The South I: Birmingham and Montgomery

During January of 2022, Camille took Sophie, Ezra, and Mia on a three-week Civil Rights tour of the South, from the lunch counter in Greenville, North Carolina, where desegregation of restaurants began, to the Mississippi Delta, where voting rights battles were fought.  On April 14, 15, and 16, 2022, Dave and I followed Camille's example in traveling through Alabama. 
 

We toured the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where three little black girls were murdered by a bomb blast in 1963.  The church was targeted because it had been a gathering place for civil rights activists.

Martin Luther King spoke from this pulpit, during the Civil Rights years.

The stained glass window behind the pews, with Christ's portrait, was damaged by the bomb blast.  The window was later replaced.

We walked outside to see the window into the basement, where the four little girls were waiting in the restroom, preparing to go upstairs to church, when the bomb killed them.

A plaque on the Church pled, "Be ye reconciled one to another."

We also visited the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.  

The Institute included a timeline of Civil Rights events between the 1940s and 1968 that ran around the museum, with displays that portrayed events from the timeline.  It began with displays of black and white living standards before the Civil Rights era and  finished in a room with a wall-sized screen in which Martin Luther King gave his speech from the March on Washington.  

There were chilling displays about the Klu Klux Klan, which staged lynchings and cross burnings throughout Alabama.

One display showed a heavily armored police car used in demonstrations.

The museum shop sold African-inspired crafts, such as the beaded bracelet this clerk wears.  I bought several table runners with African prints.

These girls are authors and performed at a book reading at the museum.

At the end of each day in Alabama, we found good Southern food.  Some of the best food was at sports bars.

In Montgomery, Alabama, we visited the spectacular Legacy Museum.  It was "darker" than the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, with displays emphasizing the harrowing, all-encompassing aspects of slavery and barely mentioning white attempts to alleviate the blacks' plight.

The entrance to the museum was through a room with a screen showing only crashing waves and an empty horizon--the view that slaves might have seen after they left Africa.  The room above followed.  It appeared that we were walking beneath the sea and could see the heads of all the Africans who were lost there, never reaching America.

There were also holograms of slaves whispering their stories from within the slave pens--children crying for their parents, husbands and wives agonizing over being torn apart.

And there was a display showing the dozens and even hundreds of blacks who had participated in the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

During our evening in Montgomery, we found excellent food in the restored industrial area.  Again, it was a sports bar serving ribs, baked beans, and mac'n'cheese.