On this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 2019, I thought
I would share this story I wrote about a trip we took in 2008.
The B and B seeped with southern charm if Talladega, Alabama, did not.
Three of us had decided to take a portion of the National Park Service’s new civil rights road trip called “We Shall Overcome: Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement”. It was 2008, and we had wrapped up four days in New Orleans attending the annual Jazz and Heritage Festival before we headed to Mobile then through Alabama. We stayed in Monroeville where novelist Harper Lee grew up, had our introduction to supper of “meat and three sides,” and slept at a friend’s family farm. Then it was on to Selma and Montgomery. Our trip would continue to Birmingham and Memphis, and we would eventually slip into Nashville for more music.
In Selma, we walked in the footsteps of the Freedom Marchers who in 1965 took their lives in their hands as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge heading to Montgomery protesting the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson and voting rights. That first attempt at crossing the bridge on March 7, 1965 would come to be called Bloody Sunday. On March 21, 3,200 protesters peacefully began the journey; three days later they arrived in Montgomery now numbering 25,000.
We wandered through Selma’s partially boarded up downtown where we talked to an elderly Black man who took us through the storefront Black History Museum and recounted his life in Selma especially the laws meant to keep African Americans from voting. A few blocks away, I stopped to ask a man about the restoration he was doing on a historic building. Wondering what we were doing in Selma and brightening up when we mentioned the civil rights tour, he said he was restoring the building in anticipation of the tourists taking the tour. As he hung from the scaffolding, he told me he had met Dr. King as a young boy; he paused, and said he was the son of former Mayor Joe Smitherman. Mayor Smitherman, who had been elected six months prior to the marches, considered himself a moderate although at the time he believed in segregation. (He once referred to Martin Luther King as Martin Luther “Coon“ in a TV interview and later said it was a slip of the tongue.) Smitherman served as mayor until 2000 when an African America candidate defeated him. His son told us not to believe everything we heard at the Black History Museum. We moved on.
We found the marker where a group of white thugs attacked three Unitarian ministers who had come for the first march, one died three days later. We stayed at a historic hotel at the foot of the bridge and went to a restaurant in a basement by the slave auction blocks; the massive door and chains were still there along with pizza and beer. Selma is like that.
Recent history can bring you to your knees, but it was not until our overnight in Talladega, home of Talladega College and the famed speedway, that we shared breakfast with some remarkable people. As the three of us, all white, sat at the table with four black couples, the questions began:
“What brings you three to Talladega?” we were asked.
“Well,” I began only slightly uncomfortable, “We are on the National Park Service’s new civil rights road tour. We were in Selma then Montgomery and Birmingham.” We shared how overcome we were with the history and the scenes we encountered. We had sat in Dr. King’s chair by the pulpit at his church in Montgomery, and climbed the steps of the Alabama Capitol. It was there that Dr. King addressed a crowd of 25,000 at the end of the grueling march. We told them about Selma and walking across the bridge and Montgomery and the capitol steps and the nearly all-white choirs singing hymns and patriotic songs. We had arrived on the National Day of Prayer that made the entire experience almost surreal. They nodded, and smiled.
There was a pause: “I was four people behind Dr. King on that march,” one of the women quietly added. “And in Montgomery, why I felt so sorry for those National Guard boys standing on the capitol roof,” she continued. “Why it was so hot and they looked scared to death. One of those boys just dropped his gun and passed out from the heat,” she continued with a tsk.
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| The Alabama capitol on the National Day of Prayer in 2008. Also, where National Guard troops stood on the roof in 1965. |
She told us that the marchers had nowhere to stay once in Montgomery. The city fathers had all of the electricity and water turned off at the few Colored Only motels, so they found refuge in homes or churches.
For me, Montgomery was what I can only describe as one of the meanest cities I had ever visited in America. Even in the heat of May the vibe was cold as ice. Yet, the people who had arrived there after a 54- mile march in 1965 with racists taunting them, and armed soldiers and vicious sheriffs escorting them, talked over breakfast that morning like that march was an everyday occurrence. In many ways it probably was.
Our B and B table mates were all there for their Talladega College 50threunion. Founded in 1867 by two former slaves from Talladega and a group of new freemen in Mobile, Alabama, it has served the Black community for decades. For us, it served as a reminder of how far our country has come and how very very far it has to go.
I wish I had kept in touch. I wish they were my long -time friends, not simply a chance encounter. I wish I had spent days and weeks listening to them recount history. I wish I had been with them when Barack Obama became president.
Instead, I am grateful for a chance encounter in Talladega, Alabama.
I wrote this for a contest my friend and travel writer, Don George, sponsored called Encounters. I didn’t win or get a mention, but it gave me a chance to write about a remarkable trip Jerry, Don DeMoss and I took.
For those interested in this particular history of our country, I suggest the following:
