Amizade and Alabama offer unique Civil Rights education
Article by an Amizade student
History is written and recorded—facts memorized, often forgotten, and remembered merely as names, dates, and infamous places. This is the presumption of what education entails: learning through the written word, memorizing, spouting off whatever vague recollections can be conjured up and shared.
At least, this was my presumption until finally I was engaged in the humbling opportunity to live history, to touch it, have dinner with it, sit down in its living room and ask it some questions. When I crossed paths so directly with what I learned in history books, the names and dates soon had a context, a point of reference, an oppressed, distorted portrait painted in my head by the voices of those who lived it and conquered it.
This is what Alabama provided for me—tangible proof of the past that escapes words or isms or fear of the realness of what’s happened where our roots were planted. Instead it turns history into a reality outside of the vacuum of academia.
My personal experience has been invaluable, surreal even: meeting, interviewing, and shooting video of monumental figures out of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. During our stay in Montgomery, Alabama, we were granted the opportunity to spend the day documenting a number of Freedom Riders, who in 1961 tested the newly-desegregated public bus system that was contested before the U.S. Supreme Court by Bruce Boynton, a young black lawyer from Selma.
The event was a memorial unveiling, upon which day not only did I get a chance to interview Bruce Boynton, but also the young people who traveled from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans over the course of thirteen days, directly through the distress of the Black Belt across Alabama, and onward. They were beaten, chased with bricks, metal batons and spray-painted black when they arrived at the Greyhound station in Montgomery—an old-time marquee still towers on the street. Ku Klux Klansmen filed out of the darkened alleyways, burning buses, breaking windows, and torching fleeing passengers. The brutalized battalion sought refuge in Reverend Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church across town. Outside the Klansmen continued their rampage—men, we learned, who were not straight out of jail or even off the beaten path: they were men of society; country club men; the elite.
In a moment that sanctioned little comfort, peace, or understanding of what was happening to these people who strived for what they believed to be a freer, more unified, and, ultimately, integrated America, they found solace in each other, sought hope from each other—a hope that, after 400 years of oppression, waned, inflated, and faded time and time again.
Standing in that church, however, after so many years of challenge and belittlement, and the almost universal acceptance on both sides of the racial divide of the mantra that suggests blacks to be inherently inferior, the Freedom Riders clasped each other’s hands and, swaying side by side, mistily visible outside through the stained-glass, they belted that night in 1961 a rendition of “We Shall Overcome” that crept out through the blockaded doors, and resounded across town and across the country, birthing a greater acceptance of the Movement, the struggle, and the hope of one day actualizing the lyrics they sang.
On our trip, we visited First Baptist Church for a special commemorative service the day of the memorial unveiling at the Greyhound bus station. Two group-mates and I shot the service from the same mezzanine immortalized in photos from that night in 1961. Below, in the congregation, familiar faces sprung up. Names I had skimmed passed in books, but there, in Montgomery, felt obligated to learn, out of humbling respect. We sat intently in the church, listening to the testimonies of the Freedom Riders—people who by no means live lavishly or in any traditionally extraordinary way, but have accomplished great, extraordinary things; these people are common, humble people who had at that moment in history a responsibility, a moral duty to set out and achieve for themselves and for all others an otherwise neglected notion of equality.
At the end of the service we began to sing the song, chills running down my back and jolting through my fingertips. “We Are Not Afraid,” we sang. People below in the congregation united, hand in hand, swaying; on their faces I could read the history rich in their wrinkles, the experiences passing through their glassy eyes, gazing onward blankly, like that night in 1961, I guessed, when all they could do was look forward to the future in hope of a brighter day, imagining.
I suppose the greatest reward I took out of that day and the Alabama trip in general was the central idea of an individual hope persevering; that a group may set out to do the will of the whole, but that the one strand linking them together is the individual desire to tactfully spark and inspire change. Our group set out to fulfill the goal of making a video, for instance; however, we all sustained a magnificent individual transformation on the trip, inviting us to reconsider the ideas we had adopted and to open up to a culture with which we might otherwise never have had the opportunity to engage.
The video our group produced will reflect upon the oral histories provided by those who lived through the violent Movement of the 1950’s and 60’s, as well as get across the ideologies they have cultivated and refined over the years. We are screening the film twice next year, and it will also be available in the library at the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Alabama and the archives of the Alabama Historical Commission. Most exciting about the video is the fact that it has immortalized these fascinating stories to move, touch, and inspire others—through this media we can share our experience, even if in mere snippets, to reveal a truth that has in these times become elusive: a truth that indicates that hate is still perpetuated even if now on P.C. terms; a truth that demonstrates the effect of poverty in relation to oppression—reveals that de facto segregation is still, in fact, segregation; a truth that underscores the power of hope and encourages individualism, education, and the notion of one day overcoming the odds of the racial divide to persevere by reconnecting with our roots and remembering and respecting where the past has brought us today.
Our experience was the journey to self-fulfillment, actualization. Our prize is our video with which we hope to inspire and perpetuate the lessons we learned, the credos of the past, and the evolving movement towards recognizing that there is still much to be done.