On the Civil Rights Trail

2 February, Meridian, MS.

Warm yesterday - we were in T-shirts. Amazing when we look back over the last of few days of freezing icy weather.

Continuing our Civil War theme, we headed to Vicksburg yesterday to tour the National Military Park that commemorates the siege of Vicksburg in 1862. The battlefield today is an enormous National Park with hundreds of monuments to the units and leaders from all the states involved in the battle.

 

 

 

Up early this morning to hit Cracker Barrel Country Kitchen again. Breakfast this time. Grits, gravy, biscuits, hash browns, eggs and bacon. Ten dollars each including bottomless coffee. Love southern food!

 

Back in Jackson, we hit the Mississippi Museum of Art and the Old State House Museum. We had both completely to ourselves. Not a culture loving Mississippian in sight. Mind you, it is Super Bowl Sunday, so most folk are indoors watching TV in the lead-up to the big game tonight.

 

Weather wise, we have had it all this week - snow, ice, extreme cold, T-shirt sunny days and today, a savage tropical storm. Who cares? We have beer, peanuts, chocolate covered pretzels and beer to watch the Super Bowl. No idea what is happening in the game, but the advertisements are hilarious.

 

3 February, Montgomery, AL.

Off the Interstates for most of the day today, we roamed through some very poor parts of Mississippi and Alabama. Driving through towns like Uniontown, AL and the poorer parts of Demopolis and Selma remind us yet again that the USA has a large number of people living way below the poverty line and, in this part of the country, they are predominantly African Americans. Last time we looked at the figures, more than 50 million Americans were surviving on food stamps. The downtown areas of these towns are simply depressing. Deserted buildings, vacant overgrown lots in the centre of town and next to no people about on the streets. On the outskirts of Selma we drove past a large estate of small brick homes. At first we thought the whole area was deserted, broken windows, burnt-out houses and abandoned cars our clues. But no, many of the homes were occupied and children played on the junk-littered streets. The whole scene put us in mind of the townships in South Africa. On the other extreme, some areas are just beautiful, grand southern mansions with huge yards and many smaller, yet obviously affluent homes.

We did make a stop at a real ghost town as well. Old Cahawba. The town, once the state capital, is now just a few ruined buildings and a grave yard. Is this what will become of the centres of some of the smaller towns we have visited?

 

Selma, Alabama will be familiar to many who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s as the site of many civil rights demonstrations. The African Americans of Selma were particularly active in the movement to gain voting rights. The 14^th and 15^th amendments to the US Constitution granted voting rights to black American males in 1868 and 1870. African American women gained the right to vote, along with white women in 1920. That was all well and good, but this is the South and Washington was then and is now a long way from Jackson MS and Selma, AL. The process of voter registration was controlled and administered by the state. In the South, this guaranteed that African Americans would find it virtually impossible to register. Literacy tests, citizenship knowledge tests, physical intimidation and administrative red tape were all applied to exclude African Americans. The Voting Rights Museum that we visited in Selma graphically displayed the struggle. The whole thing had a great impact on us, as we lived through those times, albeit at a great distance.

The battle for civil and voting rights was won of course and in 2008, African Americans no doubt contributed significantly to the election of Barack Obama, the first African American President.

 

5 February, Savannah, Georgia

On 1 December 1955 an African American woman climbed on a city bus in Montgomery Alabama and changed the course of American history. Her name was Rosa Parks, she was 42 years old and she was weary after a hard day at work as a tailor’s assistant in downtown Montgomery. She refused to give up her seat, in the black section of the bus, to a white person. Half a century later, before a joint sitting of Congress, President Bill Clinton referred to this moment as the turning point in the civil liberties movement in America. Rosa died in 2005.

Yesterday we visited the fantastic Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery and were treated to one of the best historical interpretations we have seen, and we have seen a few.

What Rosa sparked that day was a boycott of buses in Montgomery that eventually ended segregation on public transport in the city and gradually throughout the US.

What followed from these events were decades of struggle for civil rights, particularly in the South. Desegregation of schools, full voting rights and equal employment opportunities for African Americans were all fought for and won, following those events in Montgomery.

Later we visited the Alabama State House. While waiting outside for a school group to enter, we noticed a star embedded in the top stair. It commemorated the fact that Jefferson Davis had stood on this exact spot in 1861 and proclaimed the Confederate States. Inside we stood in the room where the debates surrounding the framing of the Confederate Constitution were held.

 

 

 

 

Our trip down to Savannah today was a fairly long haul, broken only by a visit to the Museum of Aviation at Warner Robins. We hadn’t expected more than a few planes and the usual patriotic fixed displays. Wrong again! B52s, Stealth Bombers, scores of aircraft from the vast American flying arsenal and great fixed displays. We were enthralled (both of us!) for a couple of hours.

 

Approaching Savannah this afternoon, the sun broke through and the temperature climbed to the low 20Cs. Hopefully, our luck with the weather has changed.