THIS IS YOUR KINGDOM PAST AND PRESENT

Birmingham, Alabama

Sometimes our kingdom becomes so large that it is overwhelming.  That's how it felt when we visited Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama.  My husband was taking part in a small inter-racial conference on MLK's Letter from the Birmingham Jail, I the tag-along spouse. The first morning I visited some lovely areas of the city, one place actually called Old English Village, an area graced with what we call Southern charm, where I had a pub lunch.

The conference had booked us into Birmingham's historic Redmont Hotel.  The hotel opened in 1925 for whites only.  Both Jim Folsom and George Wallace, two segregationist governors, had their gubernatorial campaign sites there in the 40's, 50's and 60's. This is a city with a massive amount of on-going reckoning, a microcosm, it appears, of the country as a whole. 

l6th Street Baptist Church

 

The next day I toured the Civil Rights Institute, across the street from the 16th Street Baptist Church where on a Sunday morning in 1963 four well-known Klansmen planted nineteen sticks of dynamite and killed Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair, children robing for choir in the church basement. Their bodies were "thrown into the air like rag dolls" a survivor said.

 

Many of us have read The New Jim Crow by ACLU lawyer Michelle Alexander about the mass incarceration of Black people.  Or Caste by journalist Isabel Wilkerson; or The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist (a Durham local), about slavery as the foundation for American capitalism.  These books tell the story of our national sin.  

Also The Lynching by Laurence Leamer, which documents the 1981 death of 19-year-old Michael Donald by two young Klansmen looking for a Black man. When I read the book I thought how recent 1981 is for a lynching. I remember what I was doing then, a law student parenting my children.  To me the 80s are not history.  Yet is there any difference between that lynching and the death of Ahmaud Arbery (and so many others whose names we now know), murdered by three convicted white men for jogging in a white neighborhood?  So much violence and sorrow in this history. Anything I might say is an understatement and from one who by definition has inadequate comprehension.

The Civil Rights Institute I was visiting concerns the social history of our country, the context of the Birmingham protests, the Jim Crow era, the Freedom Riders from the North, the Montgomery bus boycott, the fear, the bravery, the hubris and the inhumanity.  If you can't visit it's worth reading about, even just in TripAdvisor strangely enough.  A woman from North Carolina called her visit "life changing." Another visitor wrote, "No it's not about politics.  It's about human rights."  Someone else said, "It makes you think and hurt."  We can appreciate people from all over the world taking time to record their reactions to something so important.  

The day I was there two young African-American boys were talking with each other about each exhibit.  They gestured and spoke as if they were tour-guides in training.  As it turned out, that is exactly what they were.  There were assigned to be the tour guides for their classes.  One looked about 13, the other about 11.  A few of us joined their practice-tour.  At one point the younger boy was explaining the Freedom Rides.  He reached out and touched me to get my attention.  "On those rides," he said, "you and I" gesturing to me than to himself, "could sit together."  That seemed profound to me; it does still.  His touch was something special, a gift.  Such a young boy to understand the sins of the past and to welcome me into his present.  The children seemed empowered by what they were doing.

So my kingdom got larger and more complicated on this trip.  All of our kingdoms have a history, a past and a present.  I am grateful for this chance to focus on part of mine.  I pray for a listening heart, an open mind, a more humble attitude, the power to help, and for my comprehension to become less limited day by day. 

 Nina Naomi