Today, my 9 year-old and I went on a field trip with our homeschool group. We visited the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum and the 16th Street Baptist Church.
Follow me below the fold as I describe our experiences.
We arrived at the Civil Rights Institute at 9:30 AM (30 minutes before it was open to the public). It was bitterly cold and damp, so the administrator opened up one of their meeting rooms for us to gather and wait for everyone in our group to arrive. At 10:00 AM, a guide came and escorted us to the main entrance, where another guide explained what we would be seeing. We went into a theater and watched a short film that described the building of Birmingham, segregation, and the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement. When the film ended, the screen rooled up to reveal the first of several exhibits.
The first exhibit was a wall with 2 water fountains. A sign over one said "White", while the other fountain had a similar sign labelled "Colored". The "white" fountain was very clean and was one that kept the water cool...the "colored" fountain was rusted out and was merely attached to a pipe coming out of the wall. I was the "chaperone" for my daughter and 2 of her friends; these girls looked at me and said, "That's so unfair!" We walked along from exhibit to exhibit, we saw a replica of one of the buses used by the Freedom Riders, which had been firebombed, we saw Dr. King's cell from the Birmingham jail, we saw the police turn pressure hoses and dogs on protestors peacefully marching, we saw photographs of the many churches, homes and other buildings that led to the city being nicknamed "Bombingham" during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and many other incredible things.
We completed our tour and were waiting outside the reference room for the rest of our group, when the lady in charge of the reference room stepped into the hall and invited the children in. She had them sit down at a computer bank and let them see a great deal of footage from the marches and many other things. I was afraid that it might be an informaiton overload for my daughter, but, as we left the building, she looked at me and said, "Mommy, what makes white people think they deserve to have everything handed to them on a gold platter? What's so great about having a lack of skin color?" I wasn't sure how to answer her, but then she said, "It's just plain stupid...we need to look at people from the inside out. People don't have any control over what color they are, but they do have control over how they act and how they treat other people."
We ate lunch and then went to the 16th Street Baptist Church. We went upstairs to the sanctuary and our guide gave us a history of the church and it's importance to the Civil Rights Movement. Until today, I had never known that, during the 1960's, the NAACP was forbidden to have any organization in Alabama. Our guide was a wonderful lady who is an active member of the church and who had been one of the workers during the Movement. She told how Dr. King had stood in the very auditorium we were sitting in and explained the non-violent movement. She then spoke about the bombing of the church in 1963, which had resulted in the deaths of 4 girls and the injuring of 22 other people. She told how the girls bodies had been found one on top of the other in the ladies' room in the basement, where the young people's Sunday School classes met (the basement has been turned into a memorial to the girls, and the former ladies' room is now the church kitchen.)She explained how the bombing had shattered all the windows on the 16th Street side of the sanctuary except for one...this window was a picture of Jesus knocking at a door...the only damage to this particular window was that the face of Christ had been blown out. The window was repaired, and you can't even see where it was damaged. The following year, a group of people from Wales sent a window to replace the one at the front of the sanctuary which had been destroyed. It is called "The Welsh Window" and it is absolutely beautiful:
All in all, this was a day that I and my daughter will never forget.