Home again, via "Minnie"
Trip Start
Jun 23, 2008
1
9
Trip End
Jun 30, 2008
Berkeley, California, United States
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Two flights to get here--one inexplicably north from Memphis to Minneapolis (all I can tell you about that city is that the sun sets at a later hour than in Memphis) and another flight , 45 minutes later, to California. We tried to sleep, but a baby across the aisle wailed. A charming Indian engineer from Silicon Valley took the baby from his mother and soothed him, dandled him, quieted him. We were all grateful. The man must be a father himself.
For three hours yesterday, before we left Memphis , we went to the National Civil Rights Museum, one of the most moving experiences I've ever had in a museum. Wonderfully done, so well organized, starting with the importation of Africans as slaves to Plessy vs. Ferguson, the Dred Scott decision, all those Acts we learned about in high school; Lincoln, the Civil War, the cruel resistance of the South to giving blacks the right to vote. The first civil rights leaders, the peaceful protests, sit-ins at lunch counters, all of it building to the video of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream Speech," in Washington in 1963. Jerry and I were both moved to tears at that point; it seemed the culmination so many years of oppression, so much suffering. The museum is attached to the Lorraine Motel, where MLK was shot, and at the end of the tour, visitors stand and look into the room where he slept the night before and the balcony where he was shot from across the street. A blood-stained square foot of concrete on the balcony has been replaced, but the blank square is riveting. That's where he fell.
A class of African American teenage boys moved through the museum as we did ,and they had a young museum guide assigned to them, telling them the history, very much from a "we" point of view. So moving. There was a city bus from Montgomery, like the one Rosa Parks sat on, and a replica of a burned-out Greyhound from the days of the Freedom Riders. At the end, we crossed the street to the part of the museum that incorporates the rooming house where James Earl Ray stayed, saw the room he rented, the bathroom window where he rested his rifle to shoot. An entire floor was dedicated to the crime and its investigation; even police evidence, including the bullet removed from King's body and the rifle from which it was shot.
It was an overwhelming and profound experience. I'm still absorbing it.
Then we walked back to our hotel, stopping at a sidewalk restaurant for lunch, reclaimed our car in the hotel parking lot, and set off for the airport. Intermittently, we'd bring up things we'd learned at the Museum, a disjointed conversation while each of us grappled with what we'd seen. It's shocking, the history of this country in how we've treated African Americans, deeply disturbing, to the point of unbelievable. I kept thinking of South Africa, which we were all hasty to condemn. To come out of the Museum and be greeted courteously by black guards and gift shop personnel--disorienting. They seemed the epitome of forgiveness.
If you go to Memphis, go to that museum above all else. Graceland comes in second!
