7/26
Hey there Campers,
We wake to a hot day as we journey on
to Montgomery, AL. There we went to the Legacy Museum- From Enslavement to
Mass Incarceration. (Another Cairy Lester’s recommendation.) This museum is built on the site of a former warehouse where enslaved
black people were imprisoned, and is located midway between an historic slave
market and the main river dock and train station where tens of thousands of
enslaved people were trafficked during the height of the domestic slave trade.
Montgomery's proximity to the fertile Black Belt region, where slave-owners
amassed large enslaved populations to work the rich soil, elevated Montgomery's
prominence in domestic trafficking, and by 1860, Montgomery was the capital of
the domestic slave trade in Alabama, one of the two largest slave-owning states
in America. Montgomery had more slave trading places than they had churches or
schools.
There is a statement that
said “Slavery is the next thing to hell.” The museum has jailed cells that have
holograms in them. One with a woman begging to find her children, one with the
kids asking can they get help to find their mother, one with a lady singing a
sorrowful song and one with a man.
There were 12 million
people kidnapped during the African Transatlantic Slave Trade. Slavery was
justified by false notions blacks were inferior. The governor of Mississippi
said “as a Christian people it is the duty of the South to keep them in the
present position, at any cost and at every peril.” Half of all slaves were
separated from spouses, parents and family members.
In 1885 the city built
Court Square Fountain. It is very beautiful. However, most people pass by this
area and don’t know the history of this location. It was once the location of the
biggest Slave Trade Auction.
After the Civil War,
slavery persisted in the form of convict leasing, a system in which Southern
states leased prisoners to private railways, mines, and large plantations.
While states profited, prisoners earned no pay and faced inhumane, dangerous,
and often deadly work conditions. Thousands of black people were forced into
what authors have termed “slavery by another name” until the 1930. 73% of Alabama state
revenue came from convict leasing. Did you know that 13 states have no minimum
age for trying children as an adult? Did you know that after slavery black
orphan children were branded “criminals” and forced to labor in the fields,
farms, mines and railroad in Mississippi? It is stated that the people took off
the white robe (KKK) and out on black robes off justice. They are the same
people.
9 million black people
were terrorized by threat of lynching. During
the period between the Civil War and World War II, thousands of African
Americans were lynched in the United States. Lynchings were violent and public
acts of torture that traumatized black people throughout the country and were
largely tolerated by state and federal officials. These lynchings were
terrorism. “Terror lynchings” peaked between 1880 and 1940 and claimed the
lives of African American men, women, and children who were forced to endure the
fear, humiliation, and barbarity of this widespread phenomenon unaided. The great singer Billie Holiday wrote and sang a song about "Strange Fruit". This was about lynchings. One of the horrific things about looking at these lynching picture is to see the smile on those people faces. Oh my God where is the compassion?
The Great Migration - In 1900, African Americans constituted nearly a third of those living in Southern states and less than 2% in other regions. They occupied the lowest rung of the Southern racial caste system, relegated to sharecropping, discriminatory Jim Crow laws, extreme poverty, and brutal racial violence. Seeking freedom, more than six million African Americans left the South in a steady, 60-year stream. By 1970, just 19% of the Southern population was black and the African American population in the Northeast and Midwest had grown to 10%. Traveling by car, bus, or train from Louisiana to Los Angeles, Mississippi and Alabama to Chicago and Detroit, Georgia and Florida to New York and New Jersey, the individual acts of African Americans aggregated into a movement. The massive population shift forever changed both those who fled and the places where they sought refuge. Those who migrated still faced discrimination, segregation, and hardship, but used new opportunities to nurture potential in the next generation.
Our
family can related to this as most African American can. My mom left Beaumont,
TX and my dad Lake Providence, LA. Neither one of my parents ever returned to
the South. Lo’s parents left Bastrop, LA. His family would go back for visits.
The
museum has a collection of jars of soil from lynch sites. The jars have the
name of the person who was lynched and the date of the lynching. It is humbling to see these jars.
This museum is a two part exhibit. You must go to the go to The National
Memorial for Peace and Justice. It is located a couple of miles from the
museum. The Memorial for Peace and Justice was
conceived with the hope of creating a sober, meaningful site where people can
gather and reflect on America’s history of racial inequality. EJI
partnered with artists like Kwame Akoto-Bamfo whose sculpture on slavery
confronts visitors when they first enter the memorial. EJI then leads visitors
on a journey from square, created with assistance from the Mass Design Group.
The memorial experience continues through the civil rights era made visible
with a sculpture by Dana King dedicated to the women who sustained the
Montgomery Bus Boycott. Finally, the memorial journey ends with
contemporary issues of police violence and racially biased criminal justice
expressed in a final work created by Hank Willis Thomas. The memorial displays
writing from Toni Morrison, words from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and a
reflection space in honor of Ida B. Wells.
I want to tell you a family story. My dad, George Parker, was
from Lake Providence, LA. This is in East Carroll Parish. His nickname was
“Pophouse” because he would work with his father at the local soda factory as a
kid. When he was 14 years old he went to work for the local pharmacist. Mr.
Levy (who was Jewish) had my father become his kids babysitter if he and his
wife needed to go out or someone the kids could play with while they worked. My
dad would sleep on the screened porch. The only way to get to the porch was
through the parents’ bedroom. They trusted him all over their house and even
let him use their bathroom inside the house. When WWII came my dad went off to
war. He was stationed in several parts of the U.S. His last duty station was
Oak Noll in Oakland, CA. The military had a rule that where ever you enlisted
you had to go back there. So he had to go back to his home town. The day he got
back he saw a white man he knew and was speaking to him and he looked him in
the eye and did not call him Sir. This was forbidden for any black man to do.
That night he had a visitor. It was Mr. Levy. He told my dad that while it was
good for him to be home he needed to leave as soon as possible if he wanted to
remain alive. My dad said he clearly understood and caught the bus back to
California the next morning. He never ever returned to Louisiana. In 2011 Lo
and I took a trip to Louisiana to my dad’s home town to visit dad’s last
remaining family in LA. Cousin Sye Parker relayed the same story to me. He took
us to the local pharmacy. I got a chance to speak with the pharmacist. He was
one of the kids my dad had babysat. He relayed the same story. The man’s father
had saved my dad’s life because if he had not been told he would have been
lynched. As I passed the East Carroll Parish marker it brought tears to my eyes
because my dad’s name could have been there.
From the memorial we toured the Capital. We went to Martin
Luther King’s church on Dexter Ave, First White House of the Confederacy, Martin
Luther King’s house and the Harris house.
MLK had some pretty profound statements.
Ø Rattle snakes don’t commit
suicide. Ball players don’t put themselves out. You got to put them out.
Ø Color is a stigma. White
peasants were given land as an economic base. Blacks weren’t given anything
What and interesting, educational day we had. I think Maya
Angelou says it all:
Please
note that most of the above information came from the EJI - Equal Justice
Initiative.
Well,
campers until next time.
Lo
& Bren
I'm so glad that you got to meet the Levys. That... is stupendous; I wish your Daddy might have done so, but it is good that you did it for him.
ReplyDeleteI'll also bet the Levys either were non-religious Jews, or practiced Judaism on the down low because that wasn't cool at various times either.
Oh, this country.
Excited to see that u guys visited the Legacy Museum. I found it powerful. I am going to devour what u wrote about the Whitney Plantation in LA. It is on my mental list of places to visit. Great scouting!
ReplyDeletePowerful story about your dad. If he was a part of the memorial - you would not exist. - Cairy
ReplyDelete