Educational and heart-rending: A trip to Alabama to see, hear bitter evidence about our country’s racist history

Posted on by fchristlieb

During two whirlwind days of visits to museums, poignant exhibits, breathtaking sculpture gardens, and other historic sites in Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama, Kay and I went on an eye-opening trip back in time last weekend. It was an emotional learning experience like few I’ve ever known.

We knew this trip would touch us deeply, but we had no idea it would be to such a degree. It almost felt as if we witnessed for ourselves the disturbing, tumultuous, violent events we spent the trip reading, viewing and hearing about in countless photos and other images, quotations, newspaper clippings, audio, video and sculptures, reliving the racial injustices and racial terrorism so ubiquitous in our country’s ugly past.

Maybe I’ve just forgotten because it was so long ago, but it seemed like a classic case of “they didn’t teach us this stuff in school.”

At Montgomery Square, this amazing large sculpture shows Rosa Parks’ hands holding her arrest number after she was arrested Dec. 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger. Four days later, the Montgomery bus boycott began. It would not end until Dec. 20 of the following year, when the Supreme Court ruled the Alabama and Montgomery laws segregating buses to be unconstitutional.

Most of the places we toured were in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama and where we stayed after the 12-hour drive from Arlington. We immersed ourselves in vast amounts of information about Black Americans’ unending, torturous struggle for civil rights and voting rights. The unspeakable horrors of centuries of slavery – over 12 million people taken from Africa to be enslaved in the Western Hemisphere with generations of their descendants, and nearly 2 million dying in transit on the Atlantic Ocean in deplorably inhumane conditions.

Montgomery, we discovered, with its rail lines and the Alabama River making it a major inland port, served as a primary hub and capital of the domestic slave trade during the mid-19th century, with numerous slave trading depots and auction houses.

I learned sad, sickening truths about our nation’s long reign of white supremacy – a reprehensible ideology that exists to this day – and the intense, unabating hatred that once flowed through the veins of most white Americans toward anyone with another skin color. As we saw at the Legacy Sites – four venues sponsored by nonprofit legal organization the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) at different locations in Montgomery and dedicated to shedding light on these abominable pieces of our history – that prejudice grew stronger after the Civil War and intensified well into the 20th century.

This heartbreaking sculpture paying homage to victims of slavery greets visitors at the start of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery.

Millions of Black Americans in the Deep South were targeted in lynchings – hangings, burnings, shootings, drownings, stabbings, beatings – that began after the Civil War and continued, unbelievably, into the 1950s. These killings, sanctioned by law enforcement and elected officials, were intended to terrorize Blacks and enforce racial hierarchy, re-establishing white supremacy after the war.

Of the Legacy Sites, the outdoor National Memorial for Peace and Justice was the most jarring for me. It’s the first U.S. memorial dedicated to over 4,400 Black Americans documented to have been murdered in lynchings between 1877 and 1950, their names engraved on more than 800 steel monuments – one for each county where a lynching occurred. And that’s a small fraction of the true number, since untold numbers of lynchings went undocumented. I counted the number of counties from our state of Texas at a staggering 98. Sadly, many victims honored in the exhibit are listed as “Unknown.”

I also now know more than I ever did about the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, which started the civil rights movement. It was led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. – who lived in Montgomery from 1954 to 1960 and preached at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church – and its genesis was the courage of the remarkable Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger on Dec. 1, 1955, and was arrested. We visited the Rosa Parks Museum on the Montgomery campus of Troy University.

This is one of more than 800 steel blocks honoring the thousands upon thousands of Black Americans who were lynched in the U.S. starting after the Civil War and into the 1950s. Each block represents a county in a state in the southern U.S., and as you can see, this one includes several people whose names went undocumented. There were countless more victims of undocumented lynchings.

Exhibits also opened my eyes to details about the brutal beatings suffered by Black and white Americans attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in March 1965 on their way to the state Capitol in Montgomery to make their case for the voting rights no American should ever have been deprived of. At the start of our trip, Kay and I stopped in Selma and walked the bridge, a moving experience for both of us.

Then there were the Freedom Rides of 1961 (the year I was born), during which Black and white Americans were also attacked while challenging segregation on interstate buses and in bus terminals. We read at length about those brave patriots at the Freedom Rides Museum inside the former Greyhound bus terminal in Montgomery.

When we drove to Birmingham to visit friends Sunday, we went to the 16th Street Baptist Church, where a bombing by Ku Klux Klan members in 1963 killed four young Black girls. As I walked up the front steps, Sunday morning’s service was about to start. I stood outside the doors, listened to the beautiful music being sung inside, and said a prayer for all the families affected by the horrendous events of Sept. 15, 1963. After I walked back down, a man getting out of his truck invited me (Kay was exploring on another street) to attend the service. I thanked him and said we’d love to but had lunch plans.

We made the all-day drive home Monday after an eventful, memorable trip during which we saw most of what we’d hoped to. Montgomery, Alabama, was never on my list of desired places to visit, but as I told Kay, I’m so glad we made this trip. What we learned, what we saw, what we felt and what we came away with were immeasurably educational and invaluable lessons about innumerable atrocities committed by our fellow Americans against fellow Americans over the course of our country’s history.

If you’ve never been to Montgomery and ever have a chance to go there and take in these sites, you shouldn’t hesitate. If you’re ever driving through Alabama, don’t think twice about detouring to Montgomery to witness what we did. It’s history every American should know more about, see up close, and take time to pay respects to the millions of our fellow countrymen against whom these injustices have been perpetrated.

Without question, the experience will have a deeply profound impact on you.

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This is just one example of the many unfathomable reasons Black Americans were lynched in the southern U.S. for decades.
Kay and I visited the Legacy Museum, one of 4 Legacy Sites in Montgomery sponsored by the Equal Justice Initiative that educate visitors about the civil rights movement and pay tribute to victims of slavery and lynchings.
Left: A statue of Rosa Parks stands at the former city bus stop site in Montgomery where she got on the bus Dec. 1, 1955. Her courage was the impetus for the civil rights movement. Right: A beautiful statue of Mrs. Parks stands across from the Legacy Museum.
Right: A statue of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who led the Montgomery bus boycott and was a major figure in the civil rights movement before his assassination in 1968, stands across from the Legacy Museum. Left: John Lewis, a long-serving Congressman from Georgia who died in 2020, was also a central figure in the civil rights movement, participating in the 1961 Freedom Rides protesting segregation on interstate buses and the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery to protest for voting rights.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice features over 800 of these steel structures honoring the thousands of Black Americans who were victims of lynching at the hands of white Americans.
Among the 98 Texas counties I counted bearing the names of lynching victims at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, there was one name from Tarrant County where we live — Fred Rouse, who was lynched on Dec. 11, 1921.
The words speak for themselves.
In addition to the 800-plus hanging steel structures inside, the same number lay outside with all the same lynching victims’ names.
This is the Freedom Rides Museum at the old Greyhound bus terminal in downtown Montgomery. It documents the 1961 Freedom Rides on which Black and white Americans fought against segregation of the interstate bus system, which the Supreme Court had already ruled unconstitutional but remained in place. The Freedom Riders, most of them students like future Congressman John Lewis, were attacked, beaten and bombed by Ku Klux Klan members and other white Americans.
The 16th Street Baptist Church in downtown Birmingham was the site of tragedy in September 1963, when Ku Klux Klan members bombed the church, killing 4 young black girls. The church remains a vibrant congregation today.

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