Dateline: On the road to Memphis, Tennessee. November 19, 2016
As we on the Living Legacy Pilgrimage bus rode the last 80 miles back to Memphis, we reflected, both conversationally and introspectively, about what we had experienced in the previous eight days.
I recalled the sights I had seen and the people I had heard:
- the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, where Dr. King was killed;
- the Sunday service at Centenery United Methodist Church in Memphis, where the minister had spoken out against the election of Donald Trump as US president six days earlier;
- the three crucifixes dedicated to James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner at the Mt. Zion United Methodist Church near Philadelphia, Mississippi;
- the sensation of walking across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma; and
- so many others.
I closed my eyes and saw images from the documentaries I had seen prior to joining the pilgrimage and also on the bus while we rolled through southern countryside:
- Eyes on the Prize, the wonderful PBS special on segregation;
- Freedom Riders, which related so poignantly with the bus replica at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis;
- Home of the Brave, about Detroiter Viola Liuzzo who was the only white woman murdered during the Civil Rights Movment, possibly by an FBI undercover agent, for transporting marchers from Montgomery to Selma;
- the images of Emmett Till's brutalized head and face in The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till; and
- the story of Booker Wright, an African American waiter in Greenwood, Mississippi, who was killed for speaking out against being treated as a second class citizen on the documentary Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story.
I thought of the information card about Fannie Lou Hamer that I had drawn on the first night of our pilgrimage when we had come together in Memphis.
As the daughter of sharecroppers, Hamer worked in cotton fields at age six. For registering to vote, she was fired from her job, kicked out of her home, and shot at. She was beaten for attempting to help Negroes to vote.
Yet, she became the field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and, in 1964, helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She was the human epitome of resilience.
Thus, the word "resilience" rose high in my consciousness, and I joiurnaled this:
"We can read that white supremacy dictated that a black man never, ever look a white woman in the face, but that's different than hearing a black activist, still energetic in his 70s, describe that crime as 'eyeball rape.'
"We can read and know that racism continues today, but that's different than seeing vandalism and bullet holes in the gravestones of murdered civil rights martyrs James Earl Chaney and Jimmie Lee Jackson.
"We can read all we want, but reading is so different than learning first-hand from people who experienced violence in the 1960s -- and who remind us that, yes, racism does continue today."
Prominent in my mind was the observation of the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth (1922-2011), the outspoken pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, who, in 1964, stated so eloquently:
"It was neither church prayers nor conciliating committees which brought about the Civil Rights Bill. It was nonviolent demonstrations -- marching feet, praying hearts, singing lips, and filling the jails which did it."
Then came to mind the slogan of the Civil Rights Memorial, which is associated with the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama: "The March Continues."
March on!
Next blog: "Segregation Stories: Dr. Von Washington, Sr., and Jacob Johnson"
