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. 

 

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