-Jack Selzer
One of the most striking things that I learned on our trip concerns the variety of the South. Each community seems to have a unique civil rights history. The three places we visited in Alabama show what I mean.
Montgomery, to me, was all about the juxtaposition between the Civil War and the civil rights movement. 1860s and 1960s right next to each other; Rosa Parks Avenue intersecting with Jefferson Davis. Right around the state capitol you have The White House of the Confederacy, and three short blocks away is Dr King's first pastorate, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church; at the bottom of the hill you have the bus stop where Rosa Parks refused to move to the back and got arrested, and right down the street was the location of the slave auctions; from there you can look up the hill to where George Wallace gave his inaugural address ("segregation today, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!") and where Martin Luther King, Jr gave his speech at the end of the march from Selma to Montgomery. As Mr Randall Williams gave us a tour of the city, we saw those juxtapositions repeated again and again.
When we got to Selma, it was a completely different scene. Selma seems stuck where it was in 1965. The downtown looks the same; the Edmund Pettus bridge looks the same; the city is still divided into the black section (east) and the white section (west); and even attitudes seem rooted in the past. The town still seems committed to de facto segregation--the public high school is 99% black and the private high school is 99% white; Nathan Bedford Forrest is still honored with a monument in the all-white cemetery even though he started the Klan, and Brown Chapel still stands proudly as a foundation of the black community. And there are signs of poverty everywhere: 42% of the citizens are under the poverty level, we learned. No wonder: what company wants to operate in a city devoted to segregation?
Birmingham was different too. The city was built after the Civil War (it was a creating of new processes for making steel), so it had a definite working class feel. Yes, it was the site of the fiercest civil rights confrontation of 1963, but the city is not resisting segregation so mightily, to judge by its physical spaces. No Civil War monuments here, just a substantial section devoted to honoring the civil rights movement, including the monuments in Kelly Ingram Park, the excellent Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, and the 16th Street Baptist Church nearby, where three little girls were murdered in 1963. And of course Birmingham is physically very different from the other two cities as well--much larger, much more industrial, more vital economically. The racial divide is still apparent when you look at the schools and neighborhoods, yes, but it is nevertheless its own unique civil rights space.
One of the most striking things that I learned on our trip concerns the variety of the South. Each community seems to have a unique civil rights history. The three places we visited in Alabama show what I mean.
Montgomery, to me, was all about the juxtaposition between the Civil War and the civil rights movement. 1860s and 1960s right next to each other; Rosa Parks Avenue intersecting with Jefferson Davis. Right around the state capitol you have The White House of the Confederacy, and three short blocks away is Dr King's first pastorate, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church; at the bottom of the hill you have the bus stop where Rosa Parks refused to move to the back and got arrested, and right down the street was the location of the slave auctions; from there you can look up the hill to where George Wallace gave his inaugural address ("segregation today, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!") and where Martin Luther King, Jr gave his speech at the end of the march from Selma to Montgomery. As Mr Randall Williams gave us a tour of the city, we saw those juxtapositions repeated again and again.
When we got to Selma, it was a completely different scene. Selma seems stuck where it was in 1965. The downtown looks the same; the Edmund Pettus bridge looks the same; the city is still divided into the black section (east) and the white section (west); and even attitudes seem rooted in the past. The town still seems committed to de facto segregation--the public high school is 99% black and the private high school is 99% white; Nathan Bedford Forrest is still honored with a monument in the all-white cemetery even though he started the Klan, and Brown Chapel still stands proudly as a foundation of the black community. And there are signs of poverty everywhere: 42% of the citizens are under the poverty level, we learned. No wonder: what company wants to operate in a city devoted to segregation?
Birmingham was different too. The city was built after the Civil War (it was a creating of new processes for making steel), so it had a definite working class feel. Yes, it was the site of the fiercest civil rights confrontation of 1963, but the city is not resisting segregation so mightily, to judge by its physical spaces. No Civil War monuments here, just a substantial section devoted to honoring the civil rights movement, including the monuments in Kelly Ingram Park, the excellent Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, and the 16th Street Baptist Church nearby, where three little girls were murdered in 1963. And of course Birmingham is physically very different from the other two cities as well--much larger, much more industrial, more vital economically. The racial divide is still apparent when you look at the schools and neighborhoods, yes, but it is nevertheless its own unique civil rights space.