It's hard to believe that African Americans were denied the right to vote in my lifetime, or imagine the pervasive indignities they suffered living in the South during the unrelenting nightmare of the Jim Crow era. Isabel Wilkerson really opened my eyes to the latter in The Warmth of Other Suns.
The Equal Justice Initiative also has done an extraordinary job of helping people like myself to see and understand more clearly the horrors of slavery and its aftermath through several projects that have transformed Montgomery, Alabama, into a Civil Rights tourist mecca. Several years ago I experienced the gut punch of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which honors nearly 4,500 people who were lynched all over the United States.
I couldn't wait to visit the brand new Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. Photographs weren't permitted in most areas prior to the formal opening on Juneteenth. That prohibition turned what might have been an aesthetic experience into one far more educational. I used my phone to record some of the shocking facts that inspired the artworks and invoked parallels to the Holocaust that could not be missed.
- Nearly 6,000,000 Black people died enslaved in American colonies and the United States.
- Nearly half of black infants born enslaved died before they reached the age of one.
- Nearly four million people were enslaved in the United States; prior the Civil War in 1860, Virginia alone had 491,000, the greatest number.
- From 1630 to 1775, more than 14,000 people were trafficked from Africa to New York City.
- Beginning in August, enslaved laborers picked each cotton plant as many as ten times a season as the plants continued to flower and produce bolls through the fall and early winter.
- By relentlessly pushing enslaved people to pick cotton faster, overseers more than doubled the cotton picking rate between 1810 and 1860 when enslaved adults picked 130 pounds and children picked 80 pounds per day on average.
- By the Civil War almost 15,000 enslaved people in the South worked on railroads and enslaved labor had been used to build over 75% of the railroads in the Confederate states.
- Nearly 200,000 Black soldiers served for the Union during the war. Some 300,000 black women and men also made important contributions as civilians by gathering military intelligence, treating wounded soldiers, producing wartime provisions and providing essential services.
Photos were allowed at the National Monument to Freedom, situated near the park's exit.
122,000 names of African Americans who were counted in the first U.S. Census after Emancipation are inscribed on the front and back of the enormous wall. They represent the four million enslaved people who won their freedom after the Civil War.
The cumulative emotional toll of what I had been seeing and learning erupted when a young man who looked a lot like pre-plastic surgery Michael Jackson approached with a tablet and asked if I would like his assistance in tracing any ancestors on the wall. I seized the befuddling moment to comment on the significance of the memorial and my sense of shame before bursting into tears. He responded kindly. After I stepped away to compose myself, he returned and suggested I place a carnation in the water that surrounded the monument.
In 1965, a series of marches in support of the Voting Rights Act began at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and ended at the state capitol in Montgomery, 54 miles away. I drove the same stretch of Highway 80 in reverse, still bordered on both sides by farmland.
The Lowndes Country Interpretative Center, operated by the National Parks Service about halfway between the two cities, explores the history of the marches and the impact of the Voting Rights Act on the citizens of Alabama.
If you were one of the young black men pictured at the beginning of this post, here's what you might have encountered during the three-day long marches.
After passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Alabama landowners expelled so many sharecroppers from shacks that some had inhabited since before the Civil War that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and enlightened local leaders established a tent city along Highway 80 to house the men, women and children who had no place else to go.
Once across the infamous bridge, named for a U.S. Senator who had once served as the grand dragon for the Ku Klux Klan, I pulled into Old Live Oak Cemetery in Selma where, judging by the number of well-tended graves with Confederate flags flying, the "Lost Cause" persists. There's even a Jefferson Davis Chair.
These stones commemorate local men who gave their lives to prevent enslaved people from gaining their freedom. Ironically, the first Black man elected to Congress from Alabama after Emancipation is also buried at Old Live Oak. At the rear of the cemetery, of course. Did you know that Confederate cemeteries have received millions of dollars in federal and state support stretching back over a century? Only recently have some states begun passing legislation to preserve the burial grounds of enslaved people, many of which already have been bulldozed for highway construction and redevelopment.
Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves lives in an antebellum mansion in the middle of downtown Jackson. Although seven Southern states have a history of celebrating "Confederate Heritage Month" in April, Mississippi is the only one to have done so for the past three years.
There's also a statue in front of the capitol, a National Historic Landmark, honoring the sacrifices made by Confederate women. Tributes to mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, inscribed on the four sides of the base more than a century ago, emphasize their fealty to men.
Much more than Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, Jackson seems to look backward.
The next morning after crossing the mighty Mississippi, I happened upon a small museum that sought to preserve the kinder, gentler face of enslavement and its aftermath.
A local family had donated their modest "plantation" to house the museum. Cotton continues to be grown and harvested on a small plot of land behind it for the purpose of "educating" tourists.
The curators do nothing to hide their sympathies.
Guess what the "invasion" refers to.
Forget those pesky Northerners. From the looks of this painting, the life of a sharecropper seems relatively benign. No one even has to bend over to pick cotton!
Of course, the sharecroppers' purchases of food and other essential items at the "commissary" were deducted from whatever they earned farming the land. Which left them with next to nothing.
The young docent seemed as surprised as I had been to learn that cotton plants require multiple harvesting each season.
I used this sign to explore the economics of enslaved labor based on information I had recorded the day before in a different context. Just before the Civil War, it took an enslaved man or woman a little less than four days to pick a bale of cotton which could be used to make 690 bath towels, 274 dresses or 215 pairs of men's jeans to cite just three of the examples listed.
It's no wonder the South wanted to preserve the status quo and explains why, in Alabama, the enslaved population grew from 45,000 in 1820 to 435,000 by the start of the Civil War, when the state had 15,000 cotton plantations. If you don't believe that nearly half of the US economy at the time was connected in some form to cotton produced by enslaved labor, just see The Lehmann Trilogy.
It and the 1619 Project made me a believer in the economic justice of reparations as difficult as they may be to disburse fairly.
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