Preservation

As people have begun to enlighten themselves more about the civil rights movement, at some point I almost always hear them say, “I was surprised at how recent everything was. Stuff we were taught in history just happened last century.”

I am no exception.

But as I read various memoirs, flip through the age-tinted pages of books, and watch documentaries, I cannot help but wonder what it is all for. I wander through memorials and museums, but merely a spectacle does not give me a purpose to ponder on memorials instead of art galleries, whose sole purpose is to brandish aesthetic beauty.

Accessible written accounts like While the World Watched or Buses Are a Comin’, and other aspects like geography literally ground the story. Person accounted being threatened by white supremacists, “You’ve made it fine until Georgia, but you’re in Alabama now.” The Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial in Atlanta was intentionally placed between the church he attended and his home. Though they seem trivial, the accumulation of these details depicts a timeline that demythologizes the civil rights progression. Every single one recorded adds to the validity of a story, in the same way that the four gospels verify the story of Jesus through different accounts with unique omissions.

“Demythologizing…trying to create a more human picture,” said Anthony “Tony” Grooms, amongst a room of amazing testimonies and authors, such as Charles Person, Glenn Eskew, Ebony Glenn, and TM Garret. “Un-ghosting” was another colloquial term used by the speakers. These creators make these unbelievable stories of courage and tragedy the realism by providing all the other of facets that we would not see in a headline.

As “agents of civil rights” (as Nathan phrased it), preserving these stories does not mean learning the history textbook synopsis. It means reading every tile, peering into the windows we can, and shaking the hands callused with memories of all kinds of hardships. Immersing ourselves in the legacies in hopes of preserving it can create a tangible story rather than an old legend with no effect on the present.

Jon Sison

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