Recently, my wife and I spent the weekend in Montgomery, Alabama. The impetus to select Montgomery as a destination grew from us watching the Ken Burns documentary on County Music. One of the episodes featured Hank Williams, and we decided to visit the Hank Williams Museum in Montgomery. It was a most interesting and fascinating experience and reinforced the creative genius that Hank Williams possessed. The number of songs that he wrote, produced and sung are legion and the title of the documentary’s episode was the Hillbilly Shakespeare”. How true. Hank Williams lived a rather tormented life and many of his songs reflect on the many personal tragedies and challenges that he tried to live through but succumbed in the back seat of his 1952 powder blue Cadillac convertible at the every so young age of 29. It is fitting that he died in West Virginia on his way to a performance in Canton, Ohio. One wonders what he might have continued to produce had he lived longer, but it was not meant to be.
While in Montgomery on a damp, raining afternoon, we also visited The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. It is a national memorial to commemorate the victims of lynching in the United States. The intended purpose of the Memorial is to acknowledge past racial terrorism and advocate for social justice throughout the country. A project of the Equal Justice Initiative, it opened in April 2018. Located in a raised area of the Memorial is the memorial square where there are 805 hanging steel rectangles, the size and shape of coffins. On each of the hanging coffins are the engraved name(s), county and state where a documented lynching took place. Almost 5000 documented lynching’s of African Americans took place between 1877 and 1950, primarily in 12 Southern states. Within the same building is a wall with water continuously flowing over it that represents those who have been lynched, but whose names are not known.
Laid in rows on the ground are steel columns corresponding to those hanging in the Memorial. These columns are organized by state and the counties in each state where a lynching took place. The names of those lynched are, likewise, engraved on the coffins. Additionally, throughout the grounds are sculptures depicting the dehumanizing struggles that African Americans endured throughout the southern states during the latter part of the 1800’s and the first 50 years of the 1900’s. It is my belief, that no one can walk through and observe what lies before you without being profoundly moved by the experience. My wife captured the essence of the experience by referring to it as, sobering. Indeed, it was very sobering and an experience not to be forgotten.
Later that day we took the shuttle to The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. The Museum is located on the site of a former warehouse where black people were enslaved in Montgomery. Its location is one block from one of the most prominent slave auction spaces in America and steps away from an Alabama dock and rail station where tens of thousands of black people were trafficked during the 19th century. The intended goal is to lead those who visit the museum on the path from slavery to racial oppression in other forms, including lynching and mass incarceration of minorities. There are multiple photographs, videos, interactive displays and sculptures which, in a very cogent way, depict the sordid history of the treatment of African Americans in this country. One display contains jar after jar of soil collected from the ground beneath where a human being was lunched. Spending the afternoon at the Memorial and the Museum, brought back a memory in my life from my days in high school. In August of 1955 a young black adolescent left Chicago to visit relatives in Mississippi and never returned to Chicago. He was severely beaten, shot, mutilated, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River where his remains were found days later. His crime was that he, allegedly, whistled at a young white woman. Just a few years ago the woman recanted on her accusation that led to Emmett’s death. Emmet’s cousin was a year behind me at the high school we both attended and in his adult life has been a champion for racial justice.
As noted earlier, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) was the organization that was the catalyst for the development of the Memorial and the Museum. The founder of the EJI, is also the author of the book, Just Mercy, which focuses on his efforts to free wrongly convicted men on death row in Alabama and was featured in the movie by the same title, Just Mercy. The book and the movie are extremely compelling and riveting and highlight the scars of racial injustice in this country. There have been any number of examples of actions taken by prosecutors to secure convictions, at any cost, which has led to the conviction of an innocent person. It has been estimated that at a minimum, 1 in 5, death penalty convictions have been wrong. Fortunately, there are now DNA tests that definitively determine whether the person who has been convicted is the person who should have been convicted. Additionally, there also are the Bryan Stevenson’s (Founder of EJI) in this country who, tirelessly, fight to have these wrongful convictions overturned. Another celebrated case in Alabama is the case of Anthony Ray Hinton who was freed after serving over 30 years for two murders that he did not commit. The lawyer who fought to have his convictions overturned was Bryan Stevenson and Hinton’s amazing story is captured in his book, The Sun Does Shine: How I found Life, Freedom, and Justice.
There has been a measure of progress made in the treatment of minorities in this country, but there is a long way to go. The glaring need for much more progress was captured in a recent article in the Washington Post, “Trump’s rhetoric has changed the way hundreds of kids are bullied in classrooms”. Throughout this lengthy article, kid after kid, related experiences of blatant discrimination directed toward them by fellow students, but also by teachers. Kids have been quoted as stating that if it’s OK for the president to say these derogatory things then it’s OK for us to do the same. This is a sad commentary on where we are as a nation. There is a message in the words of a saying that I have posted in my office: “Every FATHER should remember that one day his children will follow his EXAMPLE instead of his ADVICE”. It would do this country well if the occupant of the Oval Office would take heed and come to realize that his words and actions are the example that kids and adults in this country are following. These behaviors are not the behaviors that need to be promulgated for the generations of the future.