Paul Brouillette A Pilgrimage to Selma and Montgomery

A Pilgrimage to Selma and Montgomery

paul brouillette

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.

Friday

The morning after our arrival, we traveled thirty miles by bus on U.S. Highway 80, known today as the Selma-to-Montgomery National Historic Trail. This designation commemorates the events of March 1965 that led to the signing and passage of the federal Voting Rights Act, which abolished racial discrimination in voting, later that year.

We were joined by historian Georgette Norman, former director of the Rosa Parks Museum, who described how, following passage in 1870 of the 15th Amendment guaranteeing voting rights to Black Americans, through the mid-1960s, local Southern politicians often refused them the right to vote in state and federal elections. States passed laws subjecting Black citizens to poll taxes and literacy tests. While initial efforts to overturn these laws began in the 1920s, the momentum to rescind these laws sped up in the 1950s and 60s. Montgomery’s role in these efforts was due to an active branch of the NAACP and the protest strategies developed during the thirteen-month bus boycott by the city’s Black community in 1955, following Rosa Parks’ arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man.

Our stop at the Lowndes Interpretive Center, a U.S. National Park site in Lowndes County, mid-way between Montgomery and Selma, made clear the geographical context and historical events and locations we were visiting. Well into the early 1960s, efforts by tenant farmers who engaged in voting activities were often met with brutality; many were fired from their jobs, forced from their homes, and thrown off the land they had toiled for many years. We also heard a more personal story from Josephine Bolling McCall, a local educator and author, who described how her father, a Black leader and entrepreneur in Lowndesboro, was lynched in 1947 for his prosperous business dealings. There were many reasons the county was known as “Bloody Lowndes.”

One unexpected stop was our midday lunch at the Wallace State Community College. The school’s namesake, George Wallace, was Alabama’s governor who, on the steps of the Montgomery State Capitol at his 1963 inauguration, proclaimed “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Later that year, he blocked two Black students from entering the doors of the University of Alabama. The student population and staff we saw that day were mostly Black.

Soon, we arrived at the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Selma. For those on the Pilgrimage who grew up in the 1960s, the name Selma conjured images of confrontations between Black citizens and white law enforcement, and peaceful demonstrations countered by violent retaliation. The imposing brick church served as a house of worship as well as meeting place for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, organizers of the marches from Selma to Montgomery. It is here that both Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X spoke to the church’s congregation in early 1965, rallying support for the actions that culminated in the right-to-vote demonstrations later that March.

Five blocks away stands Selma’s historic downtown area. Some of the two-andthree story brick buildings that once housed hotels and elegant homes have kept their architectural detailing, reminders of a more prosperous past, but we could see that Selma has not benefitted from the incremental economic progress that many larger Southern cities have. A handful of shoppers and office-workers passed us in an eerily quiet area. We

wondered what route the marchers took to walk the short distance from Brown Chapel to what now stood before us, spanning the shores of the Alabama River—the bridge that played an integral role in the journey from a neighborhood church to the steps of the state capitol.

A first attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery started March 7, 1965, when more than five hundred non-violent demonstrators, including organizer and future Congressman John Lewis, attempted crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They were attacked by Alabama State troopers wielding night sticks, tear gas, and whips, resulting in more than fifty marchers who required hospital care for serious injuries. The violence and resulting injuries led to this confrontation being named “Bloody Sunday.” Two days later, state troopers interrupted a second attempt at marching to Montgomery. A third demonstration culminated on March 21, 1965, when a crowd of more than 3,000 left the Brown Chapel area for a five-day, fifty-four-mile march from the Edmund Pettus Bridge to the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery. By the time the marchers reached the Capitol on Friday, March 25, and heard Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver his speech “How Long? Not Long,” the crowd had reached 25,000 people. Congress passed the national Voting Rights Act of 1965 less than five months later.

And so, there above the western shore of the Alabama River, aware that we were standing in the footsteps of the men and women who risked their lives to have a voice in deciding who would represent them in governing the state and nation, we stepped onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Unlike most bridges with a flat deck and a clear view to the opposite side, the Edmund Pettus Bridge deck rises gradually from its start, impeding the view to the opposite bank of the river. Like the original marchers, we couldn’t see the end of the bridge until we reached its crest at the half-way mark. At that point of a lateafternoon in June, we saw a few cars parked in the distance; the marchers of 1965, on the other hand, came upon one hundred and fifty state troopers and deputies blocking the width of the four-lane U.S. Highway. Our group grew quiet as we absorbed the enormity of the decision the marchers made during that spring more than fifty years ago, regardless of the danger and despite their fears. If the marchers’ efforts crossing that bridge in March of 1965 spoke of selflessness in service of a greater good, then we were indeed pilgrims paying our respects to their courage and sacrifice.

We held hands and offered silent prayers of gratitude for being able to honor their work, and completed our journey, blessed by historical changes, to the opposite side of the bridge. Later that afternoon, as we drove away from Selma, we noted a water tower rising above all buildings in the area, with a self-assessment painted on its front circumference: “SELMA—A Nice Place to Live.”

Saturday

On Saturday, we visited the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, both of which opened in 2018. The museum and memorial are the brainchild of Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, the non-profit organization dedicated to criminal justice reform, racial justice reform, and education. Situated on the site of a slave warehouse, the Legacy Museum chronicles the relationship between the past and present, connecting the history of

slavery, Jim Crow laws, and segregation, to the contemporary mass-incarceration of Black men and women.

We somberly entered along re-creations of slave holding pens. Visitors read the exhibit descriptions and listened to recordings intently. One display, a collection of clearglass mason jars filled with dirt, was initially puzzling. A closer look revealed that each jar held soil from a lynching site in the southern United States. An enlarged black and white photograph from the 1920’s showed white families picnicking under a tree where the body of a Black man hung from a branch. We learned that, at the time, copies of the photo were sold as postcards. Prison inmates, unjustly incarcerated by harsh criminal justice policies, systemic racism, or both, told their stories through video screens built into exhibits replicating prison visitation booths. The link between yesterday’s slavery and lynching, and the incarceration of Black men and women today was unmistakably clear: the bodies and souls of Black people need to be destroyed for white supremacy to prevail. The Museum’s racially diverse crowd continued to grow. The air grew heavy and warm and quiet. One middle-aged Black father admonished his fidgeting young son, saying, “This is important. You need to know this.”

From the Legacy Museum, we took a short ride to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, commemorating the more than 4,400 documented victims of lynching in twelve of the United States. Unlike the museum, whose exhibits are positioned in such proximity to each other that we sometimes brushed against other tourists’ arms, the outdoor Memorial is situated on a grassy sloping hill, open to air and light and natural elements. From a distance, the structure appears to be a horizontal platform with tall columns supporting a low, flat, and continuous roof. A gravel path, beginning at the site’s entry, provided us with a first view of the Memorial in an almost serene setting; soon, however, we encountered life-sized sculptures of African men and women with outstretched arms in chains, as if reaching out to us as we passed by. We began walking along one side of a wooden platform and realized that what at first appeared to be columns were actually six-foot tall metal boxes, called monuments, oxidized to generate rusting on uneven surfaces, connected to the underside of the roof. Each of the eight hundred monuments was inscribed with the names of a state and counties where a lynching had occurred. Below each county, the names of people who had been lynched there were listed. Visitors read these names intently, sometimes placing a palm on the monument in a gesture of blessing. At one point we heard a gasp; a woman had recognized the name of a family member, a remembered cousin, lost to Alabama’s violent history.

As we reached the end of the platform, we turned a corner to find that the floor began sloping down; however, the monuments remained attached to the underside of the roof. Each step down the wide wooden ramp changed our relationship to the monuments until, by the time we reached the bottom of the ramp, all the boxes with the inscribed names were suspended above our heads. The effect of the design became powerfully clear: the boxes were like coffins --- or bodies --- hanging from a tree. Other visitors spoke in hushed tones, creating the unmistakable feeling of being in a sacred space.

At the end of the ramp, we faced a wall displaying multiple plaques, some etched with brief descriptions of the rationales given for the killings: “Jack Turner was lynched in Butler, Alabama, in 1882 for organizing black voters in Choctaw County.” “A lynch mob of more than 1,000 men, women, and children burned Zachariah Walker alive in Coatesville,

Pennsylvania, in 1911.” “Henry Patterson was lynched in Labelle, Florida, in 1926 for asking a white woman for a drink of water.” “Elbert Williams was lynched in Brownsville, Tennessee, in 1940 for working to register black voters as part of the local NAACP.”

Outside, a gravel path led to duplicates of the monuments, all arranged in rows on the ground, like so many coffins or gravestones. The organizers of the Memorial have challenged each county represented by a monument to claim it, display it, and honor the men and women who were lynched. Only a handful of counties have started the process of reclamation.

Much of the National Memorial’s power stems from its name and design. It is not simply a remembrance of one state’s social control, it is a formal accusation of the country’s disregard of the terror inflicted upon its citizenry because of race. While the hanging metal boxes may, in an abstract manner, suggest the shape of a coffin, the list of names and dubious transgressions forces the obvious conclusion—that these people were brutally murdered specifically because of their skin color. Fathers and mothers. Sons and daughters. Families. Citizens of the United States. Human beings. Reading an unfamiliar name inevitably prompted questions: Who was he? Did he have a family? Where did this woman grow up? How did she spend her days? What were their lives like? In the process, we imagined stories that humanized the victims, while feeling enraged by the “official” justifications for their murders.

Sunday

On Sunday morning, many of our group attended a Fathers’ Day service at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where a young Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., had served as pastor in the 1950s and preached in the literal shadow of the First White House of the Confederacy and Alabama State Capitol building, a three minutes’ walk away. Afterward, we shifted gears, from reflecting on Montgomery’s history to participating in a discussion about city redevelopment efforts, much of it inspired by the influx of visitors to the Legacy Museum and National Memorial. The event was held in the community room of the Kress on Dexter building, previously known as the S.H. Kress & Co., once one of Montgomery’s premiere retail destinations. Recently renovated into apartments and office space, the restoration is part of Montgomery’s efforts to invest in the downtown area prompted, in part, by increased tourism, as well as residents looking to take part in the city’s burgeoning rebirth. Even the name of our lodging, the Renaissance Montgomery Hotel, reflected that change. It is remarkable change in sixty years, from a Black woman’s arrest for refusing to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger, to a public shrine for the murdered Black citizens.

Learning that the local economy is newly energized, in part, by the city’s willingness to confront its legacy of white supremacy left many of us hopeful that redemption may be an eventual reward for those efforts. Small but incremental gestures, like the two marble slabs, salvaged during renovation of the S.H. Kress & Co. building, are an example of the delicate balance of acknowledging the sins of the past without burying them forever. Displayed prominently at the new entry with a descriptive note, the slabs were part of the original building’s water fountains. One slab reads “White.” The other slab reads “Colored.”

Return

Our group of four got into a cab to the airport early Monday. The driver, a middle-aged Black man, told us he had worked as a nurse for many years but found driving less physically taxing. He seemed happy to make small talk, asking where we were from. “Boston! That’s a long way from Montgomery!” When he noted that he was a native of Montgomery we acknowledged the obvious: “You’ve seen a lot of changes.”

“Oh, that’s right, I’ve seen a lot of changes. A lot of changes.” After a pause, he continued. “There were a lot of bad people in those days, but there were a lot of good people, too. There were always more good people than bad.”

That balance of tension between good and bad seems entwined in the state’s history. For example, in his later years, Governor George Wallace appeared in Black churches and asked forgiveness for his inflammatory rhetoric and segregationist policies; in his last race for governor in 1982, he received ninety percent of the Black vote. The Edmund Pettus Bridge, Brown Chapel AME Church, and Dexter Avenue Baptist Church have been named National Historic Landmarks; so is the Alabama State Capitol, also known as the First Confederate Capital. Many cities and towns in Alabama have elected Black representatives for local government, though Selma’s first Black mayor was not elected until 2000, thirtyfive years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act; Montgomery duplicated that feat only in 2019. Following the United States Supreme Court’s 2013 invalidation of a critical component of the Voting Rights Act, which had required federal review of proposed changes to certain states’ voting procedures, Alabama, and much of the country, is again subject to a resurgence of discriminatory voting laws.

And in 2017, during construction of the National Memorial to Peace and Justice, which was financed through private funding and donations, the state legislature passed the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, which “prohibits the relocation, removal, alteration, renaming, or other disturbance of any monument located on public property which has been in place for 40 years or more,” effectively sanctioning the existing 120 public Confederate statues and memorials in the state.

A month following our return, the Old South Church participants spoke to the congregation at a Community Hour presentation on what we had witnessed and learned. We admitted that achieving the goals of the pilgrimage in four days was a substantial challenge but one that would, instead, require an extended period of listening, reflection, humility, self-awareness, commitment, and activism to be truly enlightened and able to take part in the act of reconciliation.

After all, before the Pilgrimage began, we thought we knew. We had read the book Coming ofAge in Mississippi and watched the PBS documentary, Eyes on the Prize, or the more recent Hollywood movie, Selma. Still, we didn’t really know. We assumed Montgomery had dedicated a public memorial to Dr. King but learned that, while the city featured a large Confederate Memorial Monument and even a statue of country-singer Hank Williams, no life-sized memorial to Dr. King has been erected yet. We thought we knew that the current criminal justice system had led to a disproportionate number of Black men in American prisons. But we didn’t know that, today, there are almost as many incarcerated African Americans as the four million enslaved people before the end of the Civil War. We had learned in school about the terrible personal losses suffered by the North and South during

the Civil War but hadn’t been taught about the mob violence and lynching of Black citizens that followed.

So, yes, we thought we knew. But after four days of listening, witnessing, and reflecting, we had to admit: We still didn’t know the half of it. We remained pilgrims on this road.

SECTION II

INTERVIEW

Fantastic Cinema in the Years Before CGI by Pierre V. Comtois (VBW Publishing, 2017)