Let this sink in before you move on!
Call me stuck in stereotypes, a time warp, “la la” land or whatever, but when I peered out the windshield at the sign “Welcome to Montgomery,” well the truth is that my racial anxieties set in, emotions no different than those when we first approached the Edmund Pettus Bridge crossing into Selma a few years ago. My knowledge of history and caution kicked in so I decided to make sure we adhered to local speed limits.
Okay, to be honest, when I think about Montgomery, Alabama, I think about Rosa Park and her refusal to take a back seat on a bus that led to a yearlong boycott and the rise into preeminence of its chief architect, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I thought about Governor George Wallace’s “segregation now, segregation forever” failed promise. Now all that doesn’t make me delusional; no, it makes me wary.
So, with that as an entre, this narrative is about our recent visit to the Legacy Museum in Montgomery and the nearby Freedom Monument Sculpture Park and National Museum of Peace and Justice.
The first thing we saw in the Legacy Museum in Montgomery was a huge screen showing ocean waves crashing against the shore. It was mesmerizing until, seconds later, an audio voice pierced the image with a reminder that the Atlantic Ocean was the burial site for over two million slaves – I repeat, two million slaves – who were unable to survive the voyage during what’s become known as “the middle passage.”
For a second I had a chilling recollection of the many times I’ve crossed that ocean without ever thinking that it was a burial ground for slaves who were chained and uprooted from Africa. Not once.
As we left that room, I imagined a day this summer when I’m on a beach with waves licking the shoreline when suddenly…. well, I’ll let you take my imagination from there.
Let that set in before I move on.
Now if that wasn’t harrowing enough, we then walked through a dark tunnel between glassed in displays with scores of beautifully sculptured heads of former slaves on both sides. The facial expressions – not a happy face nor smile among them- and coarse hair on each one were surreal.
Thankfully small benches were strategically placed throughout the museum allowing visitors to sit and process their innermost thoughts in silence before mustering up the energy, strength and resolve to continue the tour. Just like those ships that left the shores of Africa loaded with slaves headed west, there was no turning back on this tour.
As I made my way down a hallway with plaques on both sides with the names, ages, dates and places of where those who were lynched, the fate of a 15-year-old “Maceo” stopped me in my tracks. His “crime” and the reason for his lynching written on the plaque was, get this, his failure to respond to a white man as “mister.”
I couldn’t walk away from the thought of young Maceo (who at the time of his lynching was the same age of my grandson) who like scores of others may have become a doctors, teachers, scientists, CEOs, or engineers later in life. I thought not only about the loss of human beings but about the losses of incalculable billions of dollars in productivity, creativity and revenue from our nation’s coffers that slavery cost us.
Let that sink in before I move on.
Near the end of this tunnel, I saw photos crowds of white men, women and children dressed in their Sunday afternoon best standing below scaffolds with lynched slaves dangling half naked from the end of ropes. I wondered how they were able to sleep at night, to square that with their religious beliefs, to explain that to their descendants.
As I made my way through other exhibits in an air of occasional gasps and murmurs, direct eye contact between visitors seemed to last a second or less as folks tried to make sense of what they were seeing. I thought but decided not to ask what thoughts ran through the minds of others on the tour, the handful of whites in particular. What would their follow-up conversations look like in their vehicles when they left Montgomery, around evening dinner tables with family, or with friends?
Let that sink in before I move on.
Suddenly I remembered a forerunning piece penned 18 years ago by Pulitzer Prize winning writer Leonard Pitts, Jr., about his annual visit to a local Holocaust Museum in words that that resonated. In it he talked about walking through shadowed halls of human hatred, human hubris, yet halls of incredible resilience. “Call it centeredness. Call it somberness. Call it Sacredness,” is how he rationalized his annual visits.
Further he wrote, “to walk into the Holocaust Museum is to be reminded of the logical, inevitable result of that refusal to accept, that insistence upon declaring that some racial, sexual, religious or cultural fraction of us must live outside the circle of human compassion.” His words then, my words now eerily echo my experience in those museums in Montgomery.
When we visited the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park on day two, I paused before each sculpture to “hear” the millions of screams and cries for help from slaves who communicated with me from their watery graves in the Atlantic Ocean, from unmarked graves, from the end of hangmen’s nooses, from smoldering ashes.
I think that the word “clairvoyant” most aptly describes the 6-foot sculpture of the shackled slave I stood next to at my first stop. It was if he was quietly asking – begging – me not to let the world forget one of history’s most infamous examples of man’s inhumanity against man…the institution of slavery in America.
Well, a promise made, a promise I intend to keep was the commitment I walked away with from my brother from another epoch. The “do not touch” sign – and my cautious wife nearby – was what discouraged me from giving my brother a fist bump before moving up the sidewalk to another exhibit.
In closing and in parting, for me the realization set in that those powerful museums and monuments exist to pull off the cover of history and bring our sordid past of slavery into a present that prefers to cover its collective ears, to demean it as “wokeness,” DEI or some other nonsensical boogeyman.
But like it or not, the institution of slavery cannot be erased, is deeply internalized and is irretrievable like hardened cement into our national psych and impossible to forget…..whether we want to or not.
In the end, let this narrative sink in before you move on!
Photo by Polly Sadler on Unsplash
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