For Days One and Two, go here.
For Day Three, go here.

We spent Day Four touring Montgomery, Alabama and then driving the route of the Voting Rights March, but in reverse — from Montgomery to Selma.

Our tour guide was Jake Williams. He knew everything — dates, names, stories: my head was spinning! — and he spoke with an enchanting poetic lyricism. I didn’t write anything down (I was too intent on listening to write), but I do remember that he said regarding an abandoned town: that it “got lost” — which perfectly encapsulated that sad-grief feeling I got when visiting those once-vibrant neighborhoods.

^{photo credit: Rose Shenk}

Everything happened in Montgomery, it seemed. Mr. Williams pointed out the place where Rosa Parks got on the bus and, a couple blocks later, where she was told to give up her seat. “The theaters had just let out,” he said, indicating two old buildings on either side of the street, “and the buses were filling with movie goers.” Later when we drove through the campus of Alabama State College, he pointed to the building where the civil rights workers had used the college’s mimeograph machine to print 50,000 flyers alerting the Black community of the strike that very night.

^{photo credit: Arloa Bontrager}

He took us through the wealthy part of Montgomery where fancy churches stretched for whole blocks. “We Alabamans love our churches,” he said. “We live with the Bible in one hand and a pistol in the other.” He showed us where the public pool was that the a city had closed for five years rather than integrate it, and he pointed out a park that used to be whites-only and told us about the Black boy had been murdered for taking a shortcut through it.

Court Square, Montgomery: where the slave auctions were held
^{photo credit: Rose Shenk}

At the Southern Poverty Law Center, he pointed to the lone guard standing out front. “It looks like no one’s guarding the place,” he said, “but let me assure you, there’s a whole lotta more protection than just that one guard.” And at the capitol building, as he parked the van along the curb for his lecture, he said, “You’ll notice no police are in sight, but they are watching me right this very minute. If I so much as go up and touch that Jefferson statue” — alluding to the recent attempts to remove it — “they will be everywhere.”

The baby of sixteen children, Mr. Williams was born and raised in Lowndes County, the county between Montgomery and Selma and home of the Black Panther Movement. When the march took place, there were no registered Black voters in Lowndes. A twelve-year-old at the time, Mr. Williams joined the march for one day. As we drove along Route 80 heading for Selma, he kept pointing out which lane of road was the original and which one wasn’t (they’d switch back and forth), and the place where the road had narrowed to a single lane and the marchers had to downsize their count to 300, as per the agreed-upon number for that stretch. 

He showed us the spot where he saw Martin Luther King, pointed out the sprawling ranch house set back from the road where his mother had been the housekeeper (“She had to arrive at work early so she could have breakfast on the table when the family woke up”), and he showed us the campsites where marchers slept, and explained what happened to the landowners that allowed the marchers to use their land (one was unable to purchase stock for her store, another had their bank account frozen, and I can’t remember what happened to the third), as well as the stories of the three murders that resulted because of the march. 

“Five days, fifty-four miles, four campsites, three murders, and three repercussions,” he said as we neared Selma. “That’s how I describe the march. You ready for the test?”

We briefly drove around Selma (lots of churches, and lots of damage from the recent tornado), and then he parked so we could walk across the bridge on the same path the marchers took.

That afternoon we drove to Mississippi and that night we stayed at Pine Lake Camp, which is ridiculously gorgeous and packed with wonderful places to play and explore.

As soon as we parked, the kids raced down to the water and took off peddaling, paddling, and rowing. After so many days of driving and listening, we were all in desperate need of fresh air and open spaces.

It was just the thing.

P.S. After writing this post, I discovered a YouTube video of — get this — Mr. Williams giving a tour! I haven’t watched all of it yet, but I highly recommend you do (and then report back when you find my mistakes). He’s wonderful.

This same time, years previous: eat more spinach, milk, anzac biscuits, the quotidian (4.6.19), Marta’s picadillo, stages of acting, Moroccan carrot and chickpea salad, the quotidian (5.5.14), fence, not what we’re used to.

(For days one and two, go here.)

Day Three 
At the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, aka the Lynching Memorial, in Montgomery, I was struck by its simplicity.

The architecture looked industrial with its straight lines and drab colors — boring, almost. Just an outdoor pavilion with a maze of vertical, rusty-colored rectangles with the names of counties and states at the top of each, followed by the list of the names of the people who’d been lynched and the date they died.

We meandered through the columns reading the dates and catching hints of stories: the clusters of people lynched on the same day, the family groups, the women. And then we turned the corner and the floor began to slope downward and the boxes began to rise up.

By the time we got to the bottom and turned the corner again, the boxes were hanging high overhead, the engraven names hard to decipher, the names of the counties now on the bottom. 

My son wondered to me if they were modeling the design after the African American History museum in Washington DC, in the sense that the space was changing in such a way as to make you feel the story — and he was exactly right: the boxes lifting up, all those people gone, leaving us behind with our heads thrown back looking up after them. Hanging boxes; hanging bodies. Talking about it to my husband later, I found myself crying. 

In the courtyard was a mound, and atop it a simple square of wood to symbolize the very public ways in which the enslaved people were humiliated and lynched. In the yard surrounding the memorial were the boxes again, this time in long rows on the ground, like caskets.

They went on for forever.

There was also a section with plaques of the community remembrance project — markers honoring communities that have done the hard work of truth telling through the Equal Justice Initiative. 

From there we took the shuttle to the Legacy Museum.

The way the museum was structured, visitors enter at one end and wind around through enormous rooms, everyone moving in the same direction and with no outside light to indicate where you are, what time it is, or how much more ground you need to cover. In other words, one must go through it to go through it; no skipping around. 

The material in the museum was so interactive and immersive that I kind of got lost in it. At one point when I noticed I was getting hungry and was debating whether to wait until I finished to go eat, I approached a guard to ask where we were in the museum. About a third of the way through, she said. Needless to say, we broke for lunch (which meant leap frogging from guard to guard until we reached the end, got a wristband from the last guard, went to eat our lunch, and then reentered back at the beginning).

Things that stood out to me: The sound of water. Walking down a corridor lined with head sculptures of the enslaved people by Ghanian artist Kwame Akoto-Bamfo*. The columns of ads of people for sale. The wall filled with lynching stories, and the wall filled with shelves of gallon jars — each jar filled with soil from a different lynching site. Watching Fannie Lou Hamer’s full (I think) testimony. The sound of gunshots, unrelenting. Picking up the phone and listening to prisoner after modern-day prisoner tell their story. Gordon Parks’ Doll Test Photo.

I kept thinking about how this museum compared to the African American museum in DC. They both covered a lot of the same material, and this one was a lot smaller in size, yet somehow this one felt much more intense, perhaps because the focus was on the fallout from slavery: its legacy. Yet somehow, even though the information was deeply disturbing and heavy, I didn’t feel traumatized. Drained and fragile, yes, but not battered. It was one of the most engrossing, intense, and informative museum experiences I’ve ever had, period.

The Legacy Museum is an important place — for all of us. If you get a chance to visit, do it. 

*This 15-minute video tells the origin story of the head sculptures, and here is a video about the making of the sculptures from the first photo:

This same time, years previous: with my children, the quotidian (5.4.15), creamy avocado macaroni and cheese, rhubarb diaquiri, roasted rhubarb, classy rhubarb pie.

Last fall when our church arranged a civil rights learning tour through Mennonite Mission Network, our family talked about going — just the four of us living at home — but my older daughter who was living in Massachusetts at the time said she wanted to come, too, so we decided to wait until spring when a second trip was scheduled. Then, with the departure date fast approaching, my husband and I realized it was too complicated for both of us to go, so he decided to stay home to milk the cows and earn money (so I could spend it). And then, since there was a vacant space, my daughter-in-law decided to come along, too. 

So there we were: most of my family, five other people from our church, and three people from MMN headquarters: a driver, the leader, and another MMN employee who was along for the ride (and the learning).

Day One
The first night we had supper at Casa Alterna, a home where asylum seekers and US citizens live together. Two of the residents, a young couple who met and married on their way to the US, prepared our dinner of baleadas and rosa de jamaica tea, and then told us a bit about their story. (The young woman was from Honduras, close to the place where fish fall from the sky — seriously. It’s a thing!)

Day Two
At the Friends Meeting House that serves as a worship space, short-term sanctuary for immigrants, and preschool, Anton, the friend in residence, pulled out a pin-filled world map showing where the people they serve come from.

He took us on a tour of the building and showed us where the immigrants sleep, and the room full of second-hand clothing for them to choose from, and he filled us in on some of the history of Atlanta, including the ways in which gentrification has impacted the city — at which point my younger son asked what gentrification was. I’ve always been unclear about gentrification, and I’m still fuzzy about the practicalities of it, but Anton’s comprehensive explanation, combined with all the driving tours and history lectures (both in Atlanta and in the other places we visited), painted a much fuller, more nuanced picture. 

Here is a video of Anton talking about the work they do, if you’d like to know more:

In downtown Atlanta, we walked by ICE headquarters where a long line of asylum seekers were waiting outside. “Rain or shine, there is always a crowd here,” Anton said. He kept breaking away from us to introduce himself to the people, shaking hands, asking their names, jotting down phone numbers for them to contact. It’s very hard to get asylum in Georgia, he explained. Only ten percent of all requests in Georgia are ever granted. (Other states, like Maryland and New Jersey, are much more accessible to immigrants.)

Outside the state capitol, he explained how Georgia law requires a social security number in order to get a driver’s license, and walked us through what happens if an unlicensed person is caught driving — crippling fines, jail time, and, on the third offense, a felony charge — as well the risks and challenges of attempting to get basic medical care without a license.

And outside the unmarked Freedom University headquarters for undocumented students, we read the words of DACA artist Yehimi Cambrón in her mural called The Dreams We Carry.

(The university has got some pretty cool merch, wink-wink, and you can see Junot Dias, board member for the university being interviewed on the Colbert show here.)

At the Ebenezer Baptist Church, we took a few minutes to sit in the pews and listen to the recordings of MLK’s speeches that were playing over the sound system.

Being in that church was like stepping back in time.

The space felt familiar, thanks to the photos and footage I’ve seen, and I could almost feel the energy of all those people who’d been there before me, yet it was so quiet, almost other-worldly.

I got that same melancholy ache more than once during the trip: Driving through abandoned Black middle class neighborhoods and commercial districts. Standing at the spot where the Freedom buses unloaded. Facing a water fountain in the middle of a court square where slave and cattle auctions had once been held. The weight of all those people, all that history, so heavy it was almost palpable. 

We visited the MLK memorial then, and Anton got yelled at by a guard for (unknowingly) entering a taped-off area and looking under a tarp-wrapped thingy that was under construction.

(Apparently he got yelled at when they’d visited during the fall trip, too, but that time it was for baptizing people with water from the MLK reflecting pool. “But there’s no sign that says you can’t baptize people,” he pointed out, eyes twinkling.)

This same time, years previous: a good place to start, freezer coffee cake, Puerto Rico, a simulation, carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, depression chocolate mayonnaise cake, the definition of insanity, burning the burn pile.