Page 16 - WTP VOl. XII #1

It’s Time (continued from preceding page)
country’s history and the nature of systemic racism. These would later inform my work as a community organizer, union organizer, and educator.
Now, in my late sixties, this trip was in many ways a dream come true. I had always wanted to go to the Deep South, the home of so much that is central to U.S. history, but I never did. When I heard from a friend that SANS was doing this trip, I jumped at the chance. I already knew much of the history that I would experience, but I was looking forward to being rooted in the places and with the people who had made that history. The opportunity to bear witness to the struggle and the joy of the civil rights movement led me to join SANS.
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Charles Woods, education director at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, led us on a tour of Kelly Ingram Park, situated diagonally across from the 16th Street Baptist Church. We began at the bronze and steel sculpture, the Four Spirits, which is designed to capture the final moments of the four girls murdered in the basement of the church. On the base of the sculpture are also the names of two boys who were murdered that day, one by police and the other by white supremacists. One of the girls stands on a bench, releasing six doves into the air, while another sits on the bench helping the first with her dress. A third girl stands gesturing to the others that it’s time to go up to the sanctuary. The fourth has a book open to the words of The Stolen Child by William Butler Yeats, which includes the refrain, “For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”
There are several other sculptures in the park—of the water cannons, the snarling dogs with their teeth bared, and a scene of children behind bars. At one point, we stopped at what Mr. Woods said might appear to be an incongruous marker in this park— one that commemorates the life of Anne Frank. He reminded us that Hitler had adapted many of his ideas about racial purity from the Jim Crow south. Charles also noted that he had heard that some things done in the United States were too extreme even for Hitler, which I later told him I had read were related to the “one drop” rule to determine whether or not one was Black. The Nazis created their own systems for determining whether someone was Jewish.
My family immigrated from Germany in 1953, two years before I was born. The country of my national origin and the country of my birth share this horrible legacy, something that pained me anew as I stood there. And yet, the message inscribed on the marker
was one of hope—a quote from Frank herself. “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” In the midst of all these memories of the horrible things that human beings have done to one another, it was reassuring, for just a moment, to think about how it’s always time to do something to move the arc of the moral universe towards justice, to paraphrase Martin Luther King.
After our tour of the park, we rode our massive double-decker bus through an area in Birming-
ham known as Dynamite Hill. Angela Davis lived in this neighborhood as a child. From the late 1940s through the mid-1960s, when Black families began moving to the west side—the white side—of Center Street, across the color-dividing line initially estab- lished by the segregation codes, many of their homes were bombed by white supremacists. Carolyn McKin- stry told us in her presentation that there were at least sixty unsolved bombings during that period. Birmingham became known as “Bombingham.”
I sat in an aisle seat towards the back of the bus. Looking out the window to my right, I saw the red brick one-and two-story townhouses tightly packed together, forming a semi-circle around a central courtyard. To my left, up a rising hill, were the stately wood-frame single-family homes, each with its own little yard. Images such as these form a vivid picture of the legacy of segregation. Riding along on this street, saturated with humanity’s insanity, I allowed myself a brief moment of internal pleading. The
title of Timmy Thomas’s 1972 anti-war hit, “Why Can’t We Live Together?”, came to mind. I reluctantly brought myself back to reality and thought about
all of the different ways that white supremacy has enforced and still enforces its prerogatives through violence—many of which we would bear witness to on this trip—telling me once again that it’s time to end this never-ending madness.
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Of the five concerts we sang in Birmingham, the first and the last stood out for me, as we had opportuni- ties to connect with local choruses. Our first was with the Carlton Reese Memorial Choir, the choir that originally sang freedom songs during the mass meetings in the 1950s and ‘60s. Some of the current members of the choir had been active in the Chil- dren’s Crusade, and they shared their stories with us between the songs. There were very few people in the audience, so the evening became a communal event between the two choruses. They sang to us, and we then sang part of our repertoire to them.
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