2022
A Pilgrimage to Selma and Montgomery pa u l b r o u i l l e t t e
Thursday We were four members of Boston’s Old South Church who had just finished dinner at Dreamland, Montgomery, Alabama’s premiere barbecue joint, and decided to stroll back to our downtown hotel, the newly renovated Renaissance. We passed old brick storage buildings and a minor-league baseball stadium, followed railroad tracks, and walked through an underpass leading to a channel of the Alabama River. Tree-lined Riverfront Park slopes gently to the water. As we watched the sun set, we wondered what concerts and plays had been enjoyed at the outdoor amphitheater. A service building stood nearby, its utilitarian purpose masked by white ceramic tile. On one side wall, above our reach, we saw a round decorative medallion. Along the top were the words “Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement” and, along the bottom, “First Capital of the Confederacy.” This civic declaration was similar to the advertisements we had seen at the airport that afternoon, posters for the Rosa Parks Museum alongside those for the First White House of the Confederacy, and photos of the Montgomery Zoo’s lions and elephants next to pictures of the Court Street Fountain, where enslaved men and women were once sold at auction alongside livestock. These conflicting messages introduced us to the tension we often experienced during our visit to Montgomery, as Alabama’s capital continues to both confront its Confederate past and honor its civil rights activism. Among our group of forty-one participants were educators, activists, historians, and ministers, mostly white, on a trip promoted as an “educational Pilgrimage to seek truth and justice,” organized by Rev. June Cooper. Cooper is the former Executive Director of City Mission and Theologian in the City at Old South Church, two of Boston’s longstanding institutions at the forefront of racial justice issues. The Pilgrimage’s goals were broad: acknowledging the living legacy of white supremacy in our country; learning the history of white racial violence from Reconstruction to the Jim Crow era, when state laws reinforced segregation of Black citizens in schools, places of assembly, transportation and voting rights; recognizing the strengths of the African American community to resist white supremacy in the struggle for freedom; and understanding how far we have come and how far we have yet to go to achieve racial reconciliation in our country.
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The Lowell Review
