by Charles V. Bagli
We recently embarked on the road trip of a lifetime through the American South. Our journey took us from state capitals to small towns and focused on two things that have been important touchstones throughout our lives — the Civil Rights Movement and the Blues.
We flew to Atlanta, where we rented a car for what would be a 650-mile long journey, ending in Memphis, near Beale Street and the Lorraine Hotel. Before we set out, I had thought I knew a lot about the enslavement of Black people and the Civil Rights Movement. We didn’t know the half of it.
Our first stop was Ebenezer Baptist Church and the neighborhood where Martin Luther King Jr. grew up. You can almost hear his father’s voice thundering down from the pulpit.
The next day we visited the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, where each gallery offers an immersive portal into the enslavement of millions of Africans, the broken promises of Reconstruction and the civil rights campaigns that would inspire the women’s movement and the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
One exhibit in particular struck us to our core. You are invited to take a seat at the Woolworth lunch counter, complete with a table top juke box which oddly enough features a digital timer. You place your hands on the counter on a set of handprints, put on headphones and the timer starts counting down 1.25 soul-rattling seconds that define forever your idea of what courage and commitment really mean. In those seconds, you absorb the insults, anger, shouting, and shoving energy of the mob set on displacing the young people who sat still and silently at that counter to make the statement that we all belong at the table. It would be one of many times we saw bravery in action.
Statues of Rosa Parks stand on many corners in Montgomery. And there’s the Greyhound Bus Terminal, now dedicated to the Freedom Rides, when multi-racial groups of young students, ministers and activists put their lives on the line to fight Jim Crow laws and help Black citizens register to vote. Beatings and burned out buses marked the battles and scores of arrests were memorialized in mug shots featured throughout the exhibit.
In Selma, we walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of what became known as Bloody Sunday. On March 7, 1965 state troopers and possemen used batons, bullwhips and tear gas to attack 600 unarmed local residents and activists who were attempting to march 54 miles to Montgomery in defiance of Jim Crow and in support of voting rights. A protest leader, Bevil Boynton, was beaten unconscious and John Lewis, the future congressman, suffered a fractured skull.
Two days later, a second march was cut short and that night a civil rights activist and Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb of Boston, was murdered. Thousands of marchers, escorted by federal marshals, persevered, successfully completing the third attempt to march to Montgomery on March 24. Five months later, President Lyndon B. Johnson enacted the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The dramatic campaign is memorialized in the stories, mementoes and photographs in the National Voting Rights Museum at the foot of Pettus Bridge. The courage of the civil rights protestors is evident in the testimony and photography of the era. Their bravery in the face of terror was illuminated at the National Lynching Memorial in Montgomery, where the names of more than 4,400 Black people killed in racial lynchings between 1877 and 1950 are inscribed on 800 corten monuments, one for each county where lynchings took place.
We got to Clarksdale, MS in time for the annual Juke Joint Festival, featuring blues musicians such as Robert Kimbrough Sr., Gary and Duwayne Burnside, Ghalia Volt and Tinsley Ellis on the streets and in front of shops in what is known as the “Home of the Blues.” Legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, who influenced countless musicians, is said to have sold his soul to the devil at the town’s “Crossroads” in order to better play guitar.
We also ate a lot of good food along the way. If you’re thinking about a similar trip, we suggest you banish any notion of a diet until after you return. There’s BBQ everywhere. And breakfast at the Blue and White Restaurant on Hwy 61 in Tunica, MS consists of two eggs, bacon, toast, grits and two hotcakes. You can usually find a cup of coffee for $2!
Our visit to the Lorraine Hotel, where Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 as he lent his support to striking sanitation workers, was a spooky experience for me. I (Charlie) was only 14 in 1968 and I had only ever seen those famous newspaper photos of Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy on the balcony of the hotel’s second floor pointing in the direction of the shooter. To stand in front of the hotel, now a museum, 58 years later sent a chill up my spine.
I (Ellie) was in junior high the night of the assassination. My brother and I had gone to a Martha Reeves and the Vandellas concert at Montclair High. We returned home to find my parents waiting for us on our front porch to share the news about Dr. King. It was a heartbreaking moment for all of us. As I walked down the hill toward the Memphis motel, I could not hold back my sobs and my anger about how much was taken from our country that night.
We worry whether our grandchildren born in the 21st Century will learn about the uprisings by the enslaved, the campaigns to win civil rights and the ongoing fight for civil rights in an era when the powers that be want to bury and deny this vital history. The docent at the Voting Rights Museum in Selma told us that the teachers in her son’s high school were not allowed to delve into Bloody Sunday and the March to Montgomery. But we hope that this history will be handed down as long as these museums exist and as long as there are people to tell these stories.
Charles V. Bagli