It was very foggy driving into Oklahoma this morning. Also, I paid cash tolls for the first time in years.

A year or so ago, I watched a show on PBS called “10 Streets that Changed America”. One of them changed what I put in my itinerary for Oklahoma – Greenwood Street in Tulsa. The big land rush into Oklahoma territory in the 1880’s included a lot of African-Americans, who built a thriving residential and business section in Tulsa. In May 1921, a black man was accused (probably falsely) of harassing a white woman. Facing a likely lynching mob, the blacks held their ground, a shot was fired and what resulted was possibly the most deadly race riot in US history and the burning of the entire Greenwood area. I visited a couple of exhibits of the story and the recent Reconciliation Park.

Then I explored a museum on the life of Will Rogers, who I remembered as a writer and humorist, but I never knew he was a star in vaudeville, Broadway and films. His most famous quote (on his tombstone in the garden there) is “I never met a man I didn’t like”. I recall a sign at a Monday night football game “Will Roger’s never met Howard Cosell!”

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I learned a lot of Oklahoma’s colorful past in the History Center. Then I relived more recent events of the 1995 bombing of the Murrell Federal Building in the National Memorial and Museum.

Finally, I attended services at ‘Congregation Bnai Torah, which welcomed me to their contemporary sanctuary within a much older building, the oldest congregation in Oklahoma City.

Tonight’s song is of course the title song from the musical “Oklahoma” (“brand new state, gonna’ be great”), which had its pre-Broadway tryout at the Colonial Theater in Boston in 1943.

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It was heavy rain in the morning in Little Rock when I was mostly inside and cloudy but dry in the afternoon at Hot Springs National Park when I was largely outside, so it worked out.

One more significant civil rights event. The first well-publicized test of Brown vs. Board of Education’s prohibition of segregated schools was “the Little Rock Nine”, 9 black high school students selected to attend all-white Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Governor Faubus called in the National Guard to prevent them from entering the school, then President Eisenhower laid down the order to admit the students. It was a painful year, but one student graduated that year and slowly integration happened and was accepted. Bill Clinton was 11 years old then in Arkansas and claims that this was a powerful influence on his political career. On the 40th anniversary in 1997, he invited the 9 to the White House and gave them medals of honor.

Then I went to Clinton’s library. It’s a cool building on the river and had a lot of interesting exhibits and full-size models of the Oval Office and the Cabinet room. Oh and there was a small mention of an indiscretion he committed while president.

Hot Springs National Park has hiking trails, mountains and an observation tower, but it mainly consists of Bathhouse Row in the town, a series of elaborate public baths that for 150 years have used the geothermal hot springs in the area for trying to heal all kinds of ailments, especially for the rich and well-dressed. And several baseball teams had their spring training in Hot Springs between 1900 and 1920, including the Red Sox when they had Babe Ruth.

Today’s song is “Don’t Stop (thinking about tomorrow)” by Fleetwood Mac , Bill Clinton’s campaign theme song.

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Of the 19 states I had not explored before starting my trip, perhaps Arkansas is the one I knew least about. I am here to report that I had a charming time here today and am looking forward to more fun tomorrow. There are lots of different types of trees, plenty of hills/small mountains and lakes and rivers. If one were into fishing and hunting it might be a place to live, but it’s definitely worth a visit.

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I first went to War Eagle Cavern. Much smaller than Luray and Mammoth but I had a private tour and learned all about the caves main inhabitants (bats) and how guano (bat poop) was used to make gunpowder by Confederate soldiers hiding out in the caves during the Civil War.

I spent the late afternoon visiting three state parks (Lake Dardanelle, Mount Nebo and Petit Jean) that are popular campsites and have windy roads making their way up hills for great views of the Arkansas River and its lakes, along with stone lodges and bridges built during the 1930’s by the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps).

Since I am around the Ozark mountains, today’s song is “Jackie Blue”, by Ozark Mountain Daredevil.

As I was driving from St. Louis to Kansas City this morning on interstate 70), I recalled that the 1985 World Series between the Cardinals and the Royals was called the I-70 Series. So I went to a baseball game tonight at lovely Kauffman Stadium, right next to Arrowhead Stadium where the Patriots outlasted the Chiefs. The last baseball game I attended was a little more intense – the second game of last year’s World Series. There were probably more Dodger fans at Fenway that night than there were fans of any kind tonight. But it was an exciting game, as the Twins beat the Royals 5-4 in 10 innings, despite an inside-the-park homer by the Royals.

My daylight activities were related to world wars. First I visited the house and museum/library of the man who fought in WWI and essentially ended WWII. Harry Truman was a common man who got thrust into the Presidency and dealt the best he could with multiple crises, such as whether to drop the two atomic bombs, the Cold War and Mccarthyism and Korea. I got a tour of his wife Bess’s family house that Harry and Bess lived in their whole married life, except when they were at the White House.

I had never heard of the National Wirld War I Museum, but it was very effective in showing all aspects of the war, both before and after the United States joined in “over there”. There was a section built up to look like the elaborate trench systems.

Now a movie plug. Look for “They Shall Not Grow Old” where Peter Jackson (director of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy) weaved together video taken by actual photographers during the war and audio from interviews years later with British soldiers to show real trench warfare. At the end is one of the most understated closing credit in film history:

“Filmed on location on the Western Front, 1914-1918”

There are two songs titled “Kansas City”. One is from “Oklahoma!” (“Everything’s up-to-date in Kansas City – they’ve gone about as fer as they can go”) and the other was sung by Wilbert Harrison and also covered by the Beatles on “Beatles VI” (US) or “Beatles For Sale” (UK).

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No fooling- my journey is now one quarter over, 3 weeks out of 12! That make sense, because I arrived today at the Gateway to the West. Hey, when I was born, St. Louis was the west coast of major league baseball.

I was driving from Louisville this morning through the farms and flat fields of southern Indiana and Illinois (see pictures below). Seeing the Gateway Arch from across the Mississippi River was mesmerizing, so I had to drive to the waterfront of East St. Louis Illinois to snap pictures.

You take a very snug tram to the top of the Arch and peek through windows for views of the city and the river. I saw plenty of exhibits on the history of the city, in particular the Louisiana Purchase in 1804, the Worlds Fair and Olympic Games on the 100th anniversary in 1904 and the amazing engineering feat of building the Arch. I also visited a wild place called the City Museum, which I can best describe as what the Boston Children’s Museum would build if it had all the space of the Mass. MOCA in North Adams.

After learning what started around St. Louis – the Lewis and Clark expedition, wagon trains, railroads – I am really looking forward to spending the next six weeks west of the Mississippi, seeing the lands of these explorations.

I have two songs for today, both with interesting you tube’s you may find. St. Louis Blues was written by W.C. Handy, a Blues pioneer I learned about at the Delta Blues Museum. I found a tape of him playing the song on his trumpet on “The Toast of the Town”, the original name of Ed Sullivan’s show. “Meet Me in St. Louis” is the title song of a 1930’s film about the 1904 World’s Fair. The star and singer was Judy Garland.

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I spent the last day of March in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. I visited my first national park of the trip (with as many as 17 left to go), Mammoth Cave. It’s nowhere near so colorful as Luray Caverns in Virginia, but it is indeed mammoth! The caves combined are over 400 miles long, more than twice the length of any other caves in the world- and they’re still finding new areas. They were explored by Native Americans hundreds of years ago and used for a few mummified burials. When American frontiersman rediscovered the caves in the early 1800’s, they used sulfur to make saltpeter for weapons in the War of 1812. After the war was over, the caves were explored and have been continuously open to private and now park service tours for 200 years.

Then I went to the Kentucky Derby Museum and a walking tour of Churchill Downs, where the race has been held every year since its founding in 1875 by the grandson of William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame. I will be retracing my late father’s footsteps later on the trip at Ohio State in Columbus and I recall him saying that he attended the Kentucky Derby one of his years at college.

Now a geographical technicality I am ruling in my favor. One of my core goals of the trip is to stay overnight in every state (19 in all) that I had not previously. I was in Kentucky virtually all day, but my hotel room is across the Ohio River in Jeffersonville Indiana. Hey, the river has probably changed course over the centuries. I can literally see the skyline of Louisville out my window. It’s my journey and I’ll cheat (I mean, stretch the truth) if I want to!

Today’s song is “My Old Kentucky Home” by Stephen Foster, the theme song of the Derby. It sounds like a nostalgic antebellum white plantation song, but I read that it was really an anti-slavery song.

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I visited The Hermitage, the house and estate of Andrew Jackson, the only president our current president thinks accomplished anything useful while in office. I can’t believe we haven’t yet received an executive order announcing that a black woman (Harriet Tubman) can’t possibly take the place on the 20 dollar bill of his hero.

OK, enough politics! Andrew and his wife Rachel (who sadly died after his election but before his inauguration) lived in a two story log cabin before building the handsome neoclassical mansion I toured today. It was a large cotton plantation. Jackson is considered to have treated his enslaved people fairly and kept families together, but did not free them from slavery either.

For the rest of my day in Nashville, I had a tour guide I didn’t anticipate when I was planning my trip. Ariel is the daughter of my special cousin Alison, who died much too young of cancer a few years ago. Ariel graduated from Florida State last year and is working at music festivals to establish herself in the hospitality business.

We took a tour of the Ryman Auditorium, a big old red building that started as a religious tabernacle and became the home of the Grand Old Opry and all kinds of concerts and events. Then we rambled around the waterfront and nearly got crushed by the multitudes of bachelorette parties on drinking bicycles, live bands, Predator hockey fans and general revelers on Broadway, a pedestrian street that for some reason allows cars. We topped it off with a barbecue dinner.

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I’m sure you all guessed that the song of the day is “Nashville Cats”, by the Lovin’ Spoonful.

My first 20 miles or so north out of Vicksburg was among the weirdest driving I’ve ever done. In the Mississippi Delta the river has a mind of its own, as both sides of the road were surrounded by water and I saw a church and a house (see picture below) that were islands just a short distance from the road.

I spent most of the morning on US 61, which was one of the routes taken by African-Americans during the Great Migration from the Southern farms to the Northern cities. More relevant to me today, it was also the road where gospel, country and blues music evolved into rock and roll and soul music.

I visited the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, and the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and Memphis Rock ‘n Soul Museum, both in Memphis. I passed on Graceland – too over-the-top.

I also went to the National Civil Rights Museum, attached to the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. King was assassinated. This was very comprehensive, covering what I had already seen in Alabama and Mississippi and then some.

Today’s song is “Memphis, Tennessee”. Chuck Berry wrote and sang it, but the most well-known version was by Johnny Rivers. The album of the day is “Highway 61 Revisited” by Bob Dylan, his first electrified album, with the songs “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”.

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If you have Alabama, you have to have Mississippi (some people might say you can have both of them). Seriously, just as Germany has done a lot of public acknowledgment of the horrors of the Nazi era, I have seen several impressive museums and outdoor exhibits in my two days in the Deep South detailing the horrible treatment of African-Americans over the last four centuries.

I first took a tour of the public spaces of the Governor’s mansion in Jackson, where the governor of Mississippi has lived continuously since 1840, except for when General Sherman occupied the house and the city before his March to the Sea.

Then I visited the house of Medgar Evers, the state NAACP director, who was assassinated in 1963 in his driveway, with his wife and three young children inside. Our host was Minnie Watson, a woman in her 70’s who knew and was inspired by Edgar.

Next was a brand new Mississippi Museum of Civil Rights. Featured were the Freedom Riders of 1961 and Mississippi Summer of 1964, where white and black college students came down from the North to help with voter registration and set up better schools than the segregated public schools.

Then I drove to the edge of the Mississippi River and the Vicksburg National Military Park. The Union army, led by General Grant, finally outlasted the Confederate soldiers and the townspeople after a month and a half long siege that gave the North control of the Mississippi River for the remainder of the Civil War. The battles of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, probably the two turning points of the war, both ended on the same day, July 3rd 1863. But Lincoln didn’t feel like going all the way to Mississippi to give an address!

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The song of the day is “Mississippi Queen” by Mountain.

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.

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