Felicia Hirata and I are in the midst of a Georgia-Alabama Civil Rights circuit. I write this blog while sitting in a park along the Alabama River. The quiet beauty of the spot belies the past. The pier and the nearby train yard were used to unload thousands of enslaved Africans brought to Alabama from northern regions of the South as part of the domestic slave trade from roughly 1808 to 1861.
We flew into Atlanta, Georgia, rented a car, and drove to Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma, Alabama and will return to Atlanta to visit the Martin Luther King Center. In Birmingham, we toured the Civil Rights Institute across the street from Kelly Ingram Park where on May 2, 1963, over 1,000 non-violent youthful protesters were attacked by police with batons and dogs and firefighters with high-pressure hoses. On the other side of the street is the 16th Street Baptist Church where four young African American girls were murdered by Ku Klux Klan bombers on September 15, 1963. The park now has monuments celebrating the civil rights marchers and commemorating Addie Mae Collins, Carole Richardson, and Cynthia Wesley, all fourteen years old, and Denise McNair age 11, the four girls killed in the September 1963 bombing. The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was not an isolated incident. Between alone 1945 and 1963, there were fifty other racially motivated bombings in the city.
We also spent time at the Sloss Furnaces Iron Works. Birmingham was an iron and coal center from 1880 through 1950 and local companies took advantage of “convict labor,” young Black men falsely imprisoned and sentenced to slavery-like labor in mines and mills so Birmingham could compete with northern factories. Other Black men worked in the factories and mines but always at the lowest wage levels and in the most dangerous jobs.
Unfortunately, despite the importance of the 1965 Selma marches for securing the Voting Rights Act, there was not much to see or do in today’s economically depressed Selma. The downtown area is decimated with abandoned stores and battered housing. However, we did symbolically walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge where civil rights marchers were brutally assaulted by Alabama state police.
The bulk of our stay, and the focus of this blog, is Montgomery, Alabama, the first capital of the Confederacy, a leading slave trading market for the Cotton Kingdom, a major center for remembering Southern White terrorist attacks on the regions Blacks after the Civil War, and a site of important Civil Rights actions including the 1955 bus boycott.
Montgomery’s tourist attractions tell two very different and competing stories. To the side of the state house is a major monument to Confederate military heroes and in front are statutes of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, and James Marion Sims (see image above right). The current Alabama State Capitol building was also the first capitol building of the slaveholding Confederate States of America. Sims is commemorated as a pioneer of gynecology who conducted his research in Alabama, research that included numerous brutal and repeated surgeries on enslaved African American women. After an intense battle and a series of public hearings, a Sims statute in New York City’s Central Park was torn down and is now in storage. To prevent a similar fate for statues of its pro-slavery heroes, in 2017 Alabama passed a law preventing localities from renaming or altering “historically significant” buildings or monuments without state permission.
As you walk around Montgomery you constantly see conflicting versions of public history. The Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Marin Luther King, Jr. was a pastor during the historic Montgomery Bus Boycott, is nestled between state office buildings a block away from the Capitol. Even the historical makers seem to be at war. Markers placed by the Alabama Historical Commission frequently highlight the city’s Confederate heritage. Markers placed by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) tell horrific stories of enslavement and post-Civil War Jim Crow segregation, as well as of historic battles for Civil Rights. There is a marker at the bus stop where Rosa Parks got on the bus where she refused to give up her seat. A former Greyhound bus terminal, where an interracial group of Freedom Riders where assaulted by a white mob and almost murdered in 1961 is now the Freedom Rides Museum. Local police, who knew of the mob’s plans and had promised to protect the Freedom Riders, mysteriously did not appear at the scene for over an
The most powerful exhibits in Montgomery, exhibits that evoked the same emotions I felt in Washington DC at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Museum of African American History and Culture and in Europe while visiting German concentration camps used in the mass murder of Jews, were the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the partnered Legacy Museum. The Memorial and Museum tell the story of “decades of racial terrorism and lynching” that followed the Civil War as Southern whites created a Jim Crow system of slavery by another name. It was a system of oppression and exploitation that forced millions of desperate Blacks to flee the South to settle as “refugees and exiles” in Northern ghettos and slums. Exhibits recognize the heroism of the Civil Rights struggle, but do not want their heroism to overshadow the horrors they battled against, because it contributes to a sanitized version of American history. The museum also connects the legacy of Jim Crow and anti-Black racism to mass incarceration in the United States today, a country in which some states still sentence children to life in prison without the possibility of parole for non-capital offenses.
The most dramatic part of the memorial and museum was the six-acre hilltop National Memorial for Peace and Justice. EJI has identified over 4,000 Back men, women, and children lynched between 1877, the end of Reconstruction following the Civil War, and 1950, but believe there may have been many thousands more. The memorial includes over 800 suspended steel monoliths, organized by state, listing the names of people lynched and the county in which the lynching occurred (see image above left). Three hundred and forty of the lynchings occurred in Alabama including at least twelve in Montgomery County.
Reparations for African Americans and greater recognition of the horrors of slavery, segregation, and racial terrorism have emerged as issues in the 2020 Presidential election. Most white Americans, who grew up learning either falsified or sanitized versions of slavery and racism, do not understand the depth of the racial divide in the United States. The histories of Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery will play an important role as Americans consider options. For anyone who can make the trip, this is an essential journey.
Follow Alan Singer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ReecesPieces8