No pretty pictures today.
About 10 months ago, Jay and I were visiting the sites of killing fields and liquidated ghettos of Eastern Europe in the 1940’s. Today was a similar feeling – Alabama in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute is right next to the 16th Street Baptist Church, where four girls were murdered in 1963, and across the street from the park where marches were organized, leading to confrontations with dogs and water hoses. The museum documented all this, but ended on a hopeful note by pointing out many subsequent events (tearing down the Berlin Wall, ending Apartheid in South Africa, Solidarity in Poland) that drew inspiration from the American Civil Rights movement.
Then I drove to Selma for a good exhibit at a National Parks Historic Site and I crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge and drove over the 45 mile route of the 1965 federal government protected march two weeks after Bloody Sunday to the state capitol building in Montgomery, where Dr. King spoke about the arc of the universe bending toward justice, codified a few months later in the Voting Rights Law.
I will try to describe the very recent National Monument for Peace and Justice, which I learned about at a lunchtime talk at Brandeis. There are stones for hundreds of counties in southern states listing the names and dates of over 4,000 known lynchings. At the start, they are at ground level as you walk by, but then the walkway slopes down and the markers are above you, as nooses. They have made duplicate copies of every stone and are asking each county to claim its stone and display it publicly. I didn’t see an indication of how many have been claimed yet.
This memorial and the nearby Legacy Museum are the creation of the Equal Justice Institute, led by Bryon Stevenson, who is getting well known. I think his basic premise is that there have been three forms of African-American enslavement – the two centuries of slavery “abolished” after the Civil War, followed by a hundred years of Jim Crow and lynching, and more recently mass incarceration.
The song of the day is “Eve of Destruction”. Listen to it for the first time in decades as I did and quite a few of the lyrics still ring true. The good news is we haven’t been destroyed.
The Capitol building in Montgomery 
The lynching stones at noose level 
The lynching stones at ground level 
The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma 
The first attempted march from Selma 
Police brutality in Birmingham 
Separate – and not so equal 
The four little girls and the church in which they were murdered
Mark's cross-country trip 