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.
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.
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