Stars in Alabama

Swimming in conference and 1010 drudgery today so not much to relate about actual goings-on (alas, you must be patient for the Sam & Lucy Chin-Cleaning Day story). Consequently I think it a good moment to share about something extremely cool and worthy in our neck of the woods.

One perk (I concede there are a couple) of working with the conference is getting to go to Montgomery and visit rather extraordinary places. We’ll be taking the group there during the week of the conference so P. and I went to set up the agenda and meet a bunch of people at the Capitol and elsewhere in Montgomery a few weeks ago.

Some of you are I’m sure already aware of the Civil Rights Memorial; if not, it is really quite striking and you should go there sometime. It was designed by Maya Lin, the same architect as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC (who, I just found out, is an Ohio native - from Athens!) and no less impressive for its being smaller and in a less frequented tourist spot. It is overseen by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has played quite a sizeable role in the course of history (its involvement in the Judge Roy/Ten Commandments case being one small example), especially civil rights history.

New! Those of you who know the Memorial may be surprised to find, as I was, that as of last October in addition to the Memorial itself, there now exists the Civil Rights Memorial Center, which is a place to digest and expand upon one’s Memorial experience. It entails dynamic and engrossing interactive presentations teaching you in as much detail as you would like to soak up about the US civil rights movement and its martyrs to better comprehension of the context of these events we have all grown up hearing about on various documentaries so often that we no longer always really consider either the why-for’s or their significance and shockwaves. The Center is breathtaking – literally – we only had time to look around for about 3 minutes before going to a back conference room to talk with the director specifically about our May visit, but that time was ample for thorough gulps and goosebumps along with a feeling of profound sobering and admiration. Seriously this is a tremendously meaningful and heart-breaking experience; I was completely distracted by the 6 or 7 meetings I had survived as well as the 2 that were left in the day, plus not a little stressed and disgruntled, not to mention completely carsick from wacky city driving in a vehicle I could hardly see out of. Under those conditions plus my general flightiness, if an experience can take such a substantial hold as to give me chills through glorified glances into 2 or 3 rooms… well you get the picture. In addition to the portion of the exhibits surrounding US and AL civil rights, there is a big timeline of world civil rights issues, many of which are ongoing, showing the literal big picture and how far there remains to travel in this realm on a global level.

I should not neglect the Rosa Parks Library & Museum in this verbal/ose tour. It is exceptional in its own right and it’s only my being so blinded by how palpably I was affected by the CRMC that causes it to seem overshadowed here. Their mixed media tour with audios of many people involved in the Boycott along with lots of artifacts of the period (including the actual bus in which Ms. Parks took her seat) are captivating and appropriately shock and jostle your senses along with your awareness. In our latest visit, again to arrange things for the May group, we were shown a new portion with interactive computer presentations where you can access tons of research (which sounds boring but it was done in quite an engaging way indeed) for backstory on the other boycotters and see video interviews of many of them. In much the same way that the Memorial Center places Alabama’s historical civil rights history into perspective in the much larger picture of US civil rights and in the historical and ongoing world civil rights battles, the added materials at the Rosa Parks Museum present a comprehensive view of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in addition to and beyond Rosa Parks, as well as giving you the big picture of the Boycott and its ramifications.

So! Next time you are sitting around lamenting the lack of Good Stuff here on the Plains, in the way of many of us who have lived in, ahem, larger and/or at-times-more-diverse or cultural-events-enabled, places (as I admit I often do) you can add the Montgomery Civil Rights Memorial and the Rosa Parks Museum to your list of Worthy Things in Alabama. Better yet, just pick up and hightail it to Montgomery.