THIS IS YOUR KINGDOM PAST AND PRESENT, CONTINUED

 Memorial for Peace and Justice

My Alabama kingdom didn't end in Birmingham.  I went on to Montgomery to see the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.  Just 93 miles but delays and traffic so heavy I almost turned back.  Such a mistake that would have been. 

My everyday kingdoms are Durham and such other every-day North Carolina towns as Pine Knoll Shores and Beaufort-by-the-Sea.    Certainly all three have a history both good and bad and a present both good and bad.  But the present is mostly good, I hope that is fair to say.  Now Montgomery is part of my kingdom because I will never forget what I saw. No one would.  

The Legacy Museum is on the site of a holding pen for enslaved people to be auctioned.  It traces the 200-year slave trade, both trans-Atlantic and domestic, up through the voter-suppression efforts of today.  More than 4,000 African-Americans are known to have been lynched between 1877 and 1950.  Some for refusing to run an errand for a white person, or asking a white woman for water, or rejecting the bid of a white person for cottonseed.  One Museum display is canister-jars of dirt taken from the site of each lynching that could be documented.  Dirt scrapped from under trees, from sites that family members remembered from generation to generation.  I thought about what that dirt held.  Blood,  tears, human tissue, sweat, trampling boot marks, or the bare foot prints of a man, woman or child.  
 

Legacy Museum

I looked for the counties in North Carolina.  I touched the jars.  I wished I could touch the dirt.  How important this preservation is.  Part of the world-wide theme of "Never Again."  How good to be part of that theme.  Although the museum holdings are horrifying, the remembering makes the Museum seem hopeful to me.  

The Memorial is a short drive away at the top of a hill.  Six acres of open air overlooking down-town Montgomery.  Set there in a beautiful spot for all of us to confront the past, bring our own hearts and minds to it, integrate it into our present and into the people we are today.  The centerpiece is 800 steel columns, each the size and shape of a coffin.  Each bears the name of an American county and the names and death dates of those killed there by violence.  When it rains the columns bleed red rust.  The display begins at eye level but the ground slopes downward so the columns rise until they are hanging like men lifted from the earth by a noose pulled tight.  

I thought about our time in Berlin at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.  Isabel Wilkerson's Caste (2020) documents how India's untouchables, the Jews during WWII, and Blacks (a term not used as a racial identifier in other countries) have been othered by the caste system. The sarcophagi in Berlin seemed endless. The ground also slopes, raising the monuments until the visitors themselves feel buried. 

Berlin, Germany

Montgomery has faced not only its own past but the past of the rest of the country.  The Memorial is for us all.  It makes things better when we  stand together as truth-tellers and try to make amends.  A reconciling action.  If you want to see this I hope you are able to.  Nina Naomi.