Greetings, CUCC friends,
Throughout the week we’ll be adding photos and more to this post so you can journey with us on the Racial Justice Pilgrimage. Keep checking back for more photos and please pray that Spirit will guide each of us and our group together on this journey.
Monday, June 13 – Traveling to Birmingham, AL
Śānti shares information
Gathering for our departure prayer
We started the morning at CUCC, gathering for prayer for our journey. These are photos from our prayer circle at CUCC.
Our group of 20 divided into 6 cars for the 9 hour drive to our first stop: Birmingham, Alabama. The photo that leads the article shows the joyful reunion of the pilgrims at dinner taken. Tonight’s devotion gave us an opportunity to recall a time we had witnessed, experienced or caused an injustice.
Tuesday, June 14 – Birmingham and Selma AL
After our morning prayer time, we drove to the 16th Street Baptist Church, an active congregation which houses as a Christian witness an interpretive center of the bombing of the church in 1963 – a bombing that led to the deaths of 4 youth on their Youth Sunday. Each of us has their own stories to tell about how the visit shook and moved us; ask us when you see us next. After a quick and delicious lunch break filled with conversation to unpack the morning, we returned across the street from the church to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. We wandered through the extensive museum at our own pace, gravitating to exhibits and timelines at will. Some of us found time to cross the street to the Kelly Ingram Park, a formerly whites-only park in which the young people of the Children’s Crusade began their march to the city hall and were attacked by dogs and water cannons. The tree-lined park, which is on the US Civil Rights Trail, is full of powerful sculptures that tell the story of that day. Leaving Birmingham, our drive through the rolling and forested hills of central Alabama took us to Selma. We gathered for a photo and then walked in small clusters on the sidewalk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the broad Alabama River. We’re all smiles in the photo, yet each of us was carrying the emotions and thoughts of the day over that bridge. At the hotel we closed our evening raising questions that remain for each of us, forming a litany; some of us hung around to hear Rhiannon Giddens “Birmingham Sunday,” the story of the day of the bombing. Listen here.
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Throughout Birmingham banners like these directed pilgrims on the Civil Rights Trail. We walked only a little of it.
Our group in front of 16th Street Baptist Church, a prominent leader in civil rights organizing in Birmingham.
Standing at the place where the bomb was placed at 16th Street Baptist Church, listening to the guide.
Listening to the tour guide in the sanctuary
In the bombing, the face and heart of Jesus were broken out. All of the sanctuary windows have since been repaired.
A window created by a Welsh pastor/craftsman as a gift to the people of 16th Street Baptist Church. They were reluctant to accept it lest it cause another bombing.
One of our guides - a professional organist - played a hymn for us, all stops out.
"A Love That Forgives" honors the four girls killed in the bombing a the church across the street.
Inscription on "A Love That Forgives."
The Children's Crusade began their march in the park across from the church. There they were attacked by dogs and fire hoses.
A monument to the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement in Kelly Ingram Park
At Kelly Ingram Park
Gathering at the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum. In the shade!
We're about to walk across the Edmund Pettus bridge.
Walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge
Walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge
Two of the monuments to civil rights leaders at the park at the Edmund Pettus bridge.
Historic marker for the Remembrance Project in Dallas County AL. Placed in the park at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Dinner along the Alabama River
Dinner conversation
Listening to "Birmingham Sunday"
Wednesday, June 15 – Selma to Montgomery AL
This morning we gathered for prayer in the only space available – the swimming pool pavilion. Did you know that 20 voices sound like 100 when lifted in song surrounded by glass and water? “Go Down Moses,” the song associated with the scripture for our pilgrimage, was full and prayerful as we surprised ourselves with our strength.
Our journey to Montgomery followed the route of the 1965 march for civil rights: across the Edmund Pettus bridge and through the rolling hills and tree-surrounded fields of central Alabama, bringing alive the vulnerability of those hundreds walking through open country. After a hearty southern lunch, we divided into two groups as our interests directed, visiting the Freedom Rides Museum in the Greyhound Station where the 1961 freedom riders were viciously attacked or the Civil Rights Memorial Center at the Southern Poverty Law Center, long-time legal champions of justice in the south. We came back together to explore the Rosa Parks Museum, built at the site where Rosa Parks was removed from the bus for refusing to relinquish her seat. Tired, but our minds still churning with being in the places where everyday people took extraordinary risks for justice, we collapsed at our hotel, ate dinner, and relaxed for the evening.
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Thursday, June 16 – Montgomery
We spent today at two sites connected to the Equal Justice Initiative: The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Through holograms, small documentary theaters, photographs, eye-witness testimony, art installations, music, giant screen and small screen monitors, and – most arrestingly – the walls of jars of soil from places where African Americans were lynched – The Legacy Museum immersed us in the stories of enslavement through Jim Crow to modern mass incarceration. The trip through theatrically darkened vast rooms culminates in a light-bathed, bronzed, vaulted-ceilinged Reflection Room paneled with photos of African American luminaries – from journalists to freedom activists to playwrights to legislators – and flooded with songs of healing and hope.
You may have seen photos of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice with its forest of hanging metal slabs, one for each county from states where more than five lynchings have occurred. Each county’s slab – including one for Wake County – is engraved with the names of those murdered. A path winds up a grassy hill to the open-air pavilion, and then spirals down through the memorial to a wall of water. Each of us navigated the forest of large metal boxes in our own way, stopping to read names, to pray, to mourn, to recommit. The hour spent in the almost 100 degree heat brought home the fragile humanity of the victims.
With so much to process together, we were grateful for the hospitality of Immanuel Presbyterian Church. Rev. Elizabeth O’Neill and members welcomed us with cold water and sweet snacks, then listened as we told stories of what we had seen and felt, witnesses to our effort to understand what God was asking of us.
[Note from Jane: Several pilgrims submitted photos special to them from the Memorial; I included all so you could receive varied perspectives.]
Warning: Many of these images are disturbing.
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Entering The Legacy Museum.
Security was tight, yet most of us experienced at least one time when a guard checked in with us, asking if we were okay.
A lunch break to rest and feed our spirits.
A sculpture at the begining of the walk to the hilltop pavilion.
Each stellae is inscribed with the names of those lynched from one county. At first the stellae hang at ground level, then just head level (as here)...
The number of people lynched is unimaginable...
Inscription at the Peace and Justice Memorial
Wake County stellae 800
Each stellae has a companion resting in the garden, awaiting a home in the county it represents. A group is Wake County is working to return George Taylor's memorial to our county courthouse.
Footprints invite us to walk with those who chose to boycott the buses in Montgomery.
A modern symbol that turns a symbol of surrender into an act of resistance - Hands up, don't shoot.
Friday, June 17 – Atlanta
Our final morning prayers together took place around the pool under the busy flight path of the Atlanta airport, providing opportunities for dramatic pauses in the reading of scripture as we waited for the skies to clear. Then we were off to Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Park – a complex of buildings giving glimpses into the life and legacy of Dr. King. Each car-full of pilgrims circuited the blocks at our own pace. Dr. King’s birth home is a Queen Anne Victorian in a neighborhood that was home to doctors, teachers and laborers. The early Ebenezer Baptist Church where his father was pastor and the newer and larger church complex which is now led by Rev./Senator Raphael Warnock were closed, but we could walk by and consider the strength and entrepreneurship of the black community that built and maintain these ministries. The King Center/Center for Non-violence houses a one-room museum of some personal effects and many of the awards received by Dr. and Mrs. King. Outside in a plaza a long pool of gently falling water has at its center the crypt for Dr. and Mrs. King and across from that is the eternal flame. The pool ends at a wall in which are chiseled Dr. King’s six principles of non-violence, which are still taught through in-person and online classes.
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What’s next for the pilgrims?
The pilgrims will gather on June 26 to reflect on their travels and beginning planning to how to communicate to the congregation some of our experiences and what action we may propose to further CUCC’s work for racial justice. Meanwhile, Roger is gathering ideas to create a resource for other congregations considering making a racial justice pilgrimage.
What’s next for you?
Mark your calendar for August 21. The pilgrims will be presenting their experiences at gathering after 10:30 worship. Watch the newsletter for more information.