Driving Miss Daisy

Remember my somewhat mixed feelings about the Confederate Cemetery in Chattanooga?  After spending a little time in Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery on my own self-guided civil rights tour, any sympathy I might have had, any effort to understand the other guy's point of view, has gone away.

Fortunately I was just leaving church Sunday morning in Chattanooga when an e-mail popped up from my friend Ken.  He told me I couldn't leave Chattanooga without going to the Chickamauga Civil War battlefield.  Then I saw a sign for it on the interstate and decided I couldn't fight fate any longer.  I swung through southern Chattanooga, which is technically northern Georgia, and found it.

The Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park was established by Congress in 1890 for the purpose of "preserving and suitably marking, for historical and professional military study, the fields of some of the most remarkable maneuvers and most brilliant fighting in the War of Rebellion."  This was the first such Military Park, predating Gettysburg by some five years.

The Battle of Chickamauga was hugely important in the Civil War, and may be a classic example of "win the battle and lose the war."  After some of the bloodiest fighting of that terribly bloody war, the South won, but failed to capitalize on its victory and allowed the North to retain control of Chattanooga - which Sherman later used as a supply base for his March to the Sea.  I'm not a military history buff, but the interpretive center does a great job of helping you understand the strategies that were used and the importance of the battle.  The park itself is immense, with many markers commemorating both Union and Confederate companies.  A number of them, of course, were from Indiana.

You could easily spend most of a day here, but I didn't since I wanted to get to Birmingham in time to see a couple of museums.

Before I get into what I saw in Birmingham, one thing I neglected to mention in my fawning review of the National Museum of the USAF, is that a part of their Holocaust exhibit includes a timeline of human rights in the 20th century.  The curator included a wide range of items, including labor rights and eugenics, and I liked how s/he linked all these together.  In Alabama, "civil rights" is more of a black-and-white term - and you can take that phrase however you want to.

But there is a little Native American history.  For instance, behind the Bi-Lo grocery store in Rossville, Georgia, is the two-story log cabin home of John Ross, Great Chief of the Cherokees (1790-1866). Ross was only one-eighth Cherokee but was elected Principal Chief and served the Cherokee Nation for forty years in that capacity. Ross was on the forced relocation march known as the Trail of Tears, during which he lost his wife.

I arrived in Birmingham mid-afternoon and went straight to the 16th Street Baptist Church.  On September 15, 1963, about three weeks before I was born, three Ku Klux Klansmen set off dynamite, killing four little girls and injuring 22 others.  Bombings were not a new way of terrorizing the black community - they were so common in the city that it was sometimes called "Bombingham" - but this event was so outrageous that the world took notice.  (The world took notice, but not so much local leaders - although 8,000 people attended their funerals, there were no city officials among the mourners.)

The monument in their honor is very understated and takes a minute to find.  On one side is a scriptural verse to the effect that retribution is not the appropriate response.  The other side is simple:

The church is right across the street from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (you can see it on the right in the background behind the picture of the monument).

The tour starts with a movie about Birmingham from 1871 to 1921.  Interesting thing about Birmingham - it was created, more or less, out of whole cloth.  The railroads crossed there and some people said, "Hey, let's build us a town."  Birmingham is known as the Magic City, which I guess is a way of describing how this community (it's the 50th largest metro area in the U.S.) developed pretty quickly.  Of course, given the willingness of the city fathers to use a wide variety of creative, brutal and effective segregationist and union-busting tactics which resulted in Birmingham having the lowest labor costs in the nation during this period, it doesn't seem so magical at all.

On the 50th anniversary of the city's founding, President Warren G. Harding arrived to congratulate the good people of Birmingham.  He also called for racial equality - the first American President to do so in a speech in the south. Only part of the crowd applauded.

It's hard to completely fathom all of this.  For instance, in 1963 Birmingham changed its form of government from a commission to a mayor/council.  This had been studied and planned since the mid-1950's, but Bull Connor (you've heard of Bull Connor - he's the guy with the firehoses) viewed it as a threat to his power.  On April 2, 1963, Albert Boutwell was elected Mayor along with a new City Council.  Connor refused to leave office (he was a Commissioner) and until May 23 there were two operating city governments.  It was like a coup in reverse.

Or in Selma, in 1964 a state judge issued a court order prohibiting more than three people from congregating in Dallas County.  True dat.  Check out the First Amendment if you've got a minute, and get back to me.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (and, I would say cynically but confidently, white flight from a landlocked Birmingham) has had some impact.  In 1979 Richard Arrington, Jr., was elected Mayor of the city, the first African-American to hold the office.  He served five terms, until 1999.  There is a boulevard by Vulcan Park named for him.

Side trip to Vulcan Park:

Set on a big hill, this is a combination city park, local museum, observation tower (see the deck in the picture above) and gigantic monument to the industrial age.  You get a great view of the city, but the height is a bit much for me so I didn't stay long up there.

Operated as it is by city government, the Vulcan Museum is a little less, um, stinging in its description of the city's history than the Civil Rights Institute.  They do mention that the city was very, very badly hit during the Depression since it was so dependent upon relatively new industry, with something like 90% unemployment among industrial workers.  Yes, you read that correctly.  That still wasn't enough to make local business leaders support the New Deal:  their anti-unionism was stronger than their recognition that workers with incomes will buy more than those out of work.  Still, most of Vulcan Park was built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) so I guess someone got over it, at least a little.

I took a break from history and had dinner with my friend Diane who has lived in Birmingham about five years.  She likes it - good weather, and it's a really pretty city.  My other friend, Leslie, was in New York visiting relatives and craving winter.  Yeah, I worry a little about Leslie, but everyone has their own minor craziness.  Diane sent me on my way Monday morning with apples, berries, cheese, granola bars....more food than I typically had in my entire frig this summer.

And so, well-stocked, I headed south from Birmingham to Selma.  During this leg of the trip, I hit 10,000 miles which is obviously something of a milestone so I celebrated with a few minutes of Facebooking in the parking lot of the Valley Grande, Alabama, City Hall and Public Safety Building.

Downtown Selma is interesting.  The streets are very, very wide, and some of the old buildings are renovated.  I parked by the PNC Bank which somehow made me feel like home.  (My definition of "home" lately is really weird, but that is a topic for another time - if at all.)  I walked across the Edmund Pettus bridge, which crosses the Alabama River, and went to the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute.

In case you were wondering, as I was:  Edmund Pettus was a Civil War general and a Senator from Alabama (1897-1907).  He practiced law in Selma before being elected to the Senate.  The bridge was built in 1940 and is 250 feet long.

Of course, the real historical significance of the Edmund Pettus Bridge is that it is where Sheriff Jim Clark and a bunch of Alabama state troopers engaged in what might politely be described as a police riot when a bunch of black people wanted to march the 54 miles from the Brown Chapel church to the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery in order to petition their government for voting rights and make a point that they were tired of being denied said rights, with the proximate cause of the march being the killing of a young black man named Jimmie Lee Jackson by a white policeman during a nonviolent civil rights demonstration. 

The state troopers drove the marchers back across the bridge and all the way back to the church, which is a little over a mile.  March 7, 1965, is known as "Bloody Sunday" because of the beatings and violence that the marchers received at the hands of the police.  A second unsuccessful attempt at crossing the bridge came on Tuesday, March 9 and included a large number of clergy, many of whom travelled from across the country to participate.  It was on this day that a Unitarian Universalist minister from Massachussetts, James Reeb, was beaten to death by white supremacists. He was survived by his wife and four children.  Later, on March 21, under the sullen protection of Alabama National Guardsmen federalized for this purpose by President Johnson, several hundred people followed Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and began the march to Montgomery.  By the time they arrived at the State Capitol, the group had grown to 25,000.  Governor Wallace stayed in his office and refused to meet with them.

These events are widely credited as giving President Johnson and the non-racists in Congress the political leverage to pass the Voting Rights Act despite the continued opposition of powerful southern Senators and Congressmen.

On Highway 80, along the path of the march, there is a very good interpretive center operated by the National Parks Service.  (As an aside, I am really impressed with the many NPS centers I've encountered during the Driveabout.)  The Lowndes County Interpretive Center describes a lot of the history that I'd seen elsewhere, but goes into more detail about the conditions in this very rural county halfway between Selma and Montgomery.  Rural and, it seems, feudal.  The industrialists in Birmingham used a combination of racial prejudice and state-sanctioned violence as a way of achieving their economic power.  The 86 white families that owned 90% of the land in Lowndes County added control of property to the mix, with the result being that at the beginning of 1965, there were no black residents of the county registered to vote.  Black tenant farmers and sharecroppers were entirely dependent upon the goodwill, if that word may be properly used here, of the white landowners who would evict you from your home if you registered to vote or took any other such radical step.  Since your home comprised your livelihood, even if it didn't have running water or heat, that was quite a risk.  And if that threat was too subtle, there was the knowledge that white people had carte blanche (no pun intended) to injure or kill a black person with no threat of punishment.

When the civil rights marchers came through Lowndes County, many of the county's black residents were afraid even to wave at them for fear of retribution.  And that fear was not unfounded.  After passage of the Voting Rights Act in the summer of 1965, a number of families were evicted when they registered to vote.  The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) raised money to purchase six acres for a tent city so that families would have a place to live.  The interpretive center is now on this land.

While in Selma, I walked over to see the Dallas County Courthouse which had been featured in several pictures at the Voting Rights Museum.  Before they marched to Montgomery, black citizens had unsuccessfully tried to register to vote in this building, and often had been arrested by Sheriff Clark.  Just across the street there's a marble monument to the first U.S. Naval officer killed in World War I who was from Selma.  The monument was erected long enough ago that they called it "The War With Germany" rather than "WWI" so I assume it is circa 1920.  Without irony, the monument states "He gave his life that democracy and liberty might live."  Perhaps there wasn't room on the monument for the modifiers that would have made the statement more accurate, or perhaps Sheriff Clark had never read it.

Several places there are references to "foot soldiers," ordinary people who participated in the marches and other civil rights protests.  Most of these foot soldiers were black, but perhaps because she was a Unitarian white woman, I've always been moved by the story of Viola Liuzzo.
Viola was a mother of five who left her home in Detroit to join the marchers.  She was shot and killed by a white man on March 25 while driving with a black man back to Selma. 

All this sacrifice made a difference.  In 1940, less than one-half of one percent of voting age blacks in Alabama and Mississippi were registered to vote.  In 1984 (the latest they had in the Voting Rights Museum exhibit) it was 74% and 77%, respectively.  The greatest increase in registration occurred between the Presidential elections of 1964 (prior to the Act) and 1968 (the first Presidential election after).  Alabama went from 23% to 56.7% and Mississippi went from 6.7% (yes, that is correct - six point seven percent) to 54%.

I was going to pass on the Old Depot Museum, which is the Selma/Dallas County museum, but fortunately decided not to.  As I walked in I met Beth Spivey, their new director of three days - the previous director had a stroke, so Beth has jumped in to get things organized.  There is a lot of material here, both inside and out, so Beth has a big job ahead of her.  Here's an old cotton scale:

They have a small exhibit about women's suffrage with a picture of Harriet Hooker Wilkins of Selma, the first (white) woman in Alabama to be elected to the legislature.

Beth proudly showed me a large collection of photographs of sharecroppers from the late 1800's and early in the twentieth century, taken by Selma native Mary Morgan Keipp.  The pictures provide a window into the past that is very interesting and moving.

By far the coolest thing at the museum is the treatment log from the hospital in Selma on Bloody Sunday.  This is very un-HIPAA, but hey, it's history.

Here is one of the entries enlarged.  Take a minute to read it.

Name: Robert Landford

Complaint: Difficulty breathing

How happened: In March Tear gassed

Seeing that book just made me shiver.  Artifacts can make history come alive in a way that's hard to explain, and that log did it for me.

Beth has big plans for the museum and I wish her the best in making them happen.

When I arrived in Montgomery I drove along what I thought might have been the path of the marchers to the State Capitol.  It's a beautiful and impressive building - set on the top of a hill and it gleams in the sun.  Under the right set of conditions, I can see how it might be intimidating, too.

To be complete, let me give you a picture of the Brown Chapel AME Church, which is where the Selma to Montgomery March began.  That way you'll have both ends of the journey.

In front of both buildings there is a monument about the march.  You can see the one in front of the church in the picture.  The one in front of the State Capitol is more of a historic marker, but it's there.

In Montgomery (Cradle of the Confederacy) I visited the Rosa Parks Museum which is operated by Troy University.  Their focus is very specifically on December 1, 1955 - the night that Mrs. Parks refused to give up her seat - and on the year-long bus boycott, which ended with the Supreme Court ordering the integration of buses.  The original demands of the protestors were ridiculously modest from our perspective in 2013 (or even 1973):  treat passengers with respect, keep blacks and whites separated but let seating be first-come first-served so that already seated black patrons wouldn't be required to give up their seats for whites, and hire some black drivers for the routes in black neighborhoods.  They made a point of saying that they weren't opposing segregation - this was 1955, after all.  But the city and the bus company wouldn't hear of such a thing, and ended up with integrated buses. 

This was the seminal event of the modern civil rights movement, and the museum uses multi-media pretty effectively to give you a sense of what it was like to be there.  I would recommend it both for adults and for children.

After all this powerful history, I had a bite to eat at Chris' Hot Dogs, the oldest restaurant in Montgomery, operating from the same location since 1917.  Their hotdogs are topped with chili, mustard and sauerkraut (I had mine without onions).  They're not Coney Island dogs, but they're still good - I loved the combination of sauerkraut with the chili.  And I felt very virtuous since I had chicken vegetable soup rather than fries or onion rings.

When he was ringing me up, the third generation owner Gus (he looks to be about 30, plus or minus) said that Chris was his grandfather and that President (Franklin) Roosevelt came in once.  After that he'd have hotdogs sent out to the train when he would be on his way through town.  Truman did the same, and Elvis would order a bunch whenever he was in Montgomery.  Hank Williams, a Montgomery native son, ate here a lot.  So did Governor George Wallace and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Everybody likes coney dogs.

It's interesting to hear young white Alabamians talk about segregation.  It is part of the history, and by acknowledging it I don't take it that they agree.  It's just that I'm not used to hearing the topic being discussed as recent history, the way you might say "there was a building over there before they built the new highway."  For instance, in showing me the hospital log Beth said "we have the log from the black hospital."  Of course it was the black hospital - the protesters would have been refused treatment at the white hospital.  And Gus said that when Rev. King and Rosa Parks would come to Chris' to eat, they had to eat at a separate area "because of the segregation law."  There's a long history of racial inequality in the midwest, but most of it wasn't structural and legal.  I guess that's the part that I find the hardest to wrap my arms around.

So that's my Song of the South.  I'm still processing it all, truly.  There are a bunch of things rolling around in my brain:  reconciliation, justice, forgiveness, progress, economics, morality, how a society moves on from such evil...it's going to take a while before anything coherent develops, if it ever does.  In the meantime, tomorrow I'm headed for the Gulf Coast for some sun and fun and thinking about nothing more serious than what's for dinner.