The South II: Selma and the Tuskegee Airmen

We inspected a lot of monuments, as we visited Selma and Tuskegee, Alabama, on April 15, 2022.  The rock David is standing next to was at the Civil Rights Memorial Park.  It had an inscription from a Martin Luther King speech. 

So many places, in Alabama, celebrate the progress that has been made by black Americans.  Still,  there is so far to go.  This ranger at the Selma Interpretive Center, run by the National Park Service, told us that he won't go to some parts of Selma at night, as a single black man.  He also remembers taking refuge in an abandoned bus, with several other homeless people, at one point in his life, and being beaten and imprisoned by the police.  

Selma was the focus of the Civil Rights voting rights campaign during 1965.  To protest their exclusion from elections, the blacks in Selma planned a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.  

On Bloody Sunday, in March 1965, the march was blocked by policemen, who beat, arrested, and disbursed the marchers.

The protesters later staged another successful march, all the way from Selma to the State Capitol in Montgomery.  Dave and I drove that highway, through the green fields of rural Alabama.

The sign on the outskirts of Selma describes it as the "queen city of the black belt."  

This marker at the Civil Rights Memorial Park proclaims, "Never Forget, Never Again."  The Edmund Pettus Bridge was named to honor a Ku Klux Klan leader.

One of the organizers of the Selma march was John Lewis, who recently died, after dozens of years as a U.S. Congressman.

The park also honored lesser-known figures, such as these women, Amelia Boynton and Marie Foster, hailed as "Mothers of the Civil Rights Movement, Before and Beyond the Bridge."

Another marker described, in disturbing detail, lynchings which occurred in Selma between 1892 and 1935.

We stopped at Selma's National Voting Rights Museum, with many displays about the discrimination black people faced.  These are signs which were posted around the South before desegregation.

The museum included this collage on the campaign of George Wallace for U.S. president.  Wallace was a segregationist Alabama governor who fought ferociously against blacks receiving equal rights. 

We studied the many photographs of the Selma-Montgomery march in 1965.  The march was one impetus for Lyndon Johnson pushing the Voting Rights Act through Congress.

After leaving Selma, Dave and I drove to the airfield where the Tuskegee Airmen learned to fly.  The Tuskegee Airmen were a group of black pilots who served with distinction as "Redtails" during WWII.  Their planes escorted bombers on raids deep into Germany.  

We then drove into Tuskegee, where Booker T. Washington was the long-time president of the Tuskegee Institute, one of the first and foremost black universities.  Washington was an inventor of products made from peanuts, as well as a college administrator.  He lived in this home.

This campus building is named "Carnegie Hall," after Andrew Carnegie, whose foundation was one of the major donors to the Tuskegee Institute.

This statue symbolizes Booker T. Washington helping to disclose the greatness of black students.

The Tuskegee Institute had an impressive campus and an impressive mission.