What does “Facing South” mean?
This is the story of a my Civil Rights journey to the Deep South which will take me from Memphis, Tennessee through to Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and finally to Washington DC. It will document the stories, hopes and dreams, of challenge and change, of transformation and struggle. It is not just an American story, it is a human story. This story that started many centuries ago, continues today. I am here to face it.
I want to share what was an incredibly moving and heartrending experience . It was per chance that I learned of the Service of Remembrance and Reconciliation that was taking place at Calvary Episcopal Church in the center of downtown Memphis. The “Service of Remembrance and Reconciliation,” was a collaboration between Calvary, Rhodes College and…
“Early morning, April four Shot rings out in the Memphis sky. Free at last, they took your life They could not take your pride.” -U2 So here we are. It’s early morning on April 4th in Memphis. After two days of listening to expert panels talking about the state of persistent poverty, racial injustice,…
Elie Wiesel once said: “One thing we have learned is that when you face evil, don’t let it grow, fight it, right away. Had Hitler been fought immediately there would have been no Holocaust. Be watchful.” Congressman John Lewis said the same thing. There were magnets made of this quote in many Civil Rights museums…
Indeed any discussion of the Civil Rights movement must include this formidable woman. She is in the center of the photo above, and it takes place on Johns Island in the 1950s as Mrs. Clark teaches a citizenship class. Septima Clark was a school teacher. In 1916 Charleston would not hire black public school teachers…
Charleston became the biggest slave port in America, selling about half the Africans bought into the American colonies. There were many marked and unmarked antebellum and Civil War sites that we visited. From Liberty Square you can actually see Sullivan’s Island, where South Carolina’s African slaves were kept in pens after being taken off the…
The drive from Atlanta through to the east coast of Georgia was long. We left far too late, after drinking delicious but overpriced coffee and avocado with poached eggs (who wouldn’t leave late for that option). Driving across the state of Georgia was hot. The weather was humid, the cicadas buzzing even more furiously. I…
It’s nearly impossible to be in Atlanta and not feel the ghosts of the civil rights movement — and for good reason. Atlanta is the home of the movement and many of the key events were either planned or held here. The city is where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church…
Today I drove from Birmingham, Alabama to Atlanta, Georgia by myself. As I drove, I listened to Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast about the Civil Rights movement, and one in particular called The Foot-soldier of Birmingham. It was such a pleasure to listen to someone comment on a place of historical significance that I had…
This blog post is probably the hardest to write so far. I am filled to the brim with ideas, thoughts, and frustrations. Writing a blog is harder than I thought, for documenting feeling (with the fear of over-sharing), needing to be sensitive and the fear of offending, and realizing that you are putting words down…
Today was spent in the Alabama capital of Montgomery, in many ways the most significant place in the Civil Rights Movement. This is where activist Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a public bus that kicked off the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott, in which tens of thousands of ordinary citizens protested continuing…
