Our road trip was about more than wildlife - I'm interested in human animals too! A couple of years ago we were in the Henry Ford museum in Detroit, Michigan in which the bus that Civil Rights Activist, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat is exhibited. I knew something of her story, but we decided to make Montgomery, Alabama, where the events took place part of our trip.
It was an interesting journey in itself from Mississippi, through small towns, along highways and state roads rather than on bland interstate highways. Travelling like this we began to get a sense of an America that was unfamiliar from previous trips to cosmopolitan, northern cities or laid back California.
Here we passed farms, big and small. Enormous agricultural equipment, run-down houses, vast mansions, confederate flags and Trump yard signs combined to remind us how polarisation of economic, social and political perspectives and inequalities dominate the cultural landscape of twenty-first century USA - as well as the UK and much of Europe. Arriving in Montgomery, we found our way to our hotel - a pleasant Marriott constructed out of three historical buildings right in downtown Montgomery.
opened in April 2018. I knew that it was a museum about the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade but I was entirely unprepared for the profoundly moving experience that the museum represents. It takes the whole sweep of the history of the Black experience in the US over the past 400 years and divides it into four eras: enslavement, racial terror, segregation and the era which we're in now - mass incarceration.
The museum is one of several Legacy Sites in Montgomery, created by the Equal Justice Initiative, a law practice set up by Bryan Stevenson to represent those who have limited access to legal representation in the criminal justice system, the vast majority of whom are black.
There is so much that I am still processing and will continue to learn and process from this experience. I left feeling like I had only scratched the surface, but in that time, had my entire worldview re-orientated to a previously unknown perspective. It was a similar feeling to the one I had after studying at the Holocaust Memorial in Yad Vashem - something like profound horror mixed with deep sorrow, and a determination not to let this be the last time I ever thought or spoke about the issues raised.
The museum is not just a history of the experience of slavery and civil rights, although both of those things are covered. The Equal Justice Initiative's contention is that slavery was not abolished, no matter what the 13th Amendment to the constitution says. Rather than being abolished, it has simply evolved across the years since then, based on the perverted and pervasive view that a black human is somehow "less than" a white human. Racism takes different forms in the 21st century and different forms in the UK from the US - but it has certainly not gone away.
The website has brilliant articles and images on it, but the summary of the story is in this really helpful video.
There's far too much for one blog post - and this is something that I want to follow up with but here are three
(from many) shifts in perspective that the museum helped me to make:
- the Atlantic ocean, that we had crossed by sea to get to the US is a mass grave for approximately 2 million Africans, ripped from their homes and communities and forced onto ships for six weeks of hellish conditions where their destination was forced labour and, often, cruelty. I have been reading the Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent book, Tarry Awhile by Selina Stone . In it she reflects on the experience of forced movement for Black people and had this to say about the sea:
- that lovely hotel we were staying in made from three historical buildings? One was the house of a wealthy family and the others next door were their warehouses - containing slave pens. The historical sign outside the house which is now an upmarket restaurant neglects to mention this but I slept less comfortably that night. The Legacy museum puts an emphasis on the importance of place. Montgomery was the place of one of the largest domestic slave markets in the South. It occupies the site of a After the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, the domestic slave trade exploded and the enslaved population of Alabama rose exponentially. Whereas I had previously been focussed on the horror of the slave ships crossing the Atlantic, it was the domestic slave trade which persisted until 1865 and which was no respecter of familial ties, that traumatised the black population even further.
- 1 in 3 black male babies born in the US today will be imprisoned during their lives. I thought of my son and his mates. Tens of thousands of young men like them are incarcerated - some of them in bonded labour - with little hope of a life not blighted by injustice, poverty and crime. It's not just a US problem. Here in the UK, in January 2024, Gavin Stephens, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) accepted that police forces in the UK were still institutionally racist and too little progress had been made towards reducing disproportionate outcomes for black and other minority ethnic people in the UK. (Article here)
