CONFRONTING THE PAST
Montgomery, Ala., wrestles with its history while building to a brighter future,
Driving past the Alabama state Capitol building in Montgomery, Michelle Browder, an African-American activist and founder of the I Am More Than … youth mentorship non-profit, pointed out a looming bronze statue of Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederacy.
It has a position of prominence right out front, as does a commemorative plaque on the marble steps marking the exact spot where he stood taking his oath of office in 1861. A state holiday recognizes his birthday.
Farther down the Capitol lawn, Browder said, was a similar statue heralding Dr. J. Marion Sims, but I didn’t recognize the name and she wouldn’t elaborate.
“You’re going to have to do your homework on that one,” she said, “because my blood pressure goes up when I talk about him.”
Browder wore red cat-eye glasses, an Army-green jacket and a T-shirt bearing the words “Dream Destroyed” and the face of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who began leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, from the basement of a Baptist church just feet from those Capitol steps.
The vehicle she was careening through downtown, often parking akimbo on sidewalks or in the middle of the street, was a six-seat electric cart, from which she leads More Than Tours — explorations of a city that has been both the site of systemic oppression of her fellow African-Americans and the birthplace of the civil rights movement.
Within about10 seconds, she’d risked that blood pressure spike to tell me about Sims.
“He’s known as the father of modern gynecology,” she said. “He enslaved black women and he used them as experiments.”
Specifically, he visited unimaginable tortures on 12 slave women, without anesthesia, under the belief that Black people felt less than whites.
“We are starting an initiative,” she said, “because we would like to see the mothers of gynecology erected beside him to give more to the story.”
The “we” she refers to is a group she’s organized called Friends of Anarcha, after a woman who endured 30 of Sims’ vaginal surgeries before he declared her a success. Montgomery was my third stop on an insane yearlong mission I’ve undertaken to visit every spot on the New York Times’ 52 Places to Go in 2018 list, and I was eager to find out why the city had snagged the No. 49 slot.
By the end of four days, I’d come to believe it should have ranked higher. As a tourist destination, Montgomery is — how shall I put this — heavy. In the same afternoon, visitors can see the Rosa Parks Museum, built at the site of her 1955 arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white person, and the first White House of the Confederacy, a National Historic Land- mark. (Browder is a descendant of Aurelia Browder, a woman who faced a similar arrest eight months before Parks, and who was the lead plaintiff in the1956 lawsuit, Browder v. Gayle, that ended the bus boycott.)
The city is also undeniably relevant right now, with a deep commitment to confronting its past of (and often present) racism, at a time when white supremacism has re-entered the national conversation in a major way. Daily, I found myself moved to tears by any number of tales of brutality or hardship, and the strength it took to tell them. Even the trees that line the streets, dripping with Spanish moss like bearded old men, seem embedded with pain.
I’d arrived in MGM, as residents call it, less than two months after national news outlets had swarmed its streets to document the contentious Senate race in which Doug Jones, a Democrat, defeated Roy Moore, the Republican who had been accused of harassing and assaulting teenage girls.
“His office is right there!” Browder said, pointing to the windows of Moore’s Foundation for Moral Law, in a building that once housed the bank that funded the Confederacy.
What really ought to bump Montgomery up the 52 Places list is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice that the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a human rights legal non-profit, is scheduled to open on April 26. Inspired by the memorials that Germany, Rwanda and South Africa have built to the atrocities of their own pasts, it pays tribute to the approximately 4,400 Black victims of lynching by white mobs in the United States from1877 to1950, and is the country’s first comprehensive memorial to racial terrorism.
The 2.5-hectare site and an accompanying museum that aims to link slavery to mass incarceration were under construction when I visited, but plans show it will consist of 800 rectangular, oxidized steel columns, each representing a particular county in the Deep South and Midwest, and bearing the names of the men, women and children killed there.
While the columns will appear at first glance to touch the ground, the floor of the memorial will actually slope downward as visitors walk through it, allowing for the columns to hang over them, like bodies.
The Initiative’s project is in many ways a companion piece to the work that the Southern Poverty Law Center, the nation’s top legal advocate for victims of hate crimes, began in Montgomery with the Civil Rights Memorial in 1989. The memorial, designed by Maya Lin, consists of a stone table overflowing with water, bearing the names of 40 people who were murdered while doing things as simple as registering Black people to vote.
Upon first impression, even with a county population of 230,000, Montgomery seems far too quaint and conservative to be home to two of the country’s most influential, progressive non-profits fighting racial bias. Its airport has a single baggage claim and the rental car area is dotted with wooden rocking chairs, for an extra dose of Southern charm.
That evening, I went to the city’s historic downtown for an informal tour with an enterprising Lyft driver, Marcus McNeal. We stood talking in the middle of those cobblestone streets for what must have been 30 minutes before another car, or even another person, came by.
The one person we did meet out and about, actually, was Brother Ricky Segers, whom we found deep into a nightly ritual he has kept up for three years, of kneeling in front of a tiny souvenir American flag he’s planted on the state Capitol grounds to ask Jesus for more “godly” leaders in this country.
He feels as if Moore was “mistreated” and Robert E. Lee was a hero. Still, he and McNeal, the Lyft driver, who is Black and at least half his age, have known each other for a while now and seem to get along great.
“It’s interesting to me, too,” McNeal said of their friendliness. He’s 24, hopes to open a chain of 24-hour coffee shops for workaholics and comes from what he described as abject poverty. The car he drove me in belongs to his mother, who has been pulling double shifts as a nurse’s assistant to pay for their heating bill that had gone from $80 to $480 (U.S.) during a cold spell that preceded my visit.
The ad hoc tour McNeal took me on had been refreshingly frank. He drove straight to a historical placard describing the bustling slave markets that had been held at Court Square, the city’s central roundabout. I asked McNeal why it didn’t have more central placement in the square and he just laughed: “What else are they going to do? It’s not like they can build an auction platform here. That would really piss some people off!” When I mentioned to McNeal that multiple people had suggested I eat at Central, an upscale Southern food restaurant in downtown’s tiny revitalized commercial district, he joked, “Central is so expensive, you’d be better off buying a restaurant and opening and stocking the kitchen yourself.” We went to Applebee’s instead, and gorged on spinach and artichoke dip.
I did end up at Central on another night, and it was indeed quite good — part of a growing culinary scene that will include gourmet offerings at the renovated Kress on Dexter building downtown, which opens in April. The former block-wide department store, built in 1929, will host rotating pop-up markets devoted to local artists — and has been engaged in incredibly responsible historical preservation, which has included donating bricks made by enslaved people to EJI — as well as keep its old “Whites Only” and “Colored Only” signs on display for posterity.
I’m also a fan of the coffee shops Prevail Union and Cafe Louisa, as well as bar standouts like Leroy Lounge, a dive with a terrific selection of wines and craft beers, and Aviator Bar, covered in airplane-themed kitsch — inspired by the Wright Brothers, who started the country’s first civilian flight school outside Montgomery.
I met a group of Black culinary students there one night who not only knew the city’s history, but said it fuelled their ambitions.
“We’re in a bar on the road that was used to bring people to be auctioned off,” said Steven McIntyre, who interns as a line cook at the highly regarded restaurant Vintage Year, “and the fact that we are here today, just hanging out, enjoying life, it’s incredible. Not super long ago, we would not be chilling here. This would not be chill.”
My best culinary experiences, though, came by way of cab- drivers I’d met. Nick Alloway sent me to Mrs. B’s Home Cooking, a yellow-painted soul food restaurant a few minutes west of downtown that serves up a different featured meat every day. Blocks north of the Capitol building is Davis Café, an even older family run soul food joint that’s the haunt of Hillard Wright, a King’s Airport shuttle driver with a salt-and-pepper moustache, a gruff baritone voice and a leather rancher’s hat that never left his head.
Following the spirit of the locals I had met, I tried to absorb as much history as I could in four days: The Dexter Parsonage Museum, where King lived in the 1950s; the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in the home where their marriage dissolved; Hank Williams’ grave in the Oakwood Annex Cemetery. What stuck with me more than any of those, though, were the three hours I spent with Wright, engaging in his favourite pastime of driving around and looking at old houses. He’d introduce each neighbourhood with factoids about its legal, and later, de facto, segregation status.
Wright, though, is not bitter. He has built for himself a quiet life of hunting and fishing, driving around for money and minding his own business.
“Even through the segregation and hatred,” he said, “Montgomery, I wouldn’t trade it. I’ve been here my whole life and I’ve enjoyed every day.”
This year, the city will erect its first statue to King in front of the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church where he used to preach near the Capitol building. The statues of Sims and Davis, erected in 1939 and 1940, will be in view, too.
This is how change seems to come in Montgomery: messy and long overdue. Still, how wonderful to see progress in action.