…well, sort of anyway.
First, a brief summary…
Today, the halfway point of the trip, we started out with a Montgomery home and church blitz of sorts. These stops included the Carr home, the Dexter Parsonage, the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, the Holt Street Baptist Church, and the First Baptist Church where Ralph Abernathy was the pastor and where the First Baptist Church siege took place in response to the Freedom Riders.
 First Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL |
 Outside the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, AL |
 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church |
From there we proceeded to the Rosa Parks Museum and then on to Birmingham to visit the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. There was a lot to take in between the two of these stops; the Institute especially contained an abundance of knowledge and fascinating exhibits. Right next door was the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church where Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley lost their lives when the church was bombed by a member of the Klan.
Some thoughts and Reflections…
A few years ago I took a racial reconciliation “class” with Winston Seegobin and Evie Telfer. I put the “class” part in quotes because it wasn’t so much a class as it wound up being more of a place for discussion and healing. The emotions in these sessions got fairly raw at some points but also forced the various members of the group to move past the normal questions and observations and onto another level where healing and genuine care and reconciliation began to take place. It is encouraging for me to see similar things happening on this trip amongst the members of our group. Many of the questions and thoughts being posed are not easy and are downright frustrating. But the fact that we are considering and facing things that we never have before on a personal level is where it begins…never easy and often painful, but anything worth going after usually is.
Some of these reflections have involved considering what situation we might be in if we were making this tour during the heat of the Movement, as well as what those of us who were alive remember and experienced during this time period. There are a few different people on the trip who have this experience and it has been thrilling and hard for me to listen to the stories and thoughts that have been related to me. The emotions involved with recalling these experiences are not always pleasant regardless of who tells the story.
For those of us who don’t have the memories, there are a number of scenarios and thoughts. It occurred to me for the first time today that I would not have come into existence due to the fact that even if my half-black father had married my white mother there is no telling what could have happened. It is a virtual guarantee that it would not have gone over well though. Just reinforces the facts that God is good and faithful.
My last thought concerns the mindset of things. Yesterday while at the National Voting Rights Museum & Institute in Selma, I observed an exhibit about churches and their involvement. I was scanning over it preparing to keep moving when the words “Springfield, Massachusetts” caught my eye…my home area. It was in a section talking about churches that had been bombed or torched. I was surprised and disturbed to see that in 2008, just after Barack Obama was elected president, the predominantly African-American church had been torched. The church has since received support and as of the end of April 2011 was nearing completion.
Obviously we know this sort of thing happened during the Movement when these unfortunately were frequent occurrences and the racism and prejudice were blatant. But the common thinking, the comfortable thinking that myself and my fellow tour members are getting away from, is that everything is all better now. We don’t really have those problems; we even have a black president so we can move on to something else. But sadly the mindset of some have not changed as is evidenced by such events as those in Springfield and by many others that we are not even aware of.
And that has brought us to the point where we are now, halfway through our trip with many, if not all, chewing on the question of how do you go about changing the hearts and minds of individuals who are not even aware that our schools and neighborhoods still have work to do?