March 2-Rosa Parks Museum, Montgomery, AL
Today dawned clear and beautiful with no signs of the nasty rain, thunder and lightning that we experienced yesterday. The local news of more tornado damage and death is horrible. Where we sit you would never know that anything happened at all. According to the news FEMA won’t be able to respond for another day but that local and statewide help has been pouring in. A real neighbor-helping-neighbor situation.
Since it was safe to travel again we went east (sorry) into Montgomery. We crossed the Pettus Bridge where the marchers were first confronted in the Voting Rights march and drove the road they walked, 51 miles into Montgomery to the steps of the capital. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s church is RIGHT in front of the capital. The present capital building was also the first White House of the Confederacy during the Civil War. The Parks museum was fascinating. Unlike the Voting Rights museum that was very small and run on a shoe-string budget, the Parks museum is high-tech multimedia, run by Troy State University. The museum itself is built on the exact corner where Parks was arrested. The presentation makes the bus ride itself practically come alive. There is a real bus with windows that must be TV screens, showing the movement, actions, and voices of the drivers and passengers. They made it look just like you were watching from outside the bus as the police were called, then came and took Mrs. Parks to jail. Her arrest was just the beginning of the story that they museum tells. It goes through the filing of the lawsuit. The lawsuit doesn’t ask for desegregation of the busses. It only asked for basic respect from the drivers. The first 5 rows of seats were still to be reserved for whites. You would have thought that since they weren’t asking for much the whole thing would have blown over easily. Well, it didn’t. It took 13 months of boycotting the bus system, organizing a complex system of cars and taxis to help blacks travel the city, and with King’s leadership a non-violent protest, to make the changes. During the boycott, the city was affected financially. Businesses suffered and the bus company was loosing lots of money. The finger pointing became heated, but the Blacks remained non-violent. Whites were even using scare tactics claiming that the NAACP was associated with the Communist Party. Even after the boycott of the busses, that were finally desegregated by the Supreme Court, the bus stops were STILL segregated as was just about everything else.
Interesting aside: We are driving to Plains, Georgia as I am writing this, and a mobile claims truck from Travelor’s Insurance just passed us on the interstate. Nice to know that the insurance companies are on the job…it’s Saturday after all!
We seem to be making even more friends in Alabama than we have elsewhere in the country. This is a friendly and open state. We haven’t actually asked our questions of anyone white, but we keep striking up long involved conversations with blacks. We talked a long time with a special education teacher (married to a principal) in Walmart, about civil rights, education, and religion (he is upset about reports that archaeologists have claimed that they’ve found the tomb of Jesus). Also got invited to dinner by the young woman that we chatted with at Fed Ex while mailing Marc’s birthday package (late of course). Had to decline as we were trying to get on the road before dark. The two women at the Voting Rights museum were friendly and long suffering as we asked ill-informed after naive question about history and the current state of affairs. We have two new friends from the Rosa Parks museum too—a couple traveling from Dallas, she is pregnant and due 2 days before Caroline! I almost got brave enough to ask her to let me rub her tummy, but not quite. We had already talked about her mother’s experiences with segregation as well as her own memory of moving to a mostly white neighborhood and the neighbor children being told not to play with her because she was from an “uppity n*** family”! She was about Laura’s age…its hard to comprehend.
Since it was safe to travel again we went east (sorry) into Montgomery. We crossed the Pettus Bridge where the marchers were first confronted in the Voting Rights march and drove the road they walked, 51 miles into Montgomery to the steps of the capital. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s church is RIGHT in front of the capital. The present capital building was also the first White House of the Confederacy during the Civil War. The Parks museum was fascinating. Unlike the Voting Rights museum that was very small and run on a shoe-string budget, the Parks museum is high-tech multimedia, run by Troy State University. The museum itself is built on the exact corner where Parks was arrested. The presentation makes the bus ride itself practically come alive. There is a real bus with windows that must be TV screens, showing the movement, actions, and voices of the drivers and passengers. They made it look just like you were watching from outside the bus as the police were called, then came and took Mrs. Parks to jail. Her arrest was just the beginning of the story that they museum tells. It goes through the filing of the lawsuit. The lawsuit doesn’t ask for desegregation of the busses. It only asked for basic respect from the drivers. The first 5 rows of seats were still to be reserved for whites. You would have thought that since they weren’t asking for much the whole thing would have blown over easily. Well, it didn’t. It took 13 months of boycotting the bus system, organizing a complex system of cars and taxis to help blacks travel the city, and with King’s leadership a non-violent protest, to make the changes. During the boycott, the city was affected financially. Businesses suffered and the bus company was loosing lots of money. The finger pointing became heated, but the Blacks remained non-violent. Whites were even using scare tactics claiming that the NAACP was associated with the Communist Party. Even after the boycott of the busses, that were finally desegregated by the Supreme Court, the bus stops were STILL segregated as was just about everything else.
Interesting aside: We are driving to Plains, Georgia as I am writing this, and a mobile claims truck from Travelor’s Insurance just passed us on the interstate. Nice to know that the insurance companies are on the job…it’s Saturday after all!
We seem to be making even more friends in Alabama than we have elsewhere in the country. This is a friendly and open state. We haven’t actually asked our questions of anyone white, but we keep striking up long involved conversations with blacks. We talked a long time with a special education teacher (married to a principal) in Walmart, about civil rights, education, and religion (he is upset about reports that archaeologists have claimed that they’ve found the tomb of Jesus). Also got invited to dinner by the young woman that we chatted with at Fed Ex while mailing Marc’s birthday package (late of course). Had to decline as we were trying to get on the road before dark. The two women at the Voting Rights museum were friendly and long suffering as we asked ill-informed after naive question about history and the current state of affairs. We have two new friends from the Rosa Parks museum too—a couple traveling from Dallas, she is pregnant and due 2 days before Caroline! I almost got brave enough to ask her to let me rub her tummy, but not quite. We had already talked about her mother’s experiences with segregation as well as her own memory of moving to a mostly white neighborhood and the neighbor children being told not to play with her because she was from an “uppity n*** family”! She was about Laura’s age…its hard to comprehend.
posted by Barbara @ 6:57 PM
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