Blog on Alabama Civil Rights Tour with the Institute on Memory and Human Rights
This summer, I went on a civil rights tour of Alabama with a group of activists and survivors from Chicago. This group included folks who had survived police torture and police violence. The tour took us from Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth’s church, Bethel Baptist, in Birmingham to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery. The trip was a long, winding road through historical monuments and personal moments, demonstrating continuing links between a country founded upon racial difference and that continues to maintain a system of mass incarceration and punishment.
The survivors were searching for examples of preservation, memory and how to monumentalize their pain and endurance. I was searching for a personal history, the chance to find my own place and voice amongst the past. What did we learn? What did we gain?
It brought me joy to see black people preserving and sharing our history at these historical sites. The sites were clearly places of honor: churches, monuments, statues, museums. It was also clear that these sites were bringing business and tourism to Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham. We met an amazing cast of characters– tour guides, hometown heroes, and historians eager to share their sites’ place in advancing freedom for all black people. The sharing, the collectivity, and connection that these sites can bring demonstrates that an opportunity present for the survivors to bring forth a place of community healing and celebration.
Even amongst the accurate monuments, we still saw images that were historically false. History always bears on the present. As we see a wave of renewal going on through the south and southern metro centers, questions about who gets what still hang in the air…as do questions about whose history is the one who will be remembered. We saw markers along the Alabama River in Montgomery that failed to mention the river’s history of transporting slave cargo. Even though the Equal Justice Initiative and other activists (such as those at the Rosa Parks Museum), are doing their part to correct the record, in a land of confederate monuments and state prisons, the idea that there are “two sides” still seeps into the collective consciousness.
Despite the assertion of black history, it was clear that some folks are still being left out or pushed to the side. Civil rights history is told as a unifying narrative, necessarily lead by male pastors and preachers. I wonder how, even with the best, most truthful intentions we reproduce that history. You can’t visit a civil rights site that doesn’t exist or that isn’t public. I suppose the question raised here is, for those who document, archive, research or study history, how can we bring those on the margins of the story to the center?
So the trip was inspiring, thought-provoking and frustrating. I found a placard for my home county, Dodge County, in the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The names of 9 lynching victims were etched on a rusted, hanging rectangle. These victims stretch back to 1802 and the most recent death is 1915. This harrowing history offers the opportunity to understand more deeply how my hometown was shaped by racial violence. It’s not a history I relish, but one that I want to understand and I think one that shows that we’re never too far from the US’s history of racial injustice, or the ways it bears upon the present.
Power Structures 