Lynching museum in Alabama

 

Click on the photos for better view

 

Mary Beth and I drove to Montgomery, Alabama and yesterday visited the outstanding museum there built in an old warehouse once used to sell slaves. Created by the Equal Justice Initiative, the museum opened in 2018. MB has wanted to go to the museum ever since.

See their web site here.

The museum has three sites spread out over the city. We went to two of them are were deeply moved by all that we saw. The first, more traditional museum, did not allow photos while the second one we visited did. So all the photos above (except for the first one) came from the second one. They have a free bus take you from one to the other.

On their site they state:

On a hilltop overlooking Montgomery is the nation’s first comprehensive memorial dedicated to the legacy of Black Americans who were enslaved, terrorized by lynching, humiliated by racial segregation, and presumed guilty and dangerous.

More than 4,400 Black people killed in racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950 are remembered here. Their names are engraved on more than 800 corten steel monuments—one for each county where a racial terror lynching took place—that form the main structure of the memorial at the heart of this six-acre site.

The entry fee was only a surprising $5 per person. Loads of students (white and black) filled the museum. I asked one large group of white students where they were from and they responded - 'upstate New York'. Impressive for sure.

The museum bus driver asked MB and I if we ever heard of the 'Red Summer'. We had not. He went on to give us an impassioned account of the horrid story of racist attacks on black citizens all across the nation in 1919.

Portside reports:

Throughout 1919 the exercise of black agency — black veterans wearing their military uniforms in public, black children swimming in the white section of Lake Michigan, black sharecroppers in Arkansas organizing for better wages and working conditions — was met with white mob terror. A wave of anti-black collective violence usually and problematically termed “race riots” occurred in Charleston, South Carolina; Longview, Texas; Bisbee, Arizona; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Knoxville, Tennessee; Omaha, Nebraska; and Elaine, Arkansas. In addition, white supremacists lynched nearly 100 black people and initiated dozens of smaller racist clashes throughout the country in 1919. In Pittsburgh, the Klan made clear the goal of this bloody work in the printed notices posted around a black neighborhood: “The war is over, negroes. Stay in your place. If you don’t, we’ll put you there.”

The bus driver also shared that two more sections to the museum are now under development - which he joked were 'top secret'.

After finishing our museum tour (which could have lasted for hours more) I talked briefly with a young black woman from Montgomery. I asked her what local politics were like in Montgomery these days. (Montgomery was famous for the 1955 bus boycott led by MLK Jr and initiated by Rosa Parks.)  At first a bit hesitant, she went on to say that things were not so good. The economic situation for black people has not changed much since the 1960's and the police were still not trusted by the people. She finished by saying, 'We don't have good leadership'.

Our next stop on our whirlwind tour of parts of the country will take us to Asheville, North Carolina where on Friday we will join a Palestine solidarity protest. We've been following the Palestine story throughout our trip by listening to Al Jazeera live while driving from place to place.

I've been closely paying attention to another Tony Blinken public relations tour of the Middle East region. It appears clear to me that the US is actually doing nothing to enact a ceasefire in Gaza. In fact it is more than obvious that the US is complicit in war crimes while playing good cop-bad cop with Israel. Washington calls for the 'slowing down' of killing Palestinians but then looks the other way as Tel Aviv continues with their genocidal attacks on Gaza and the West Bank.

I am also following the run-up to the two-day hearing of South Africa’s historic case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleging Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. I checked the list of judges on the 15-person ICJ that will hear the case and counted at least nine of them coming from countries that are in the 'western imperial bag' - including Israel. So I don't have much confidence for a good outcome. (I hope I am completely wrong about this.) That is why massive protests all over the globe are vital in the coming days. Especially in the US and Europe.

If the ICJ takes a dive on this case then I believe global opinion of the United Nations (and all of its various agencies) will crash to an all-time low. Everyone paying any attention to the UN knows that it is controlled by the US-EU.

(See Pepe Escobar's article on the case here.)

We've had lucky weather throughout our trip. So we are hoping that after we leave Asheville to head home to Maine we remain lucky and avoid any blizzards and such.

Bruce