U.S. Civil Rights Trail: Montgomery
Consisting of locations across the country that were important to the Civil Rights Movement, the U.S. Civil Rights Trail offers an interactive guide to Civil Rights education. My first stop was to check out Foster Auditorium in Tuscaloosa. Second stop on the trail for me is Montgomery, Alabama’s capital and home to The National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
Montgomery is full of museums and memorials about the Civil Rights Movement including Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. served as pastor from 1954 to 1960 and where the Montgomery Bus Boycott was organized. You can visit the Rosa Parks Museum located on the site where she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus. However, on this trip I only had time to visit one place, and after seeing the pictures of the new memorial I felt called to witness it in person.
The Equal Justice Initiative opened the nation’s first memorial “dedicated to the legacy of enslaved Black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow” (https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/memorial) in April 2018 after years of research where they documented 4400 lynchings of Black people in the United States between 1877 and 1950.
The photos which compelled me to visit were of the six foot monuments, one for each county in the US where a lynching took place, which is etched with names of the murdered. There are 800 monuments.
I knew it would be an emotional site and as I started walking down the path reading the large placards describing the slave trade and passing a sculpture of enslaved Africans in chains, I could see the hundreds of monuments in the distance, but the enormity doesn’t hit you until you see all the names surrounding you. You start on level ground as you make your way through the monuments, but as you proceed the ground descends and the monuments hang above you. This design element is devastatingly impactful. Previously ignorant of the full scale of what lynching includes I learned that these people were killed not only by being hung but by being beaten to death, set on fire, shot, and drowned, among other horrific ways.
I searched for the county in which I was born and raised. I knew it would be there and I both wanted to see it and didn’t. But that’s why I was there, to learn, be confronted, and to reflect. I read their names and I read their death dates. I recognized surnames and imagined these people as the ancestors of people I knew and worked with back in my home county. Regardless if that is actually true or not, these people are still the ancestors of people alive today who hold that intergenerational trauma in their bones.
Jars of soil taken from the sites where these people were killed reminded me of the piles of shoes at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC. Some jars held red soil like the clay near my childhood home and some were scorched black from fire, the soil also holds the trauma. Every step we take is on stolen land, and here in Montgomery, land worked by stolen and enslaved people.
We will remember.
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Sara is an activist and traveling writer. You can check out her videos and blogs on her website: www.whereintheworldissara.com
