A Civil Rights History Lesson in Alabama and Mississippi

I wanted to travel south, to be on the ground where the world shifted. I wanted to experience a persevering people—sitting in, standing up, marching, and registering to vote—who, against all odds, put their homes, jobs, land, and life on the line for equal treatment.

Alabama’s Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham teaches about sharecropping, a system implemented after the Civil War to keep formerly enslaved people on their plantations, feeding a greed for cheap labor.

Sharecroppers never owned their dwelling or the land they farmed, earned little profit, and often fell more into debt year-after-year to their white bosses, who kept the books. By the 1930s, about 60% of all cotton farms in the South were farmed by sharecroppers.

I hadn’t heard of industrial sharecroppers, which is the same quasi-slave system applied to newly industrializing cities. Blacks lived in company slum housing, paid inflated prices for goods at company stores, worked sun-up to sun-down six or seven days a week, such as in Birmingham’s Sloss iron mines.

Convict Leasing became a big business post-Civil War. Blacks were routinely arrested for vagrancy or for no reason at all (looking a white man in the eye, not stepping off the sidewalk for a white man, not showing proof of employment when stopped on the street), and sold by the state to work in private industries for no pay.

Three-quarters of Alabama’s state revenue at one time came from convict leasing. The convicts were often treated worse than slaves because they weren’t company property, so they could be worked to death and replaced.

The Civil Rights Institute shows just howseparate and unequal the Jim Crow South truly was. Black schools had twice the number of students per teacher, had to use discarded books from white schools or no books at all, had no libraries, gyms, or cafeterias, and sometimes no heat.

Black teachers earned 60% of the salary of white teachers. Blacks couldn’t play in parks with whites, swim in pools or use dressing rooms, and they were segregated on buses and all areas of life. Their job opportunities and promotions, wages, infant mortality, and life expectancy were a fraction of those of whites.

Exhibits in the Institute played TV coverage of local Civil Rights struggles. Revs. Martin Luther King and Fred Shuttlesworth led peaceful sit-ins and picketing of downtown stores, asking for equal treatment in the 1963 Birmingham Boycott. Protestors were arrested, which is when King wrote his famous letter from a Birmingham jail.

A thousand high school students, studied in Gandhi-like nonviolent techniques, marched in what became known as the Children’s Crusade. Six hundred were arrested and jailed. The next day, an additional 1,000 students protested. With the jails full, police chief Bull Connor unleashed attack dogs and high-powered firehoses on the youth, arresting and carrying hundreds away in school buses to outdoor pens.

With humility and reverence, I walked the ground where it happened. In Kelly Ingram Park across the street from the Institute, there are statues depicting the firehoses and other abuses by Chief Connor.

Also across the street from the park is the16th Street Baptist Church, where four little girls were killed when white supremacists bombed the building and shocked the nation. Birmingham was nicknamed “Bombingham” because there were bombings of more than 50 Black homes, churches, and businesses.

My friend, Cary, who grew up in Birmingham, told me his neighborhood was dubbed “Dynamite Hill.” As a boy, he heard bombs exploding in houses close by three or four times a year. “It took away my childhood at age seven,” he said, “My father made me go to his dry-cleaning business every day after school. I couldn’t play with my friends.”

I met a woman named Jai, who told me her mother was one of Birmingham’s first Black physicians. After work, dressed in her regular street clothes, she would be followed in department stores like a thief. “It’s more than ‘classism,’” Jai said. “It’s racism.” And she added, “My dad made my brothers dress in a suit and tie for their driver’s license photos—just in case it might make a little difference when stopped by the police.”

Next, I went south to Montgomery, Alabama, where Rosa Parks famously sat down to stand up for her rights, unleashing a 13-month Montgomery bus boycott. In this city, the Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration took my breath away! A new generation museum founded by the Equal Justice Initiative and using cutting edge technology, it provides an immersive experience to walk you through four centuries of racial injustice.

While you’re on a simulated slave ship with trafficked Africans, you hear the water on the ship’s hull as you sail the Middle Passage—the Black Holocaust. Behind bars in slave warehouses, you hear children calling for their mothers. You see families torn apart on the auction block.

Interactive exhibits involve you with the laws, politicians, courtrooms, clergy, media, and more that invented and perpetuated the horror called “racial hierarchy.” Fueled by a convenient belief in white moral, political, and spiritual superiority, Black bodies could be “stolen,” broken, beaten, raped, and murdered without consequence. Fifty percent of enslaved families were broken apart, and few were ever reunited in the slave trade that flourished from Maine to Florida.

Montgomery had more jails, holding pens, and warehouses for enslaved people than it had hotels, banks, and churches. The museum also teaches about how today’s Black people receive more policing, arrests, convictions, harsher sentences, and less chances for parole compared to whites. The Legacy exhibit invites you to pick up the phone to hear real life inmate stories.

I wobbled, emotional and weak-kneed through the last of the exhibits, and as I approached a museum assistant, she knew to hand me a tissue before I even asked her for one. “She has done this before,” I thought. Maya Angelou said, “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

The Memorial for Peace and Justice—or more directly, the lynching museum, sits on beautiful acreage in the heart of Montgomery, offering a sacred space for truth-telling and reflection on racial terror. Eight hundred and six columns (representing all of the counties where lynchings took place) are suspended and engraved with the names of 4,460+ documented lynching victims, and a column for the unknown number of undocumented victims.

Walking among the columns, I reached out and touched an engraved name—a life violently and unfairly taken without due process. On a mural, I read some of their offenses: passed a note to a white woman, cohabitated with a white woman, complained to a boss, tried to register to vote, was successful in business, could not find the victim so his mother and sisters were lynched instead, organized farm laborers for better conditions, argued with a shopkeeper. . .

Peaking at the turn of the 20th century, lynchings were often a spectator sport, attracting crowds of hundreds, even thousands, and advertised in the newspapers. Police directed traffic around the courthouse lawn where the hangings and burnings sometimes took place. Parents brought their children.

Postcards of the event were sold, and sometimes the victim’s body parts were taken for souvenirs, such as fingers or toes. It’s inconceivable. Mass lynchings were common, sometimes up to 150 victims. After 120 years of attempts to make lynching a federal hate crime, our country finally succeeded this year with a unanimous vote.

An hour west of Montgomery, I arrived in Selma and visited the Voting Rights Museum that documents the decades-long struggle for Blacks to cast a ballot in the Jim Crow South. Just attempting to register to vote meant losing their job, being thrown off the land where they worked and lived, endangering their family, and potentially being beaten or lynched.

In Dallas County, Black women organized door-to-door, recruiting and educating potential voters, teaching in “citizenship schools” in church basements. College students from the north arrived to help with registration and were jailed. Black landowners housed the students and put up their farm deeds to bail them out.

On Bloody Sunday, John Lewis led 600 peaceful marchers on their way to the Capitol to ask for their constitutional right to vote. They were clubbed and tear-gassed by Alabama State Troopers. Federal troops protected the next Selma to Montgomery March, and after four rainy days and 54 miles, some 25,000 marchers assembled on Alabama’s Capitol steps. Following shortly, the 1965 Voting Rights Act ended discriminatory poll taxes, literary tests, and some voter intimidation.

Federal monitors were ordered to oversee elections, and Black voter participation grew from 3% in 1940 to 66% in 1980 in ten southern states. Of course, we all know that voting rights are still an issue throughout the country, and John Lewis passed away, fighting for voters until the day he died.

Next, I drove three hours west from Selma to Jackson, Mississippi to see the Jackson Civil Rights Museum. One of the exhibits showed historic advertisements portraying Blacks with exaggerated facial features and subservient to whites. I followed a class of local high school students through the Freedom Riders exhibit. In 1961, hundreds of Black and white youth rode buses from Washington, DC to New Orleans to test the new Supreme Court ruling that outlawed segregation on interstate travel.

Freedom Riders were beaten by angry white mobs in many southern cities, and the buses were bombed. In Jackson, 360 were jailed. Photos of their young faces along with their booking numbers filled an entire wall. The trip was a sobering experience, but this painful historical legacy that we share is important to know so that we can never repeat the mistakes of the past and recognize the inequality that still exists from these earlier times.

I highly recommend visiting these fabulous museums throughout the South and learning more about our racist history.