Wok N Roll with us...Bob and Teri Along with Atlas and Kalani: Montgomery, Alabama September 7, 2018

Alabama became a US state in 1819. There were 4 other capital cities in Alabama prior to the present Capitol being built in Montgomery that was completed in 1851. Today it is restored to reflect the Confederate period. While it is the place where the Provisional Constitution of the Confederate States was drawn up, we felt this decision regarding period to be insensitive. The Capitol is also the site of Civil Rights progress. This Capitol was the destination of the third Selma Civil Rights march, ending at the Capitol steps on March 25, 1965. Four months later President Johnson signed what is often considered the Crown Jewel of the Civil Rights Movement, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The city leaders could have just as easily emphasized something such as this or at least made the decision to furnish the Capitol in a period when Alabama was actually part of the UNITED States. Just an opinion. Today the Governor and other executive officers occupy the Capitol while the House of Representatives and the Senate meet in a State House building located across the street.

The First Confederacy White House is next to the Capitol building. This home was leased as the executive residency of President Jefferson Davis and his family while the Capitol of the Confederacy was located in Montgomery from February 4, 1861, until May 29, 1861when the Davis family moved to the new Confederate Capitol in Richmond Virginia. The home that is supported by Alabama tax dollars present Jefferson Davis as the head of a “heroic resistance" who was "held by his Negroes in genuine affection as well as highest esteem." In trying to move forward as a nation it is concerning that this is the message being given to Alabama school children.

The rest of our time in Montgomery was spent visiting Civil Rights historical locations. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pastored at the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church from 1954 to 1960. This church is where he led the first large-scale U.S. demonstration against segregation, the historic Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a civil-rights protest during which African Americans refused to ride city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregated seating. This boycott was spurred by Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, who was arrested and fined for refusing to yield her bus seat to a white man. We visited both the church and the location where Rosa Parks got on the bus. Directly across the street from the Rosa Park arrest location is a large fountain. This fountain is where the City’s slave market was. In 1850, Montgomery was the 75^th largest city in the country but it had the 2^nd largest slave population in the country.

Across the street from the church is the Civil Rights Memorial. Though small, the Civil Rights Memorial was successful at honoring the martyrs of the movement, and with inspiring individuals into action. At the end of the tour is an opportunity to pledge to fight hate and to promote tolerance with a continuing scroll of those that have made this commitment.

The Freedom Riders museum is very small yet powerful. There were many video accounts of those that were actual freedom riders. For those that may not know, while Rosa Parks was successful at getting people of all races to be treated equally within the state on buses, interstate buses did not fall under the same restrictions. Freedom Riders were groups of White and African American civil rights activists who participated in Freedom Rides, bus trips through the American South in 1961 to protest segregated bus terminals. U.S. Representative John Lewis was one of these Freedom riders and there are pictures of him in his youth within this museum.

Our last visits were to the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Both were excellent and powerful. The Legacy Museum occupies a building that was once used to house slaves prior to their auction. We began with a video representation of slave migration that showed how in 60 years while Louisiana increased their slave number times two Alabama increased their numbers over ten times. Just past the entrance to the museum, you arrive at five “slave pens,” behind which ghostly holograms in nineteenth-century costume tell their stories, the testimonies all from real people. After leaving the ghost pens one sees how slavery, after Reconstruction, was “dusted off and repurposed” in the American penal system. There are many personal accounts and videos. We have been to several Civil Rights Museum. This is probably the most moving and sobering one we have experienced to date.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice sad to say is the lynching museum. The memorial includes 800 six-foot monuments to symbolize thousands of racial terror lynching victims in the United States and the counties and states where this terrorism took place. The names of the multiple lynching victims are engraved on the state county columns. The memorial is more than a static monument. Surrounding the memorial is a field of identical monuments, waiting to be claimed and installed in the counties they represent. Over time, the national memorial will serve as a report on which parts of the country have confronted the truth of this terror and which have not. Like the Legacy Museum, this visit was very sobering.