Montgomery - Let my little light shine!

The morning of March 1, Jim and I headed out early to follow the Civil Rights trail in the city of Montgomery, Alabama.  We went first to the Civil Rights Memorial, designed by Maya Lin.  I don’t know how she does it.  To me, her Vietnam memorial was perfect - representing the sheer magnitude of people killed in that war and yet providing a quiet, personal place to leave small remembrances. 

Jim at the Civil Rights Memorial

She captured something meaningful again here.  This time she designed a circular black granite table, etched with the names of forty-four Civil Rights martyrs and the dates of their deaths.  Water emerges from the table’s center and flows evenly across all the names.  On a curved black granite wall behind the table is inscribed Dr. King’s paraphrase of Amos 5:24 – “We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”  (Maya Lin said that when she read this line in his "I Have a Dream" speech, she immediately sketched out this Memorial on the back of a napkin!)

Inside the memorial are photographs of faces that include the forty-four named, plus more.  Under each photo is the person's short story.  Some stories I knew – for instance, Vernon Dalmer was there, the man I had just learned about from visiting Dave’s town of Hattiesburg.  As you recall, Vernon Dalmer died Jan 10 1966, when his house was firebombed right after his offer to pay the poll tax for any person who couldn’t afford to vote was broadcast on the radio.

Emmett Till

Emmet Till’s story was there – another story with which I was familiar.  He died August 28, 1955, after he “winked” at a white woman in a grocery store.  Three nights later, two men took Till from his bed, beat him, tortured him and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. However, his body did not sink into the waters; it was recovered. At his funeral, his mother vowed to not simply bury his body – and his story.  Against her friends’ pleas, she refused to have closed casket, saying “All must see.” (Let me know if you want to hear how his body was described.  It is too terrible to even write down here where children might read.)  But that mother’s act of insisting on an open casket served as one chime in America’s wake-up call.  Emmet Till was only 14 years old.  An all-white jury found the men innocent of murder.

Many of the stories I had never heard….  stories of ordinary men, women and children with extraordinary courage and conviction.  For example, I had never heard of Viola Liuzzo – a white housewife from Detroit, mother of 5, who just felt she had to do something after seeing televised reports of the attack at Edmund Pettus Bridge. 

Viola Liuzzo

She drove alone to Alabama to help with the subsequent Selma march.  She was driving some of those who had walked to Montgomery back home to Selma when two members of KKK came upon them.  Following her at speeds up to 100 mph, she was shot through her car window, killing her instantly.  (She’s inspirational to me, as I know I am not brave enough to do something akin to what she did.)  They say that John Lewis comes every year and puts flowers on her marker.  

The timeline on the granite circle begins with the 1954 decision outlawing school segregation and ends with Dr. King’s death in 1968.  Maya Lin intentionally left a blank space on the circle.  She explains: “I left a space between these events to signify that the struggle for human rights began well before 1954 and continues to this day.”   

Blank space on the Table Top

Jim's Pledge 

That blank space meant the most to me … think Matthew Shephard, Philando Castile, the Rohingya minority in Myanmar, on and on.  No, the struggle for human rights is not done.  And, as you leave, each visitor is asked whether they would be willing to pledge to work for justice for all.  A very moving memorial.

Dexter Avenue King Memorial Church.

Dexter Avenue King Church sits on quite an avenue.  Three blocks in one direction from the Church is where a slave traders’ “pen” and auction block was located. 

Montgomery State Capitol

Exactly one block from the Church in the opposite direction is the State Capitol building where Jefferson Davis took his oath of office to become the President of the Confederacy, where the order to fire on Fort Sumter starting the Civil War was issued -- and where Dr. King gave his “How Long?” speech at the conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery march.  (We learned at the Church that Dr. King had not been allowed to step onto the Capitol steps to give his speech.  So, the Church’s lectern was put on an eighteen-wheeler truck bed and that truck bed had parked in front of the steps for his historic speech.)  What a history these four blocks have seen!

When Jim and I entered Dexter Avenue Church to see about a tour, we were immediately met by a woman with a huge smile and hug.  “Come on in, sugars.”   We were literally “pulled” into the church

Dexter Avenue King Memorial Church

The women hosts at Dexter King

– and escorted through Dr. King’s office where he wrote his sermons, upstairs through the vestibule and sanctuary, and then down again past a beautiful wall-length mural of Dr. King’s life. 

Section of the mural

We were so embraced by the two women we met at this church… it would have been wonderful to have been there for a Sunday service! 

I did leave a little something of myself behind.  They wanted to sing a song together, so we chose “This Little Light of Mine!”   However, they didn’t know all the verses that I had learned at Hawley Methodist!  So, I taught them the verses and actions for two new verses: “Put it under a bushel – No!” and “Don’t let Satan blow it out!”   They were so thrilled to share the verses with their kids’ choir that they insisted on videotaping us singing them!  (Here it is on YouTube! Just click on this title:  “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine!

Greyhound Bus Terminal – and the Freedom Riders

I feel the need to say again that I lived through these times, but was oblivious.  Yes, I knew about the Freedom Rides.  But, I realize now that I knew them “as a newspaper headline.”  In other words, I knew the surface, but nothing about the numbers involved and the hatred they encountered. 

The basic idea of the “Freedom Ride” was for teams of blacks and whites to ride regularly scheduled interstate buses from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans, sitting together on the bus, in waiting rooms, and eating together at bus station cafes.  They wanted to compel the Federal government to help enforce a court case called “Boynton vs. Virginia” that declared segregation in bus terminals unconstitutional.  

They met with such violence along the way.  One of the buses was fire-bombed near Anniston, Alabama and the riders beaten as they struggled off the burning bus.

Bus fire-bombed in Anniston, Alabama

And,  here's what happened in Montgomery:  On May 20, 1961, a group of black and white riders led by John Lewis left Birmingham on a Greyhound bus.  Upon arriving in Montgomery, their police escort “disappeared” and it is widely known that the local police chief gave the local Klan 15 minutes to do what they wanted.  An angry mob of over 200 Klan supporters attacked and injured the riders.  The most severely beaten rider was a young man from Appleton, Wisconsin -- Jim Zwerg, attacked most savagely because he was white. 

Jim Zwerg

The violence was so bad in Birmingham, Montgomery and Anniston that the Freedom Ride was called off.  But, national coverage of the ride brought the world’s attention.  And, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was so enraged by what occurred here that he became personally active in the movement.  During the summer and fall, hundreds of others took up the Freedom Rides.  On November 1, 1961, the ICC put out new regulations guaranteeing integration of interstate buses and stations - an unqualified victory.

Dexter Parsonage Museum.  

Dexter Church Parsonage

The King family lived in this parsonage from 1954 to 1960.  Two of their four children were born while living in this house.  Of all the places we went, we could have skipped this one as it mainly involved walking through a small house.  More stories were told about the period possessions inside than the Kings.  But, what stories were told gave glimpses of him as husband and father.  The most poignant story:  Martin always sent Coretta flowers when he was away.  On his last fateful trip to Memphis, he sent her plastic flowers.  “Why not real flowers? she asked him on the phone.  He answered: “These will last if I have to stay away longer this time.”

What struck me the most was realizing that he was only 24 years of age and only two months married when he was called to preach at this, his first church.  How very young!  How newly married!  Yet both he and Coretta so quickly became leaders - and faces – of the civil rights struggles in Montgomery.  You can still see the crater on the front porch left by a dynamite blast set off while Coretta was home with their new baby Yolanda.  (His brother’s house was also bombed in Birmingham; the perpetrators never found for either.)

But of all the stories told at the parsonage, the one that sticks in my head and heart the most had nothing to do with the Kings.  The woman who greeted us and started the tour told us a little about her own life.  Her mother was a domestic worker.  One of her mother’s jobs for her employer was to wash and iron his KKK robes!  At this time of lynchings and beatings, I cannot imagine the horror she must have felt as she handled, washed and ironed those robes. 

She always told her daughter: “The best way we can overcome this is to use the money I am making from washing his clothes for you to go to college.”  And, the daughter did.  A woman about my age, she eventually got her Masters in Library Science.  How justifiably ironic as she herself had not been allowed to enter a public library as a child!

Montgomery Bus Boycott. 

Artist sketch: Montgomery Boycott

We didn’t go to the Rosa Parks museum; our time just ran out.  Rosa Parks is worth mentioning, of course.  On December 1, 1955, she was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat to a white man.  She was not the first to refuse, but her arrest sparked the launch of the Montgomery Bus Boycott the next day after a meeting in the basement of the Dexter Avenue Church.  And, Dr. King - at the age of 25 - became the national face of the movement. 

As a person who has devoted her career to helping organizations be clear about their purpose and strategies, I am impressed with the simple eloquence of Dr. King’s.  Building on Gandhi and other people’s ideas, King’s new strategy launched that night was called: “non-violent, direct action.”   He believed in non-violence, but not passivity.  They were to directly confront, but never resort to violence.  The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a prime example.  What really impresses me about the boycott were the 50,000 black citizens who joined in.  These ordinary people – mostly domestic workers - walked 381 consecutive days rather than ride, before a judge ordered integration of the city’s buses.