The Delta and Memphis

March 12-13 The Delta and Memphis

The Tighes returned home to Baltimore and Susan and I left Tuesday morning for a sunny drive through the Delta.  Passing through tiny towns, rolling hills, lots of farmland and the infamous Parchman Penitentiary.  We stopped in Clarksdale - the home of B.B. King and lots of other blues artists. We took a break from listening to the NPR series on Civil Rights (highly recommend by the way) to listen to only BLUES music....Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Etta James, John Lee Hooker, Canned Heat, and Robert Johnson.  Stopping at the Delta Blues Museum to see some of the original guitars, spangly outfits and hear more music.  Not the polished and high tech exhibits of the Civil Rights Museums to be sure - but so fun.

We drove on to Memphis and finished the day at Graceland.  This is quite a tour and although not our favorite part of the week it was interesting...and sad. Elvis had a lot of redeeming qualities and he was really young when he died (46).  The lavishness and excesses were in sharp contrast with everything else we had witnessed.

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 The next morning we finished up our trip by visiting the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel. This is actually the first of the civil rights museums and it is extremely well done. They have added on to the original motel and created some terrific exhibits. When you stand in the replica of the motel room where MLK stayed and hear his last words from the night before he died you are overwhelmed by his courage and his foresight that he would murdered.

The exhibits highlight the numerous court cases required to advance desegregation.

Several of the exhibits have the audio recordings - of JFK talking to Gov. Ross Barnett as he refused to admit James Meredith to Ole Miss and one of J. Edgar Hoover talking to Lyndon Johnson after they found the bodies of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner who were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The courage, determination and fortitude of the Freedom Riders who knew they might be giving up their lives for the movement is almost beyond comprehension.  We had read a lot about the training the students had received in non-violence - but when you see how the students at the sit-ins were tormented it is hard to believe they didn't react with violence.

vintage cars in front of the room where MLK was shot

a mural depicting the Sanitation workers in Memphis on MLK's last march

depiction of the lunch counter and sit -in

poster of the 3 missing men

Thank you for taking the time to read this blog.  If you are interested in taking a similar tour please feel free to contact me. 

And if you want to learn more about this incredible chapter in our country's history I highly recommend the long, but well written book The Children by David Halberstam. And the NPR series on Civil Rights which you can get on Audible.  We had all read Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, EJI Director and seen his TED Talk prior to the trip and I learned a few days before leaving that Jonathan's former law partner, Bill Newman, had been co-counsel with Bryan on a death row case.  We also read Heavy a modern memoir by Kiese Laymon, a Jackson native.  And now for a family plug I encourage you to check out my nephews' Henry and Jon Wiener's website, Bash Brothers Media for films and podcasts about Mississippi sports . Their Between the Pines films document the history of sports in Mississippi, laden with the Civil Rights movement.

As you have read we were all enormously affected by this trip and we are left with so many questions. How far have we come? How could people be so brutal? What is our responsibility? What can we do now to redress the grievances and to further the struggle for equality?

March 9-11 -  Jackson, Mississippi

We arrived in Jackson on Saturday night and enjoyed a real Southern dinner at the iconic Mayflower Restaurant in downtown with my brother Josh and sister-in-law Judy.  You really can't beat their soft shelled crabs.  So wonderful to be visiting my family with my friends.

my sister in law Judy Wiener in front of the Eudora Welty home

We started Sunday morning with a walk around their neighborhood - Belhaven.  Walking by Eudora Welty's home, Belhaven College and many beautiful homes.  This neighborhood is close to downtown and many of the residents joined with my family to try to preserve white students' participation in the Jackson Public Schools after white flight in the 70's created a number of "seg academies" in Jackson.  Josh and Judy worked through the organization Parents for Public Schools.  to educate folks about the strengths of the public schools, to bolster support for the schools and to add volunteers on parent-teacher organizations.  In our tour around Jackson we visited the magnet schools their kids attended for elementary and middle school as well as Murrah High School where they also attended.  Sadly the percentage of white students in these schools has dropped a lot since their children attended.

We moved on to the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum which recently opened.  This museum is PACKED with information and exhibits and of course focuses strongly on the movement in Mississippi.  In the middle of the museum there is a gigantic soft sculpture that looks like a flame. As you move through the exhibits you can view the sculpture and see it change color.  There were a number of black church groups there on the day we visited with lots of young children and watching them experience this museum was so interesting. i was actually concerned that some of the films could have been traumatizing for the young ones. There was also a sound track of the music of the Movement spirituals emanating from the light sculpture. There was almost too much information for us to absorb and luckily Judy told us we couldn't possibly read everything if we wanted to experience all eight galleries.

The next morning we were lucky to be included in a Smith College Civil Right tour that had an appointment to visit the Medgar Evers home in Jackson.  There had been a lot of info at the museum on Medgar Evers' leadership in the movement as well as his assassination in his driveway.  From the archivist of Tougaloo College we learned more about Evers and his wife Myrlie.  Evers was the first field secretary of the NAACP. The details about how they had built their modest home without a front door so that no one could come in that way to hurt them was chilling.  And their daily routine of all exiting the car through the passenger side and never having the porch light on as they entered through the side door from the carport was emblematic of their ever-present danger.

Our tour continued to the Smith Robertson School - the first school for black students.  Their graduates included Richard Wright who was valedictorian in 1925.. This is a little gem of a museum. The black and white photos were fabulous.

The museum had a section devoted to Medgar Evans as well as a dramatic corner:

3/9/19  Montgomery Day 2

Up early to start the day at the other half of the Equal Justice Initiative memorials.  The National Memorial for Peace and Memorial sits on a hill overlooking the city.  As many other visitors have said there are no words that can describe the impact of this extraordinary memorial.  The pictures below hopefully captures some of its impact.

The metal slabs display the names of the people who were lynched by county.

We returned to the downtown and went to the Southern Poverty Law Center‘s Civil Rights and Memorial Center where a famous granite table designed by Maya Lin graces the entrance.  It lists the names of 40 civil rights martyrs who died between 1954 and 1968 and presents a timeline of civil rights struggle.

We then drove to Selma to walk over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Having read so much about Bloody Sunday and the marches that followed we were anxious to be there. Again we were filled with emotion as we crested the hill imagining John Lewis facing the city police who bludgeoned him and the fellow marchers.

Civil Rights Tour - Montgomery, Alabama

3/9/19

After a stop in Clanton, Alabama for lunch we arrived in Montgomery and headed to the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church.  I’ve gotta say I’ve been to a lot of museums and gone on a lot of tours of buildings, churches and houses but I have never been welcomed by a big full body hug by the tour guides.  The two women who led us through the church were so full of love and talked about their work as a mission. We learned that King was recruited from Atlanta and began serving there at age 27.  To be standing in his study and then behind the lectern where he addressed the crowd after the march from Selma was thrilling and humbling.

 The tour guide pointed out how the light came through the windows and you could feel like you were in heaven.  We couldn’t resist being photographed there since it might be our only opportunity.

We zoomed over the Dexter Parsonage where the King family lived and joined a tour of young people who were part of a Christian ministry. At that time they had one child, Yolanda, who was 10 months old.  King received numerous death threats and one in particular filled him with fear because of his young child. The guide told the famous story of his sitting at the kitchen table in the middle of the night with a cup of coffee and had an epiphany. As the story goes an inner voice told a frustrated, bewildered and faltering King to stand up for righteousness, justice and truth and the Civil Rights Movement was born.Why does it seem so unbelievable to be looking at the turquoise melamite dishes and Formica kitchen table? And to see the carnations he sent his wife Corretta whenever he went away? After the tour we gathered 

behind the house and the tour guide asked to hold hands and sing I ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around. Oh my goodness. And then she asked someone to lead us in prayer. There was only a moment before a young woman launched into a prayer. The four of us went on to sit in the reflective garden where each bench had an inspirational word to contemplate: Equality, forgiveness, Hope, Unity, Peace and Understanding.

Most people would have been done because it was already 5 o’clock but it wasn’t too late to go to the Equal Justice Initiative Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. You are not able to take any pictures there but you can go to the website that I've linked to see more of the exhibits. There are no words to express the experience of this museum. Recently opened, it uses films, interactive videos, documents and photos to describe the brutality and enormity of the slave trade. The only parallel I could draw was my reaction to the Washington DC Holocaust Museum where you moved through the exhibits in tears and horror.  Similarly the descriptions of how slaves were treated, the separation of families, the beatings were often so intense that you weren’t sure you could go on.  There was an exhibit of jars of dirt...they collected the dirt where people were lynched- a simple but sacred task.  museum seamlessly moves from the history of slavery to the current situation of mass incarceration of black people. And the unbelievably horrible conditions in prisons throughout the South.  One exhibit has people on video screens and you pick up a phone as if you were visiting them there.  With minimal emotion they describe their own experiences in jail. As we watched the stories of incarceration for offenses that hardly seemed worthy of life in prison without chance of parole we had just heard of Paul Manafort’s light sentence and the disparity between the treatment of rich, white pejople and poor black people was again in current reality.  If you decide to come on your own Civil Rights tour this is the place you can’t miss.  We walked out, wrung out by the experience. 

Civil Rights Tour - Birmingham Alabama

3/7/19

Toby and Lina Tighe and Susan Zarchin agreed to join me on this exciting road trip to experience the museums and landmarks of the Civil Rights  Movement. We met in Birmingham, Alabama on Thursday and started our journey at SAW’s barbeque - an acronym for Sorry Ass
Wilson...our kind of place. Great pulled pork, ribs, chicken and sides

We were anxious to see Birmingham so went to the historic district at night and walked through the Kelly Ingram Park right across from the 16th Street Baptist Church where the 4 girls were killed in the bomb blast set off by Ku Klux Klansman in 1963.  There was no one else around and we were immediately immersed in the brutality of the events and the courage of the congregants led by their Pastor, Rev. Shuttlesworth. The park has a series of statues honoring the girls and displaying the
vicious acts of Bull Connor and his policemen - the water cannons, the dogs, the shouting mobs.  At night the church was

illuminated and the dramatic statue of MLK shines brightly. We were struck by how clean and beautiful the city was...but so empty at night. We drove around looking for some nightlife and there was a beautiful restored theater (the Lyric) but not a lot of evidence of folks in the downtown.

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Returned to the same corner on Friday morning and walked around the 4th Avenue historic district. This area had been designated as the black business district around the turn of the century due to Jim Crow laws. There is some commerce but a lot of empty buildings.  Fabulous markers throughout the district describing each building and its history. We were especially delighted to find the sculpture park dedicated to the Temptations. you wont be surprised that I needed to dance with them

We proceeded to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute a welcoming, beautiful building with multi-media exhibits detailing all of th events of the movement in Birmingham. Our hearts opened further as we studied the photos, films, models of the buses, jail cells, and the quotes from MLK and other leaders, poets, politicians.

• We were moved to tears again by MLK at the March on Washington.