Wherein Moominmama visits the birthplace of the civil rights movement and comes face to face with the violent history of racism...

Driving the Moominhouse over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma gave Moominmama the chills. For some reason, I thought the iconic bridge would be preserved as a monument and not still serve as the everyday route to Montgomery!

But there are markers and memorials at the bridge and along the road to honor the march for voting rights in March of 1965. 

Unfortunately, the main "interpretive center" on the road to Montgomery was closed due to COVID, though an outdoor display board noted that the site was once home to a tent city for Black families -- sharecroppers who were kicked out of their homes for seeking to vote. 

Come nightfall, the display noted, angry Whites often drove by and fired shots into the encampment.

There is no turning away from the history of violence that marks the legacy of racism in this country. A visit to the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice made that painfully clear.

The museum and memorial are the result of efforts by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit founded by lawyer Bryan Stevenson, of "Just Mercy" fame. The museum draws a clear line from the violence of slavery to the lynchings, to convict labor, to Jim Crow and to the mass incarceration of today.

A startling photo in the museum shows a group of about 20 boys standing in the striped "chain gang" prison garb of the period, each holding a large hoe in a farm field. Some of them could not have been older than 9-years-old and none of them looked older than 13. Forced labor of young Black children looked exactly like slavery in a different uniform.

But there were also pictures and video clips from 1955 and the bus boycott in Montgomery. Martin Luther King Jr. was only 26 years old and pastor at this red brick Dexter Avenue Baptist Church when he was asked to lead that effort.

Sitting in the museum's darkened alcove watching the old media footage, Moominmama couldn't help but see his young face and exclaim, "he was just a baby!" and then notice the dimly lit heads of other viewers nodding in agreement.

 Among the exhibits was a row of jars of dirt, each from the site where a Black man, woman or child had been lynched. Each is labeled with the location -- and so many states were represented, not just the Deep South. There was dirt from Port Jervis, NY, to memorialize the 1892 lynching of Robert Lewis, falsely accused of sexually assaulting a white woman.

But the most devastating aspect of my visit was to the memorial to the 4,000-plus Black men, women and children who were lynched, shot, burned or otherwise killed in an act of racial terror between 1877-1950. Each of the grave-sized blocks represents a county and has a list of the names and dates of deaths by racist violence. 

Some blocks have a single name, others have dozens. State by state, county by county stand these rows and rows of blocks and names, and as you move through them, the floor starts to slope down as if it was dropping out beneath you. 

By the end, you are craning your neck upwards, overwhelmed by the blocks, hanging like bodies, above you.

I expected the names of men and boys. I was surprised by the number of female names on the blocks. Like Bernice Raspberry, killed May 25, 1927 in Greene County, Mississippi. What could have led to killing a woman with such a lovely name? 

Other blocks had dozens of names and deaths listed all in one day. A little research and I learned that 23 Black people died inside a courtroom, attending a trial involving two Black men who had accused a White man of attempted murder. They were shot by Whites who stormed the courthouse in Carroll County, Mississippi.

And the "Elaine Massacre," which I asked about after seeing 240 names on one block for Phillips County, Arkansas. These folks were killed in 1919 over the course of about week after a group of Black sharecroppers gathered to organize a union. 

An attack on the gathering led to a shootout, which in turn led to a massacre as White mobs flooded into the Black community killing not just any accused participants but many others whose only crime was being Black and living in the town of Elaine.

For some reason, my school history books told the story of the voting rights march from Selma, but never anything about the Elaine Massacre or the other racial terror atrocities, including how lynchings often attracted thousands of White families to watch, like a day's entertainment. This is history we need to know and understand and work to prevent today.

Someday, there will be a memorial to all the Black men, women and children killed in our own era. I sincerely hope it will be a much smaller memorial than the one I saw in Montgomery. But that's up to us.

Moominmama is now en route to my daughter who has surgery on Tuesday. Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers! I'll post an update next week, but these travel missives will be on hiatus until I return to the road. Thanks so much for sharing in my journey!