by Declan Ramirez
I wake up to an orb of light blinding me. I turn away quickly and the room is spinning. It looks as if some malicious spirit has followed me to our hotel. I close my eyes for a few seconds and wait for the sheets to be pulled off me in some Conjuring style mischief, but nothing happens. I cautiously open one eye then two, the room seems normal as everyone bustles about to get to the bus in time. It seems that someone turned on a lamp next to me quickly rousing me into a confused state, and as I’m cursed (apparently) I immediately mistook the light and movement for specters gliding over the bed. I should probably explain that.
Yesterday on a visit to Gees Bend I mistakenly pointed at a gravestone which given the group’s immediate uproar was seen to be taboo. After pointing at several gravestones in rapid succession I became accursed, doomed to a life plagued by spirits, or something like that. Anyways since I am a tad superstitious, I decided for the time being to label myself curse free for sanity’s sake and moved to start packing. I was the first to leave the room and had some time left, so I went downstairs to grab some Raisin Bran cereal (Not Sponsored) and joined the others on the bus headed towards the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, which was relatively close to the hotel we were staying in.
Upon arriving, we were processed through security and ushered to the front to be greeted by videos, illustrations, and text documenting the spread of slavery throughout the United States. Also at the front were exhibits highlighting the early abuses suffered by slaves at the hands of their masters, auctioneers, and white society as a whole.
Moving forward we stepped into a room of holographic persons trapped behind bars, each with their own chilling story to tell. Some were searching for children ripped away from them at auction and others simply overcome with their misery. Walking down the hall and listening to their tales of woe one might be overcome with grief, but at the end of the line is a glimmer of hope. A woman sings about freedom, a testament to the strength of a people so terribly oppressed in the America of old. The next room transitioned rapidly into the modern era, getting to the root of segregation and lynchings. We watched videos both artistic and documentary exploring the Civil Rights Movement and its struggles to gain a foothold in society.
Walking around a bit we see jars filled with dirt listing names, some of which simply say “Unknown.” The wall of jars reaches halfway to the ceiling and is widened over the length of a viewing room playing a video explaining its significance. The names are victims of lynchings, the soil all that is left of them, the rest swept under the rug and forgotten. Each jar contains soil from the location of their lynching, the wall only containing a fraction of the number of murdered individuals, the true number never to be known. Most will never be found, but those with records can at least be remembered here at Legacy, in a space where they’ll be respected and protected.
Another thing the museum did particularly well was show that the fight for equality is still ongoing, and that our past and present are closer than one might think. Across the room from the segregation signs and pro-segregation quotes from American leaders is a wall of letters. The letters are from prisoners pleading for help with their cases. The letters are from the young and old but have one thing in common: they’re all African American, and they’ve all experienced injustice. From the man given life in prison for stealing a bicycle to the children raped in adult prisons serving life sentences for mistakes made in their youth, the brutality of the American justice system is clear. The worst part? Every note on display was from the year 2000 and up.
Walking out of the museum I felt haunted, not by the poltergeists of Gees Bend, but by the souls of those ripped from their families, beaten, raped, and lynched in our recent past. It was then that I felt the curse set in, to be born in a country that would facilitate such hatred and have no care to its end. To live in a time futuristic by the standards of the 1900s and to still see discrimination and racism in the world. It’s hard to be proud to be an American when America isn’t proud to be you.
After thinking a bit, I found myself to be one of the last people in the museum and met up with Maxime (the person writing Blog #2 for today). We hitched a ride to the National Museum for Peace and Justice, the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslavement, lynching, segregation, and general American violence and terrorism towards black people. We were eager to get in, but were immediately stopped by the security guard asking to see our tickets. Unfortunately we didn’t have any tickets and looked back and forth between each other for a solid minute until he asked what group we were in. Not knowing the answer to that either, I tried to unsuccessfully name drop Dean Livingston and Kari but neither worked, resulting in us looking thoroughly suspicious by this point.
Consulting the all powerful GroupMe, we learned that the password to get in was Carleton, which was obvious enough but hadn’t occurred to us in the moment, being so removed from it in Alabama. But given that we had essentially lost all credibility, we had to provide proof we were with Carleton, and so had Dean Livingston vouch for us via cell phone.
Finally getting in, we were greeted by beautiful lawns and a sculpture illustrating the horrors of slavery, with chained individuals being ripped away from each other held just out of reach by the chains that bound them. It was a powerful image and we moved forward through the memorial. The main part of the installation were metal blocks suspended from the ceiling engraved with the names, counties, and states of lynchings throughout the South. As we weaved through the blocks they started getting higher and higher and more numerous. They were a testament to the sheer volume of lynchings that took place, a number of human lives you can’t get a feel for until you tangibly see it. As we walked we saw familiar places, and being from the South myself saw lynchings in my own county. You read about it on a page in the history books, but you miss the weight of it, it seems so distant when in fact this wave of violence happened less than a lifetime ago. The memorial remembers those terrorized and brutalized by white supremacy and gives them weight, a weight lost to them as a statistic in the history books.
Next we walked over to Chris’ Hot Dogs for lunch. I tried my hand at an Arnold Palmer, unsuccessfully as I don’t like sweet tea (except that time we had it at Paschals), and ordered the hot dog combo. One member of our group named Miah got her meal first and immediately started digging in. Now she thought I wouldn’t call her out in this blog post, but she was dead wrong. So here’s the story: The day before we ate dinner at Lannie’s BBQ and we all got our food early. Though, since Miah hadn’t gotten her food yet, we elected to wait for her to get her meal. The only problem was that Miah was one of the very last people to get her meal, so we were waiting for quite a while, but we did it anyway and had a mini celebration when her food finally came. But when the shoe was on the other foot, and she got her food first, she wasn’t waiting for anybody and started eating immediately. We all gazed longingly at her fries as our stomachs rumbled, but to her credit she did offer them to the table. Alright now that I got that out of the way let’s continue on with the trip.
We left Chris’ Hot Dogs for the Rosa Parks Museum, an experience dedicated to the woman herself and the ensuing Montgomery Bus Boycott. The beginning of the tour immersed us in the moment and power of Rosa Park’s defiance. We walked into a room and looked through the window of a bus at the scene up until the famous moment she was arrested. The rest of the tour was self-guided and covered what the bus boycott actually was and how it was organized, highlighting the carpooling efforts of the people and measures taken to maintain the boycott for so long. It featured primary sources from police reports to court documents and went into detail about the boycott’s methodology and the astounding courage of Rosa Parks and the people that followed her in protest of the buses. It’s amazing to think of what our country would be like if Parks hadn’t refused to change seats on that fateful day. What might have become of the Civil Rights Movement and where would our country be today?
From the Rosa Parks Museum we ventured to the Civil Rights Memorial Center and were immediately greeted by yet another amazing work of art. A circle in the center of the plaza was inscribed with the names of victims of the Civil Rights Movement and covered in a thin layer of water, calling back to Martin Luther King’s famous quote. A wall behind the circle followed a similar trend and had that very quote engraved on it. Upon entering the facility we saw portraits of the young men and women murdered and tortured by opponents of the movement. Some were active participants while others were just regular folk going about their day, not to realize it would be their last, simply because their skin was a shade darker. We continued to explore the building, hearing the brutality so many faced at the hands of racism, with the most tragic part being the lack of justice in each case. In almost every incident the perpetrator was never convicted or was let off easy by Southern courts that essentially praised their violence and asked for more. Moving to the final room, we added our names to a pledge to oppose racism and support equality for all, our names joining the hundreds of names adorning the wall of those that had come before us.
This being the last museum on the docket for the day, we took the bus to a restaurant called Martha’s Place, and had a nice buffet style dinner before getting back on the bus for Birmingham, Alabama. After a quick pit stop at Walmart early in the trip, we were back on the road arriving at the hotel right on schedule. Well that’s about how the day went and I’m kinda tired so this is Declan Ramirez signing off! Which is to say I’m exhausted and am going to pass out now. Night! (Or Mornin’/Afternoon depending on when you read this.)