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| Start here, at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, for your virtual tour of civil rights history in the South. |
This week, I participated in a Racial Justice and Reconciliation Pilgrimage in Mississippi and Alabama, sponsored by the Christian Medical and Dental Society and the John Perkins Foundation. We met in Jackson, Mississippi at the John and Vera Mae Perkins Foundation, founded by John Perkins, author of Let Justice Roll Down, Parting Words to the Church on Race and Love, Dream With Me, and He Calls Me Friend as well as other books.
On Thursday, we went to the (1) Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. There the most hopeful part for me was that there were a good number of school children going through the place and learning things that perhaps were no longer taught in their schools. John Perkins was wounded and beat severely by police in 1970 for his part in demonstrations in the town of Mendenhall, MS, but he is still living, and has no hate in his heart, it seems. Then we ended the afternoon by going by (2) the house of Medgar Evers, the head of the Mississippi NAACP who was shot in his own driveway by a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
The second day we journeyed to (3) Birmingham to the 16th St Baptist Church where the bombing occurred killing four girls in Sunday School. Then we journeyed on to (4) Montgomery where we went down to the old slave markets, and visited the (5) Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King's first pastorate and where he got his start in activism during the Montgomery bus boycott.
The third day, Saturday, was the most intense, as we visited the (6) National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the Legacy Museum. Both of these sites are new since the last time we visited Montgomery. The National Memorial has been built on a six acre hilltop and it is dedicated to the more the 4000 documented lynchings since 1877. Each victim's name is engraved on large steel monuments, and there are more than 800 of them, and each monument representing a county where a lynching occurred. Some counties in our state (Alabama) had 20-30 names.
The (7) Legacy Museum was about a mile away from that site, built on the site of a former cotton warehouse where many slaves labored over the years. It is an amazing exhibit, but gut wrenching in so many ways. I felt coming out of there similar to the way I felt coming out of the Holocaust museum in Washington--completely drained, sad, and overwhelmed. It was very emotional and I learned so many things that I never realized before. Just one tidbit..in the 1890s, 2/3 of Alabama's income for the state was from 'renting out prisoners' to businesses who paid the state for that, but basically used the prisoners as de facto slaves.
Then we journeyed on to Selma, and marched over the (8) Edmund Pettus Bridge, where many demonstrators were wounded during the "Bloody Sunday' march there. From the there we could see the railroad bridge where we had seen a photo of a lynching of a mother and son in the museum.
The good part of the tour was that we had a mixed team with African Americans who had lived through the struggle as well as younger ones who were millennials, and then of course Dr. Perkins to give us his perspective as well. That made the sessions a lot more meaningful than if we had only Caucasians.
Sunday morning was a wrap up session, and today was a day of reflection for me and asking "What now?" I'm not sure, but I am praying for guidance. I would actually like to lead similar tours myself and I'll let you all know if I organize them.
.Jonathan Yoder
Note: Here are two other recommended links: https://legacysites.eji.org/
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