Civil Rights

Over the last four days, we have hit four different states, but there were a couple of cities that stuck out from the rest.  A few days ago we went through Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama. Each of these cities played a major role in Civil Rights Movement.

Montgomery was the city in which Rosa Parks took her famous stand in a city bus. For those of you who do not know about this critical piece of our history, Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, boarded a Montgomery bus in 1955, two stops later the bus was full, leaving a white man nowhere to sit. The driver told Parks to get out of her seat, so the white man could sit down. She refused. Minutes later the was being handcuffed, and sent to the city jail. In response, the black citizens of Montgomery, headed by Martin Luther King Jr. organized a boycott of the city buses, and began carpooling, using Church cars, and walking.  They were met with violence, revoked insurances, and little civil progress. A lawsuit was filed, in the hopes that the segregated bus system in Montgomery be found unconstitutional.

In Birmingham we went to the National Civil Rights Institute. As amazing as learning about the men and women who fought for civil rights and basic freedoms was, I could not get my mind away from the stories of violence and hatred I was reading on exhibit plaques. One of the exhibits had a  Ku Klux Klan robe, anonymously donated. as well as a burnt cross, actually recovered from a crime scene.

Shivers were sent down my spine as I saw pictures of black men hung from a tree in their own front yard, a testimonial from a black man, who was castrated for enrolling his children in an all white school. An eleven year old African American boy who was shot in the chest, while riding on his brother's bike handlebars. The shooter served six months in juvenile hall.

Next door to the National Civil Rights Institute was the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the site of a KKK bomb, that killed four girls.

Stories of KKK, skinheads, and other white supremacists scare the crap out of me. And it is almost unbelievable to  me that today, in 2011, these hate groups are still in full operation. The Southern Poverty Law Center is an organization that deals with hate groups and such. Their website has a hate map, that tracks all knows American hate groups. when I saw this map, I just about shit myself. The thought of any white supremacists not only scares me, but pisses me off. I simply cant believe that there are still such racists I could not believe it. sure I knew there were some ignorant people out there, but I find it unfathomable that there is anybody in this great nation that can truly hate someone for there ethnicity, or religion.

Learning about the civil rights movement made me very embarrassed. As great as the movement was, it never should have happened. It is horrible that anyone was EVER oppressed in America. That being said, I am truly proud of our country, that we were able to change from our hateful ways. But it also made me realize how truly far we still have to go. The work of people such as Martin Luther King Jr. Rosa parks, and further back, Fredrick Douglas, and Abraham Lincoln still needs to be finished. It really is up to us.