit. The link is here. 

Robert Johnson's grave, Little Missionary Baptist Church, Greenwood, Mississippi.

• Hank Williams: You Win Again
• The Band: Ophelia
• Pine Hill Haints: Trains Have No Names

There is not a lot of music made by artists from Alabama and Arkansas in my music collection. But we were spending some time driving through those states so I thought it was important to include at least some music made by folks from those two states. 

The Pine Hill Haints are my favorite all time band from Alabama. You likely don't know their music. I met them in a bar below a record store (the bar was appropriately called The Basement) in Nashville in 2006. Their approach to music, which included heavy washboard and washtub bass action on most all their songs, intrigued me and I ended up buying a few of their albums which I still pull out and listen to way more than I listen to a lot of other music in my collection.  And when I say "met them" I really mean that. I was talking football while watching a preseason game with some dude at the bar when I was waiting for the show to start. That dude turned out to be Jamie Barrier, who is the lead singer and guitarist. 

I also knew that any playlist that was meant for a trip to Arkansas had to include at least one track sung by Levon Helm in The Band. "Ophelia" is perhaps my favorite track by The Band. I find it to be one of their most musical tracks and it's for sure my favorite Levon Helm vocal. Easy choice on that one.

Hank Williams made the cut because has Alabama produced a more influential musician? I tried to pick a track that was not too denigrating towards his wife, as most of his songs were.

Beale Street at night, Memphis.

• Elvis Presley: Jailhouse Rock / Suspicious Minds
• Dusty Springfield: Son Of A Preacher Man / Willie & Laura Mae Jones
• Big Star: In The Street

For the last five of my original 52 songs on my playlist, I went back to Memphis for more Elvis, one song off Big Star's #1 Album record (which is renowned by musicians but I can't for the life of me see the genius of the album) and two tracks by Dusty Springfield.

It is difficult for me to describe how incredible Dusty In Memphis is. On the first play, it sounds like it belongs on an easy listening station that only people old enough to be my parents would really listen to. I first bought this album on reputation sometime in the 1990s I'm guessing and one day started listen to it a few years later. The sexiness and sultriness set against the hot, sticky South where it was recorded lingers on every track. It is desire, it is forbidden, it is desperate, it is seductive. It never gets old. It's one of the most incredible collection of songs I've ever heard. I've consistently maintained that if I could have only five albums to listen to for the rest of my life they would be Sticky Fingers (The Rolling Stones), Abbey Road (The Beatles), a Mark Knopfler album, a Bob Dylan album (my preference on the Knopfler and Dylan albums keeps shifting) and Dusty In Memphis. It is that good.

Perhaps obviously, Dusty In Memphis was recorded in the Bluff City, specifically at Chips Moman's now long gone American Music Studio. To be more accurate here, I guess I should say that the instrumental tracks were recorded in Memphis. Dusty couldn't sing in Memphis. Just couldn't do it. Stage fright or shyness or whatever. Her vocals were recorded in New York.

The most famous song on this album is Dusty's version of "Son of a Preacher Man". The other song on my playlist, "Willie & Laura Mae Jones" was not on the original album, but it was on the expanded edition I fell in love with when I really got into the album. I think it's the most southern track on the deluxe edition so I included it on my playlist, even though it was not recorded in Memphis at all. I cheated with Live's "I Walk The Line". I'm cheating here too.

Real Deal Cowboy Neal, King's Palace Cafe, Memphis. Sometimes the best blues is found in an alley.

The living room at Graceland. The stained glass peacocks are amazing. Seriously!

• Bob Dylan: Only A Pawn In Their Game
• Neil Young: Southern Man
• Paul Simon: Graceland
• Depeche Mode: Personal Jesus
• U2: Pride (In The Name Of Love)

So this is my "plus five" list. Five songs that are completely relevant to the area of the country we visited while also being written and recorded by artists who have little to no historical connection to the deep South.

The Dylan and U2 tracks are both about assassinations of Civil Rights leaders. "Only A Pawn In Their Game" is about the driveway slaying of Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers in Mississippi in 1963. I find this song a little strange because while Dylan is (appropriately) pointing the finger of blame at the politicians who were convincing poor uneducated whites to kill for them, it sounds like he's absolving the man who pulled the trigger of responsibility. U2's "Pride" is about the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

"Graceland" and "Personal Jesus" are both on this list because of Elvis. "Graceland" is about a man feeling compelled to visit Elvis Presley's home, Graceland, but it's really about the dissolution of his marriage. There are some awesome lines in the song that represent the area of the country in just magical ways ("The Mississippi delta is shining like a national guitar"). Depeche Mode took their inspiration from a Priscilla Presley penned memoir about her time with Elvis. Elvis is her "Personal Jesus".

Finally, I couldn't add five songs to my playlist and not add Neil Young's "Southern Man". It is a scathingly accurate condemnation of how the southern states kept black men on the bottom rung of society through an institutionalized system of violent intimidation and frequent lynchings. It (along with Young's equally scathing "Alabama") caused Lynyrd Skynyrd to pen "Sweet Home Alabama" in response and in defense of the South. As much as I love Skynyrd's music and particularly their first two albums, Neil Young is in the right here.

So that's it. That's the story of the music I took with me on a trip to explore the Civil Rights Movement. This was a lot of work and I'm not sure I'm making a trip-specific playlist again any time soon. But it was probably the right trip to do this for the first time. And never say never again. 

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How We Did It

We ended up visiting a lot of music sites in our 10 days in the American South. I've discussed some of them in my post about the four studios we visited but I thought it would be worth writing down the others we stopped by to pay our respects (literally in some cases) to some of the artists that I put on this playlist.

First of all...yes, we went to Graceland. It's overblown, far too self-important and way too expensive (the cheapest ticket to get inside Graceland is $75!!!!) but it had to be done. I visited way back in 2006 and it was nothing like this. We met someone later that same week who blamed it all on Lisa-Marie. Maybe that's true. I guess if you can get people to pay that much, go for it. But it is ridiculously priced. The property is open daily (wouldn't you be if you could get at least $75 from every visitor?) and the website encourages you to purchase tickets in advance. We didn't and did just fine, but we were also visiting at the tail end (maybe) of the COVID-19 pandemic. I'm deliberately not including a link to the Graceland website.

To get the complete Elvis experience, we also visited the Elvis Presley Birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi. I think it's worth a stop if you are in the area. Admission to Elvis' first home and birthplace, his original (relocated) church and a museum are all separately priced at $9 each, although there's a discount if you buy admission to more than one of the buildings. We visited the home only and it took about five minutes. You can walk the property for free and if you don't care that much about seeing two rooms of a 1930s shotgun shack, you can probably save the $9 each and still have just as good an experience as we did.

We spent one long day elsewhere in Mississippi which included stops at three music-related sites. We stopped by the crossroads of Routes 61 and 49 on the way down to Indianola, Mississippi to visit the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center. If you can't find the crossroads, plug Abe's Bar-B-Q into the directions app of your choice; it's right next to the crossroads itself (we actually parked in their parking lot). I'd completely recommend a visit to the B.B. King Museum. B.B. was such an awesome human being but the museum also conveys really well what it was like to be a sharecropper in Mississippi between the two world wars. 

In between the crossroads and B.B. King's Museum, we stopped at the likely grave of Robert Johnson. I say likely because there are multiple sites out there that claim to be the last resting place of Johnson. Based on my research, the one at the Little Missionary Baptist Church in Greenwood, Mississippi seemed to be the most credible. The grave is towards the back of the cemetery, which sits to the left of the church itself. Look for the collection box next to the grave under a pecan tree. There is a sign describing Johnson's life at the entrance to the driveway to the property. That sign also describes a visit made by Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant to the site. Can you imagine driving around rural Mississippi looking for Johnson's grave and finding Robert Plant hanging out there when you arrived? 

Finally, some words about Beale Street. While pulling our itinerary together for this trip, I read some information online about the poor quality of music on Beale Street and that you might be better off going elsewhere in Memphis to hear some live music. While I agree that you might have to search a bit for the specific type of music you want to listen to, I found the quality of the music to be no different than what I listened to on my prior two trips to Memphis. And I found the music to be excellent on all three trips, although admittedly I found some venues to be less than satisfactory. If I were heading back to Memphis any time soon, I'd head straight for the outdoor venue at King's Palace Cafe and the indoor Blues City Band Box. I would avoid B.B. King's Blues Club (too many covers of classic rock rather than blues songs) and Rum Boogie Cafe (the bands here have not matched the quality I've found elsewhere on Beale Street). But there IS good music to be found on Beale Street.

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Southern Food

The above photograph is the truth.

Now that we are through the Civil Rights blog posts that formed the basis of our trip to the American South, let's talk about something we were really looking forward to out of our May vacation: the food. I'm serious. I've never really explored southern food in its element and this trip was an opportunity to do just that. We were prepared for some down home, finger-licking, butter-filled, deep-fried, artery-clogging goodness. Well, maybe not goodness in the artery-clogging department but we were looking forward to eating some stuff that tasted super good at just about every meal. Tons. Of. Flavor.

I went south with a list. Fried green tomatoes. Fried chicken. Biscuits. Greens. Barbeque. And maybe a few other things mixed in there that I either for sure loved or felt pretty darned confident that I would love. I did my research on where to eat online, on Netflix, in guidebooks and from memory, and laid out what I thought would be a pretty good list of places to stop and chow down.

I was right. We had some amazing eats. We also had some misses both in terms of restaurants serving what I thought were sub-par versions of foods that we sought and in terms of restaurants that we would never return to based on our one stop there. It was bound to happen. There are too many different opinions and palates out there; not everybody is going to agree on what the best food is. Here are a few words about the best stuff I thought we ate in in our 10 days in Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas. I'm highlighting the best of each type of food we had as I go.

And spoiler alert: there's no banana pudding on this list. I'm not going anywhere and deliberately eating anything banana flavored. Except maybe when it comes to actual bananas, and then only in the tropics but definitely in Ecuador.

Biscuits

I have to tell you, there are some foods in this world that I just don't get what all the fuss is about. And biscuits are on that list. If there was a redemption story possibility for a food on this trip, it was the biscuit. I took a trip to Texas in 2013 to see if I really did actually like barbeque (turns out I do!); this trip had the potential to do for the biscuit what Texas did for BBQ in '13.

I still don't get the fuss. I used to make biscuits at home on weekends and have them with jam for breakfast and I thought those were pretty good. Every other biscuit, including most on this trip: meh! I find them stodgy and heavy and that's about it. And if you want to make them worse for me, throw on some sausage gravy. I had some gravy on this trip at a somewhat famous restaurant in Memphis that was like paste. Paste is not good.

This trip didn't save biscuits for me. However, I did find one that I would try again. Best biscuit: Nashville Biscuit House, Nashville, TN.

Fried Chicken

The best meal we had on this trip (hands down) was at Gus's World Famous Fried Chicken in Memphis. The second best meal we had on this trip was also at Gus's.

By my count, I had fried chicken eight times on this trip, including twice for breakfast, in a sandwich, in wing form, twice in a biscuit and twice at Gus's. There is just one I'd go back to in a heartbeat and that's (obviously) Gus's. I don't know how they make the batter so light (with that hint of hot sauce) and keep that chicken so juicy. It's pretty much perfect. If there's a better piece of fried chicken out there, I don't know what it is. This stuff is the best.

OK, so truth be told, I'd been to Gus's before and I knew it was good. I just didn't know we'd end up there twice in a five night stay in Memphis. Best fried chicken: Gus's World Famous Fried Chicken, Memphis TN. And it's not even close!! I do feel that Saw's Soul Kitchen in Birmingham, AL deserves a shout out here. I had the fried chicken sandwich and I'd eat it again although I will say there's more tolerance for lack of perfection with a sandwich than a piece of chicken by itself. But I'd still order it again.

Fried Green Tomatoes

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, the picture above looks like a burger. That's because it is.

If there's one food I convinced myself I would love on this trip, it was fried green tomatoes, despite not having really any experience with this southern staple. Looking back on things, I'm thinking maybe I confused fried green tomatoes with pickled green tomatoes. 

I ate fried green tomatoes twice in sandwiches (including the burger shown above and an actual fried green tomato sandwich) and once as a side on this trip. For the sake of accurate comparison, I did remove the FGTs from the two sandwiches so I could taste them on their own.

I have to say I'm not thrilled, although the ones on the burger above had the most flavor and the most tanginess. Maybe a little heavy on the batter but still with good flavor. The other two just tasted like oil. Soft pass on these things in the future. Best fried green tomatoes: Cahawba House, Montgomery, AL. Yes, it's the burger above.

Barbeque

There are a ton of barbeque traditions in this country and they all have their own distinct tastes. Go to North Carolina or Texas or Kansas City or St. Louis and you'll find dishes that have a common theme (meat cooked slowly over wood or coals) but have completely different taste profiles. We managed just two true barbeque meals in our time down south and both were in Memphis, which happens to have both dry (meaning dry rubbed with spices and served with or without sauce) and wet (meaning flavored with sauce during the cooking process) varieties of barbeque.

We chose two barbeque joints in Memphis. One offered both dry and wet options; the other had only wet. And like Gus's, I had been to one of these two (the one with the dry and wet options) before.

Barbeque is inherently messy. Sauce gets everywhere. So a dry-rubbed and smoked rack of ribs is refreshingly non-messy. Being able to strip meat off a rack of pork ribs with your teeth while getting incredible flavor and no sauce all over your hands and face is a good thing. A really good thing. I have to say that my memory of dry rubbed barbeque in Memphis from my trip in 2018 was better than this year but I'd still opt for dry over wet any day. Best barbeque: Central BBQ, Memphis, TN.

Greens

I don't know what it is that makes greens so good. I mean this is about the least appetizing side in the world. It's just chopped up leaves in liquid. But it can be so, so good.

I made it a point of pride on this trip to eat greens whenever I could, which meant I discriminated not at all. There was no advance research on best greens in the four states we visited, I just jumped in every time I found them. I didn't keep track of the number of times I ate greens on this trip (and it was mostly collard greens by the way) but I'm pretty sure it was close to the number of times I had fried chicken, although admittedly I didn't eat greens for breakfast.

If I had to describe my perfect greens, I'd have them made them juicy and rich and slightly bitter with a little spice thrown in via maybe some red pepper flakes. The greens in the photograph with the ribs two pictures up matched that description and maybe because I'd already had them at Central BBQ three years ago that way, they became a self-fulfilling prophecy as my ideal greens (turnip greens, by the way; the only ones we found on this trip). But I was surprised once in our week down south to be served some collards that were decidedly sweet (the photo above) in downtown Montgomery. Totally different than Central's turnip greens but equal in a completely alternate universe way. When I think of greens from this trip, those are the two dishes I remember best. Best greens: Central BBQ, Memphis, TN and Cahawba House, Montgomery, AL.

Tamales

Why are there tamales in the South east of the Mississippi River, you might ask. Well, apparently the story is that Mexican immigrant workers brought tamales with them when they came to work in the fields in the Mississippi delta after the end of the Civil War and they caught on. So these days there are tamale shacks all over Memphis and down into Mississippi. You won't find them in corn husks like the traditional versions in Mexico. More likely you'll get them in wax paper which works just as well for steaming.

A tamale is a pretty simple dish: it's just corn masa with some kind of meat filling. In our pre-vacation planning research we found a lot of ground beef and ground turkey tamales and not much else. We opted for our single meal of tamales at Doe's Eat Place in Little Rock, which I realize is not in the delta but the original's Doe's is. We figured a franchise of an original classic would deliver the same experience and Doe's is legendary in Little Rock, with photos of celebs and politicians (including Bill Clinton, who we have followed culinarily before in Iceland and Germany).

We opted to share a dozen beef tamales with chili at Doe's. They were hot and filling and corn-y and we found the chili essential to counter the density of the tamales. This is comfort food. I'd go back if I were ever in Little Rock. We also managed to stuff down some corn fritters and hush puppies (I can highly recommend both). This was not a healthy meal. Best Tamales: Doe's Eat Place, Little Rock, AR. This is not a by default rating; these things were good.

Pimento Cheese

Let's get one thing out of the way right away in this section of this post. I LOVE pimento cheese. I know it's not a natural food and I don't care. This stuff is so cheesy and spicy (and how is there really anything much better than that) and honestly, I'm not sure I've ever had pimento cheese that I didn't like. I still remember one of my best meals ever as a pimento cheese sandwich in Bardstown, Kentucky and that meal was nothing more than a cold sandwich on plain bread. The pimento cheese is everything.

Not familiar with pimento cheese? Three mandatory ingredients: some sort of cheddar, mayonnaise and pimento, which is generally a roasted red pepper cut small. It sounds amazing, right? Even if it doesn't, it is. Trust me.

My pimento cheese on this trip was confined to one state: Alabama. It was worth the wait. I had it on a sandwich, on a burger (see the fried green tomato section above) and in pure unadulterated way-more-than-I-should-have-eaten form with some flatbread (that's the picture above). The spiciness definitely came through the best when I ate it just by itself but that may have been because there was nothing else competing with the pimento cheese gorgeousness (or it may have been some cayenne in the mix). Best pimento cheese: EVERYWHERE! But specifically Saw's Soul Kitchen, Birmingham, AL; Central Restaurant, Montgomery, AL; and Cahawba House, Montgomery, AL. The picture above is from Central.

White Chocolate Ducks

OK, so there's no way chocolate mousse-filled white chocolate ducks were on my list before arriving in Memphis. But on our first morning in town we hit up the Peabody Deli & Desserts for breakfast and these things caught my eye. And after a couple of more breakfast stops, I figured we may as well spring for one each of these on our last night in the hotel. It's not every day we stay at the Peabody so why not.

So, honestly, how could this not be really good? While the white chocolate was not as sweet as I'm used to, the mousse was a perfect filling for the duck. These are overindulgent and overpriced but I'd honestly suggest anyone staying at the Peabody spring for one if you deserve a treat while in Memphis. Best white chocolate ducks: Peabody Deli & Desserts, Memphis, TN. Duh!!!

Fried chicken sandwich with pimento cheese and collard greens. Pretty much the perfect dish.

That's my food report for this trip. Almost. There are a few last odds and ends to address.

If there's one regional specialty that is a glaring omission from this list, it's macaroni and cheese. I absolutely love mac and cheese and for some reason we ate zero of this dish on this trip. None. Not a single forkful or bite. Too distracted by the greens, I'm guessing. I didn't miss it in any way. And I'm shocked to be writing those words. 

Despite the absence of mac and cheese, we did have a couple of pasta dishes on the trip and I'll never be able to understand the appeal of spaghetti with barbeque sauce. Who knows, maybe there's only one restaurant in the world that serves this dish but if that's true, we went there and I just don't get it. Barbeque sauce does not belong on spaghetti in any world that I can imagine.

Finally, I think a shoutout is appropriate to a spot where we didn't expect to find anything good food-wise and that's Tupelo, Mississippi. We hit up Tupelo to visit the Elvis Presley Birthplace on the way from Memphis to Birmingham. Our plan was to grab a sandwich from the Peabody Deli and stop somewhere along the way at a park or picnic table somewhere but we decided not to do that and instead stop wherever we got hungry. That place turned out to be Tupelo.

By sheer chance, we picked pretty much the first place we came to and that was Kermit's Soul Kitchen (formerly Kermit's Outlaw Kitchen). The lunch we had here was amazing and Kermit himself was serving up food when we walked in. If we'd known about this spot, I'd have even considered staying in Tupelo just so I could eat a couple of times here. I'd love to explore the rest of Kermit's menu based on the one meal we had.

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How We Did It

There are ten photographs in this post from seven separate restaurants (I'm not counting the Peabody Deli & Desserts). Here's the scoop on each one. Click the name of each to visit their website.

Gus's World Famous Fried Chicken (photos one and three): Gus's is located just a bit off Beale Street in downtown Memphis. It's worth the walk (twice) to get their chicken. There might be a wait. Give them your number, sit on one of the benches outside and wait for a text. You won't regret it.

Nashville Biscuit House (photo two): We didn't really visit Nashville on this trip. We just flew there and drove straight to Memphis. But we needed breakfast and stopped at the Biscuit House. It's on a sketchy looking road with lots of similar businesses with bars on the windows. It looked deserted from the outside but we found it packed on the inside. Can't explain that quite.

Cahawba House (photos four and six): That messy looking burger was almost just that. I don't understand the Texas toast instead of the bun. It doesn't do the same job as the bun in terms of keeping the filling between the bread. But I'll give them a pass based on the fried green tomatoes, the pimento cheese and the greens. Cahawba House is my one food regret from this trip. Their breakfast menu looks amazing. We just ran out of time to start our day there one morning.

Central BBQ (photo five): The whole plate of food at Central BBQ was awesome. The ribs. The onion rings. The greens. All of it. I'd go here every time I was in Memphis if I visited the city often (and after I had at least one meal at Gus's, of course). Central BBQ is a block away from the National Civil Rights Museum. Highly recommend a visit here. You can even leave the Museum and go back in after a meal if you want. We did. 

Doe's Eat Place (photo seven): The original Doe's is located in Greenville, Mississippi. We considered making the trip to Greenville on our Mississippi day but knew we'd have to cut out a couple of things on an already really long day if we did so we figured we'd wait until Little Rock. There are a number of other Doe's all around the area.

Central Restaurant (photo eight): We picked Central (not to be confused in any way with Central BBQ) as our fancy restaurant on this trip. We ate out back in the alley, which was definitely a great place for a meal if we didn't have to see the undesirable political flags on the deck of an adjacent building. If you order the pimento cheese appetizer, share it with someone. I didn't and it was really way too much food.

Saw's Soul Kitchen (photo ten): There are several Saw's restaurants in Birmingham. We picked the Soul Kitchen in the Avondale section of town (which took us past the awesome Sloss Furnaces site) based on their menu. The food here was good. I mean I had pimento cheese on fried chicken with greens on the side. After we were done at Saw's, we grabbed a couple of beers at the adjacent Avondale Brewing. If you have this same idea, I'd think twice. I thought both beers were forgettable.

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Separate But Unequal (1957)

This post will take a while to get to the point. Lots of legal stuff. Bear with me.

At the end of the American Civil War, the Congress of the United States passed three amendments to the Constitution. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, except for those convicted of criminal offenses; the Fourteenth Amendment redefined citizenship for former slaves and addressed equal protections under the law; and the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited discrimination in voting on the basis of race or previous conditions of servitude. If it seemed like these sorts of amendments might have been opposed by those states which joined the Confederacy...well, they lost the War so...

Despite these Amendments (which were fully ratified by 1870), the Louisiana State Legislature in 1890 passed the Separate Car Act, which required "equal, but separate" train cars for white and black people. Some folks thought this law might violate the Fourteenth Amendment.

Enter Homer Plessy, a New Orleans resident whose ancestry was 1/8 African, who bought a first class train ticket in June of 1892, took a seat in the whites only car and then deliberately revealed his 1/8 African ancestry to the conductor. The resulting series of lawsuits from Plessy's arrest ended up in the United States Supreme Court as Plessy v. Ferguson. Homer lost his case and the resulting verdict, that states had the right to require separate but equal accommodations for whites and blacks, set the Civil Rights Movement back decades. Sanctioned segregation would become the law of the land in the South.

Exhibit at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

But things weren't equal. Separate, yes. Equal, no way. And starting in the 1930s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) started to challenge segregation in public education. Their efforts ended up in 1954 in front of the United States Supreme Court as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. That case was actually a collection of five similar cases filed in various locations, including one in Virginia related to the student walkout at Moton High School in Farmville, VA which we visited back in February of this year (love it when different trips interrelate!).  

The Brown verdict was a landslide. A 9-0 ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, with a finding that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional because it violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. However, in their ruling, the Court didn't spell out how to end the current segregation in place. I guess maybe they assumed all segregated schools would just integrate the next day?

So a follow up case was brought before the Court the very next year to address the timeline for desegregation. Their ruling this time? That integration should happen "with all deliberate speed". Gee, that helps a lot. Thanks for clarifying that. Effectively, the Court's ruling created the means for those so motivated to challenge racial segregation in their schools, but unless a town or city saw fit to desegregate on their own (and some did), then desegregation might take a while. Or forever even.

Which brings us to Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. Which also brought us to Little Rock in 2021. For a visit to the Little Rock Central High School.

Little Rock Central High School.

Little Rock Central is an active high school so a visit there is not necessarily all it could be. We visited on a Tuesday in May which meant that class was in session while we were walking around campus. Because of its historic significance in the Civil Rights Movement, the National Park Service offers educational tours of the property. The NPS has also constructed a Visitor Center and owns the old Mobil station that the press used while covering the events of the beginning of the 1957 school year. The Mobil station (which is now the NPS's conference center) is across the street from the High School's property; the Visitor Center is across the street from the gas station.

Under normal circumstances (meaning non-global pandemic circumstances), the NPS tours include a visit inside the school. Considering we are in a public health emergency, their tours are strictly exterior right now, although we did have about an hour of classroom learning with audience participation to reconstruct the timeline of the Civil Rights Movement from the arrival of the first slave ship in the New World up to 1957 before setting out on our tour. Not kidding. We seriously were in a classroom with markerboard with Ranger Rebecca in the teacher's spot. It was actually really fun and informative. Thank God we had been to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis the very day before so we knew some of the answers.

We knew we wouldn't be able to get inside before we went to Little Rock. Despite the fact we were limited to strictly exterior access, we still found it way worth the trip. There is most often great value in being there, wherever "there" happens to be. We found this rule applied even when we only walked about one city block on the outside of a building.

The desegregation of Little Rock Central High School was ugly. Maybe it was destined to be that way but it certainly seems to me that the actions of adults in responsible charge made it way worse than it had to be. 

In the March of 1955, the Superintendent of Schools, Virgil Blossom, submitted a plan for the integration of schools in Little Rock. After some loopholes were added, and maybe a little school district gerrymandering, the city was ready to proceed with a plan for integration in 1957. 200 black students applied for enrollment, which shocked the school board. The board claimed there was not enough capacity for that many additional students in a school built for 3,000 students that in 1956 held just 1,500 (math not a strong suit of the Little Rock school board in the mid-50s, apparently).

So they changed the rules. Perfect grades and perfect attendance were added as requirements. That got 200 or so down to 17. Then extracurricular activities were banned. So was retaliation if the students choosing to integrate were attacked in any way. 17 was reduced to 10. Then the list of the 10 was leaked to the press and then to the general public. Threats of violence and threats against employment for parents were made. 10 was reduced to nine. That number stuck: the Little Rock Nine.

Testament: The Little Rock Nine Monument. Outside the Arkansas State Capitol. 

The first day of the 1957 school year was set for September 3, the Tuesday after Labor Day, and classes at Little Rock Central High School did start that day. But not for the Little Rock Nine. They were advised to stay home for their own protection on September 3. They gave it a shot the next day and failed. In fact it would be all the way until September 23 until any one of them set foot inside the school. And then only under the escort of armed members of the Little Rock Police and Arkansas State Troopers. Armed escort. To get into school. To learn. Kids.

What could possibly have delayed the entrance into High School of nine kids looking to do nothing more than get an education? How about Orval Faubus, the governor of Arkansas, interrupting the Labor Day broadcast of I Love Lucy to claim that "caravans" of white supremacists were on their way to Little Rock to demonstrate outside the school? How about the Arkansas National Guard being called out to deal with threats of violence but then being ordered to keep anyone not white (including kitchen and maintenance staff as it turned out) out of the building? How about lawsuits? How about the President of the United States getting involved? All this because nine kids from the absolute bottom of the social structure in our country wanted to go to a better school.

Those "caravans" by the way? Didn't exist. But white supremacists DID show up after the Governor claimed they were already there. And threats of violence? The Governor claimed he had evidence but just declined to produce it. Sound familiar? Hmmm...I wonder.

That was the first three weeks of the school year. It would be October 24 before an armed escort would NOT be necessary for the Little Rock Nine to enter school. One month later!!!

I can't imagine what that first year was like for those nine kids. All they were trying to do was get an education and learn. The "no retaliation" condition of admittance must have been equivalent to state sanctioned bullying. Over their first year there would be student strikes; bomb threats; bullying; beatings and tauntings by both white students and parents; boycotts of local newspapers supporting integration; kids jumping out of windows; suspensions. All because nine kids wanted an education.

All of the Nine did not make it through year one but none of them dropped out. Minniejean Brown was suspended in December of 1957 for spilling chili on two boys blocking her way. She was then expelled in February of 1958 for calling some girls "white trash" who threw a purse filled with locks at her. After she was expelled some students distributed cards with the slogan "One Down..Eight To Go". I can't imagine the pain.

As if all that weren't bad enough, the next year they didn't have school at all. It was cancelled. The whole year. The idea of more than 1,500 white kids sharing a school with fewer than ten black kids scared people so damned badly that they just cancelled the whole school year. Think about that: people were so upset about nine black children getting a good education that they denied everyone the opportunity to learn. How messed up is that?

Little Rock Central High School exhibits at the National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis.

I got all that out of our visit to Little Rock Central. But that's not really what I got out of being there. There's always a "being there" part and the story from being there that will stick with me forever is the story of Elizabeth Eckford.

When the Little Rock Nine were advised to stay home for their own safety on September 3, Daisy Bates, the co-owner of the local Arkansas State Press newspaper and advocate for the desegregation, coordinated a plan whereby all of the Nine would meet at her house and then walk, escorted, together to the school on the morning of September 4. She managed to coordinate this plan the night before with the exception of looping in Elizabeth, whose family did not have a telephone. She figured she'd get a hold of Elizabeth the next morning somehow.

She forgot. So Elizabeth Eckford got on the school bus near her home and got off to find the school surrounded by the Arkansas National Guard, all of whom were under orders to not let her into the school.

Elizabeth, all of 15 years old on September 4, 1957, described her attempts to enter the school being met with refusal by armed Guardsmen with rifles and bayonets while being surrounded by white children and adults chanting anti-integration rhymes and threatening lynching (there are estimates that there were 400 protestors outside the school that day). She's a 15 year old girl who looks utterly unlike the crowd around her and she's carrying books to try to get an education and she's met with every sort of scaring and hatred you can imagine. At one point, she sees a woman who looks like she has a sympathetic face so she heads towards her only to be spat on by this woman. Which causes other members of the crowd to spit on her and the dress she made specially for this first day of school as well. 

I know we are almost 64 years removed from that September day but I shudder to think that nobody in that crowd wondered what exactly it was about a high school girl that caused them to threaten, bully, intimidate and just generally behave this way towards another person. If they did, they certainly didn't do anything to stop it.

Display from the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site Visitor Center. Original photograph by Will Counts.

Not knowing quite what else to do after being turned away from a day of high school by soldiers because of the color of her skin (just writing that sounds crazy), Elizabeth decided to walk right past the School to the corner of South Park Street and West 16th Street where she knew she could catch a bus at some point and go right back home. She first tried to enter the drug store across the street but the owner of the store locked the door when he saw her approaching. So she sat on a bench on that corner and waited. With a mob of white people all around her yelling at her.

That walk from the time Elizabeth got off the bus until she sat down on that bench must have seemed interminable. It's one block but it is a long, long block. Almost a quarter of a mile. We walked it one day last month in our guided visit to the High School site while not having our path blocked or having our lives threatened or being spit at. We didn't get to do too much else but that walk was enough to understand just how long and painful that walk must have been for Elizabeth Eckford. It feels a little strange writing a whole blog post based on a one block walk but ultimately that act made some of the events of that September day sink in.

For Elizabeth, this was day one. There was still an entire school year to go of this sort of stuff, albeit without the adults participating for the most part. One of the most frustrating parts of our Civil Rights trip was the acts of violence or intimidation directed towards those that are the most powerless and certainly children fit first and foremost in that definition. Even if those perpetuating the violence were also children.

The added irony of the hatred and violence these nine kids endured in Little Rock is it likely would not have been as bad if it weren't for the Governor of Arkansas, the highest elected official in the state, getting involved. It might be easy in 2021 to assume integration of schools in the 1950s seems like a concept that was doomed to fail, but it had already taken place without incident in many places of the country, including in the South and in the state of Arkansas. Seriously. In Arkansas, Charleston and Fayetteville had integrated even before the Brown v. Board of Education decision; Bentonville began integration in 1955; and the town of Hoxie had to go to court to get an injunction from a court of law IN FAVOR of desegregation. I'm not saying things in Little Rock in 1957 would have gone smoothly, but the Governor certainly made it worse and likely did it for his own political gain. Again...sounding familiar? 

Elizabeth Eckford Bus Bench. The Little Rock Central High School is visible behind.

Just three of the Little Rock Nine ended up graduating from Little Rock Central High School. Ernest Green, the only senior enrolled in 1957, got his diploma in 1958 (and even had Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. attend his graduation). Ernest was followed by Carlotta Walls Nier and Jefferson Thomas in 1960. School closure in the 1958-1959 school year and transfers and expulsions prevented the others from completing their academics at Little Rock Central.

In 2005, a sculpture featuring all nine members of the Little Rock Nine was unveiled on the grounds of the Arkansas Capitol. I've already named Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Carlotta Walls Nier and Jefferson Thomas. The other four were Melba Patillo Beals, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Thelma Mothershed and Terrence Roberts. There are quotes from each of the Nine around the perimeter of the sculpture. I couldn't help thinking how ironic it was that we are relying on these (former) kids to teach us about tolerance and acceptance after all they have been through.

The spot where Elizabeth Eckford sat on a bench surrounded by an aggressive mob now holds another bench named in Elizabeth's honor. There's a quote from Elizabeth on a plaque next to the bench about the importance of standing up for others who are being harassed and despised just based on the fact that they look different. Again, we are relying on those who have been harassed and despised to deliver messages to the rest of us.

One of the more frustrating aspects of this trip we took this May was the knowledge that there were people who had to suffer or die to advance society those tiny little steps forward. In cases like those of Emmett Till, the suffering was clear to see; he was straight up tortured and murdered. But make no mistake there was plenty of suffering endured by the Little Rock Nine as well. All nine of these kids had their lives affected by the mental, emotional and physical abuse suffered while attending (in some cases) just one year of school at Little Rock Central. Some still bear actual physical scars and if proof beyond that is necessary, look no further than Elizabeth Eckford's two attempts to take her life. 

I think there's a tendency to dismiss the suffering of the Little Rock Nine as "if they didn't do this, someone else would have had to" but I can't stop thinking about Orval Faubus' completely unnecessary and blatantly untruthful press conference. What would have happened if he hadn't done that? And I guess honestly we'll never know.

I believe our time in Little Rock was worthwhile. Sure, access into the school was off limits and that was unfortunate. But just like roaming around rural Mississippi in search of Emmett Till, I think we owed it to these kids and the change they helped bring about to go to Little Rock and learn. I think there is also a lot of value in hitting up multiple Civil Rights sites in one trip. The constant repetition really emphasizes causes and effects within the Movement which I think is super valuable. The concepts discussed in Ranger Rebecca's "class" were echoed in the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum.

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How We Did It

The Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site is open daily with guided Streetscape Tours offered twice daily with a 48 hour advance reservation requirement (although honestly, I think we could have done ours without advance reservations, although I'm not 100% sure that would have been allowed). There may be days (like Federal Holidays and school breaks) when tours are discontinued. Best to check the website for the latest information, particularly because if we ever truly come out of this pandemic, all the rules for everything may change. There is a museum exhibit inside the Visitor Center; it took us about 45 minutes to an hour to get through everything there pretty thoroughly.

The National Historic Site website has a list of sites related to the history of the events of September 1957 which you can drive by. We elected not to do this and instead head over to the Testament statue on the grounds of the State Capitol. It's on the south side of the Capitol building and there are free parking spots nearby for Capitol visits. We assumed our visit to Testament counted as a Capitol visit.

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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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