A journey of struggle and hope

I was standing outside the 16^thStreet Baptist Church in downtown Birmingham on a beautiful Saturday morning in late October. The sign recalled the evil that had literally exploded at this site on a Sunday morning in 1963. 

A bomb planted by white supremacists went off in the church, killing four black teen girls, injuring others. It would be decades before anyone was brought to justice for that act of terror. It was one in a series of vicious acts against African Americans in Birmingham.

As I stood there with others on a civil rights tour that was taking us through several of the historic cities that were part of the story of righting historic wrongs, notifications began to show up on my cell phone. The news was coming out of Pittsburgh. 

Eleven Jewish people gathered at synagogue there had been killed by a white man with a gun after he had posted anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant statements on social media. 

Another sacred site had been turned into a killing place.

Across the street from the 16^thStreet Baptist Church is Kelly Ingram Park, once a place that served as a staging area for the civil rights protests in Birmingham. It was the place where in May of 1963, the Birmingham police and firefighters attacked children as they protested, spraying them with water cannons, setting dogs on them and arresting many of them. 

In the middle of the park - now dedicated as “A Place of Revolution and Reconciliation” - is a small plaque and tree honoring Anne Frank. She was the young German Jewish girl whose family took refuge in Amsterdam during the rise of the Nazis, only later to be captured and sent to a concentration camp where she died at the age of 15 - a year or two older than the girls killed in the church bombing. 

Evil just keeps returning. Which is why Anne Frank’s words on that plaque were so important on this Saturday morning as we stood outside the site of one atrocity only to be learning the details of another. “How wonderful it is,” she wrote in her famous diary, “that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

Improving the world

The people who were part of the civil rights movement did not wait to start improving the world. Even before the dramatic events of the 1950s and 1960s, there were courageous challenges to the institution of slavery, to the degradation of Jim Crow laws, to the brutalities of rapes and lynching that are part of our nation’s history. 

But it was along this road that we traveled - 23 of us from two churches, one predominantly white, one predominantly black - where the struggle for justice moved the nation just a few steps forward. And it was along this road where we could see how many more steps there are before that vision of revolution and reconciliation from the Birmingham park become a lasting reality.

The inhumanity of slavery

We certainly came face-to-face with the horrors of the past. In the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, there are statues of the kidnapped Africans huddled together on a ship crossing the Atlantic. Many of them would die on the journey. Then there was a statue of a slave auction, a trader taking bids for a woman and her baby. This was, as so many have said, America’s original sin.

A sign in the museum pointed out that by the time of the Civil War in 1860, America had nearly four million slaves worth more than $3 billion. That investment in “human property” exceeded the combined investment in all the banks, factories and railroads in the county. Slavery bolstered the economy of both the North and the South, propelling the U.S. to its status as one of the wealthiest nations in the world. It was a status built on the backs and blood of enslaved human beings.

At the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Ala., we encountered the personal agony of the slaves. Montgomery was one of the major slave-trade centers of the nation in the first half of the 1800s. Slaves were brought in on trains and on ships that traveled up the Alabama River (the same river that runs under the famous Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma). They were kept in warehouses along Commerce Street, auctioned off in the town square. 

That time in the warehouse was one of the hardest for these men and women. They did not know if they would be separated from their family. They did not know whether their owner would be unusually cruel. Inside the Legacy Museum, we were confronted by holograms of the slaves inside five different cells, each one telling us their story, their fears, their sadness. It was a powerful reminder of the humanity that was sacrificed for the economic engines of the 1800s. And note this - the Legacy Museum is now in one of those former slave warehouses.

Juxtaposition and proximity

A few blocks away in Montgomery is Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, where Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. began his work as a young pastor. It was in this sanctuary where the Montgomery bus boycott was launched in December of 1955, with King as the leader. 

The most vivid reminder of that seminal event in the civil rights movement was not here, though. It was in the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis where you can get on a bus and hear the driver order Rosa Parks to move to the back of the bus or face arrest. Then you can see the black residents of Montgomery walking to work as they boycotted the city buses until they were integrated a year later. One of the African-America women with us said as she heard the driver’s voice on the bus, she just began to cry. It made it all so real. 

We had a chance to worship with the congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church on Sunday morning. The woman in the pew behind us had been a member there when King was the pastor. About half the folks there on this morning were visitors - typical of the attendance these days we were told. They came from the Netherlands and from New Zealand as well as from 10 states stretching from Maine to Oregon, from Minnesota to Louisiana. 

What struck me was the proximity of the church to the Alabama state Capitol. They are just two blocks apart. In the block between the church and the Capitol is a fading marker erected in 1942 that says of Dexter Avenue: “Along this street moved the inaugural parade of Jefferson Davis when he took the oath of office as president of the Confederate States of America, February 18, 1861. “Dixie” was played as a band arrangement for the first time on this occasion.” (The church was not built until the 1880s.) 

As you go up Dexter Avenue to the Capitol, you are greeted by a statue of Jefferson Davis at the entrance. On the other side of the capitol is the “Confederate White House” where Davis lived until the Confederate capital moved to Richmond, Virginia in the summer of 1861.

Montgomery is a city where slavery, the Confederacy and the civil rights movement all bump up against each other in close quarters. It is also the city where the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened this year.

The Memorial is a stark commemoration of the thousands of African Americans lynched in this country as white people tried to maintain their dominance when black people began to assert their freedom in the aftermath of the Civil War. There were 4,400 documented lynchings between 1877 and 1950 and many more that are lost in the shadows of history. 

The hanging concrete slabs list those lynched in many, many counties, in many, many states. They are not all in the South. There were three lynchings noted in northern Minnesota, others in Michigan and Indiana, in Colorado and California, in Delaware and New York.

There is a stark inscription on one wall:

For the hanged and beaten.

For the  shot, drowned, and burned.

For the tortured, tormented and terrorized.

For those abandoned by the rule of law.

We will remember.

With hope because hopelessness is the enemy of justice.

With courage because peace requires bravery.

With persistence because justice is a constant struggle.

With faith because we shall overcome.

This is a somber place, softened a bit by the grassy hills, by a garden, by a grove named in honor of Ida B. Wells, the African-American  journalist who documented so many of the lynchings that she called “our country’s national crime.”

And it is more than a place of history. As you leave, you pass a sculpture from 2016 called “Raise Up” with black men and women, short and tall, emerging from a concrete wall with their hands up - a reminder of the continuing racial discrimination against people of color by law enforcement and the criminal justice system. 

The struggles continue

That was a vivid reminder that the work of the civil rights movement is far from over. We saw evidence of that in our stops along the way.

In Memphis, we visited the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, once the vibrant hub for artists like Otis Redding (who died in a plane crash in Madison in 1967), Sam and Dave, Booker T and the MGs, the Staples Singers.  It was a rare place in the South where blacks and whites could work together creating hit and hit. The record business eventually collapsed, but now the museum not only captures the story of that era but plays a vital role in the community with the Stax Music Academy and the Soulsville Charter School. 

In Birmingham, we heard from T. Marie King, a 39-year old activist, speaker and trainer, who told us about her work with a new generation of blacks seeking justice in their community. She told us of the work of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a major leader of the civil rights actions in Birmingham in the 1950s and 1960s who often gets overshadowed in the stories of that era. She told us of the tensions between the foot soldiers - those who marched on the front lines in the 1960s - and today’s activists who are charting their own paths for change. She talked of the churches - black churches - so focused on the inside that they miss the needs on the outside. “We’ve got to do a better job of standing in the gap for people,” she said.

Some 95 miles south of Birmingham in Selma, we felt not only the power of history at the Edmund Pettus Bridge but the poverty of the present day. For me, this was perhaps the most disconcerting stop on the journey. The image of Selma in my mind focused on the triumphant crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge by marchers in 1965 seeking voting rights. Yes, there were violent attacks on previous marchers on the bridge, but the March 21, 1965 march across the bridge that ended 54 miles later at the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery epitomized the the hope in the song “We Shall Overcome.”

Selma, however, has not overcome. This city of 18,000 - down from 21,000 in 2010 - is wracked by poverty and violence. As we walked around the downtown area a bit, we felt a level of creepiness we felt nowhere else on the journey. One of our group noticed pharmacies that clearly we distinctive - one aimed at whites, the other at blacks. The buildings were rundown, many of them vacant.  The population is about 80 percent black.

There was an insightful story from The Guardian in February of 2016 that offered a glimpse into life in Selma today. As reporter Chris Arnade wrote about the city beyond the bridge area: “Yet if you walk beyond those blocks you see the ugliness of poverty that is modern Selma: dilapidated and boarded-up homes tagged with gang symbols, empty lots littered with vodka bottles and fast-food wrappers, and sterile low-income projects. You see men clustered on corners selling drugs, and on the better-kept homes you see sign after sign urging, “Stop the violence”. You don’t see working factories, only empty ones being torn down for scrap. You see a population disenfranchised, economically and politically. It makes Selma, a symbol of past civil rights victories, a symbol of current civil rights failures.”

The crime rate in Selma has led it to be tagged as the most violent city in Alabama, one of the most violent in the nation. And the reporter quotes State Sen. Henry Sanders, 73, who represents Selma: “You can’t talk about Selma, and you can’t talk about the African American experience in America, without talking about the legacy of slavery.” That legacy lives on in the political establishment in Alabama. Here’s how Sanders put it: “The statewide political establishment is overwhelming Republican, white and male. It isn’t that they don’t care about African Americans, it’s that they don’t even think about them, unless it is in negative terms. As a result, everything in Alabama is tougher for African Americans.”

It’s all a stark contrast to Atlanta, the last stop on our journey. Not only is Atlanta the thriving metropolitan hub on the South, it is also considered a destination for African-Americans from around the nation. It’s not that Atlanta has solved all its problems, but it has come to symbolize the possibilities that exist. It is a center of black political power, education and culture. 

We saw the gleaming skyline, of course, but immersed ourselves in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born and grew up, where the church his grandfather and father and them he himself pastored still stands, where he and his wife Coretta Scott King are buried. 

In some ways, these blocks dedicated to King’s life and memory, to his vision of justice that would define what he called “the Beloved Community,” represented a place that tied together the past and the present of this journey. It was the words of a fifth grade student form Griffin, Ga. - Ja’Neivia Gilliand - that offered hope for the future. His words are among many on plaques in the International World Peace Rose Garden just outside the King Center where children wrote poems that are interspersed among the rose bushes. Here is his poem:

LOVE IS NOT HATE!
Hatred is a stain on the soul

Taught, not ingrained

Fear of Equality is fear of the unknown

Speak less and listen more

Martin Luther King had a dream

Are we walking or falling asleep?
His passion is like rain,

Washing away the stain of hate

Love is not hate.

Postscript

While we were on the road, nearly 1,000 people in Madison gathered at the First Unitarian Society in response to the hate-based murders in Pittsburgh. There were speeches, songs, tears and resolve to stand together against hated. The following Friday evening, Nov. 2, there was a special Shabbat service at Temple Beth-El, a service intended for healing and solace led by Rabbi Jonathan Biatch. There was an extraordinary moment when the the synagogue’s three Torahs were passed through the crowd. There were songs and prayers.

In the end, there was this prayer from the Central Conference of American Rabbis:

"When evil darkens our world, let us be bearers of light.
"When fists are clenched in self-righteous anger, let our hands be open for the sake of peace.
"When injustice slams doors in the face of the ill, the poor, the old, the refugee, the immigrant and the stranger, we will open those doors and strive to right the world's wrongs.
"Where shelter is lacking, let us be builders.
"Where food and clothing are needed, let us provide.
"Where knowledge is denied, let us champion learning and knowledge.
"When dissent is stifled, let our voices speak truth to power.
"When the earth and its creatures are threatened, let us be their guardians. When bias, greed and bigotry erode our country's values, let us proclaim liberty throughout the land."

We closed with a song:

"Olam Heser Yirapeh
"I will heal this world with love
"And you must heal this world with love
"And if we heal this world with love
"Then God will heal this world with love.
"Olam Heser Yirapeh"

And may it be so.

The Travelers