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| A Tour of Ghosts, History and the South’s Civil Rights Past | A Tour of Ghosts, History and the South’s Civil Rights Past |
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| SELMA, Ala., — In the lobby of the antebellum St. James Hotel, on a desolate street in Selma, Ala., around the corner from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, there’s a photograph of a resident ghost. | SELMA, Ala., — In the lobby of the antebellum St. James Hotel, on a desolate street in Selma, Ala., around the corner from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, there’s a photograph of a resident ghost. |
| Well, maybe it’s a ghost and maybe it’s a handkerchief, a smudge, a white bat, a moth or just a reflection of the camera’s flash. But if it’s a ghost, it has plenty of company. According to legend, at the hotel, built in 1837, ghosts include the outlaw Jesse James, who was a guest at the hotel in 1881 and still clanks around in spurs; his mistress, Lucinda, whose portrait still graces the walls; a barking dog of unknown provenance and no doubt others. | Well, maybe it’s a ghost and maybe it’s a handkerchief, a smudge, a white bat, a moth or just a reflection of the camera’s flash. But if it’s a ghost, it has plenty of company. According to legend, at the hotel, built in 1837, ghosts include the outlaw Jesse James, who was a guest at the hotel in 1881 and still clanks around in spurs; his mistress, Lucinda, whose portrait still graces the walls; a barking dog of unknown provenance and no doubt others. |
| The South has always taken its past — real, imagined, spectral, corporeal — seriously. But there was something particularly instructive about seeing its past and present, particularly the history and aftermath of the Civil Rights era, through the eyes of Trump-era high school students, most of whom had never previously visited the South. And what struck me most was how remarkably current, even urgent, that history looked to teenagers who were born three decades after the era’s peak in the late ‘60s. | The South has always taken its past — real, imagined, spectral, corporeal — seriously. But there was something particularly instructive about seeing its past and present, particularly the history and aftermath of the Civil Rights era, through the eyes of Trump-era high school students, most of whom had never previously visited the South. And what struck me most was how remarkably current, even urgent, that history looked to teenagers who were born three decades after the era’s peak in the late ‘60s. |
| The occasion was a trip for high school students, The American South: Spotlight on Social Justice, part of the initial season of The New York Times Student Journeys. The students each paid $6,090 to participate in a 17-day tour, one of eight student trips offered. (With three of my six nights as part of the group spent in hostels and roadside barbecue our idea of haute cuisine, it wasn’t quite The Times’s $135,000, 26-day trip around the world that has generated some controversy. But the price tag on this one definitely limited participation to families of means). | The occasion was a trip for high school students, The American South: Spotlight on Social Justice, part of the initial season of The New York Times Student Journeys. The students each paid $6,090 to participate in a 17-day tour, one of eight student trips offered. (With three of my six nights as part of the group spent in hostels and roadside barbecue our idea of haute cuisine, it wasn’t quite The Times’s $135,000, 26-day trip around the world that has generated some controversy. But the price tag on this one definitely limited participation to families of means). |
| That said, the 12 students, most of them from New York and California, who traversed the South in a Toyota van and Ford SUV, texting and Snapchatting between vehicles as they traveled, could not have been more enthusiastic, curious and engaged. Students visited Whitney Plantation, near Wallace, La., where John Cummings, a white Southerner in his late 70s spent 16 years and more than $8 million of his own money on a museum documenting the history and daily life of slavery in America. We visited the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial Center and the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala. At the initiative, we saw film footage that included the experiences of Anthony Ray Hinton, who was released from an Alabama prison in 2015 nearly 30 years after he was sentenced to death for two murders he did not commit. When the film ended, a somber black man in a suit and tie strode like an apparition into the room. It was Mr. Hinton, who with remarkable clarity and eloquence, with short sentences and pauses that said as much as his words, told a story of an American hell. When tears trickled down his cheek, the students found themselves wiping away tears, too. | That said, the 12 students, most of them from New York and California, who traversed the South in a Toyota van and Ford SUV, texting and Snapchatting between vehicles as they traveled, could not have been more enthusiastic, curious and engaged. Students visited Whitney Plantation, near Wallace, La., where John Cummings, a white Southerner in his late 70s spent 16 years and more than $8 million of his own money on a museum documenting the history and daily life of slavery in America. We visited the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial Center and the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala. At the initiative, we saw film footage that included the experiences of Anthony Ray Hinton, who was released from an Alabama prison in 2015 nearly 30 years after he was sentenced to death for two murders he did not commit. When the film ended, a somber black man in a suit and tie strode like an apparition into the room. It was Mr. Hinton, who with remarkable clarity and eloquence, with short sentences and pauses that said as much as his words, told a story of an American hell. When tears trickled down his cheek, the students found themselves wiping away tears, too. |
| We went to Selma, Ala., where the famous bridge we could see from our hotel balcony, was the scene of the Bloody Sunday attack by law officers on 600 Civil Rights marchers on March 7, 1965. We marched around in the broiling heat while a woman who went by Afriye Wekandodis demanded we lower our eyes and never look into hers (“You are not my equal!”), shouted racial slurs at us and led us into total darkness in a simulation of slaves being led into the belly of a slave ship as screams and moans filled the air. We attended the ecstatic Sunday service at the Tabernacle of Praise, where parishioners danced, sang and fainted in the aisles and Selma’s energetic young mayor, the church’s associate pastor, Darrio Melton, preached the sermon. | We went to Selma, Ala., where the famous bridge we could see from our hotel balcony, was the scene of the Bloody Sunday attack by law officers on 600 Civil Rights marchers on March 7, 1965. We marched around in the broiling heat while a woman who went by Afriye Wekandodis demanded we lower our eyes and never look into hers (“You are not my equal!”), shouted racial slurs at us and led us into total darkness in a simulation of slaves being led into the belly of a slave ship as screams and moans filled the air. We attended the ecstatic Sunday service at the Tabernacle of Praise, where parishioners danced, sang and fainted in the aisles and Selma’s energetic young mayor, the church’s associate pastor, Darrio Melton, preached the sermon. |
| They were struck by the kindness and spirituality of people in Selma, the unlikely charm of hanging out in the hot sun with an amiably gabby attendant at a rest stop in Mississippi. They were taken aback by the forlorn empty storefronts, for-lease signs and boarded windows in Selma and the Mississippi Delta, the sense of places that once made history and now were left behind by it. | They were struck by the kindness and spirituality of people in Selma, the unlikely charm of hanging out in the hot sun with an amiably gabby attendant at a rest stop in Mississippi. They were taken aback by the forlorn empty storefronts, for-lease signs and boarded windows in Selma and the Mississippi Delta, the sense of places that once made history and now were left behind by it. |
| And at the National Civil Rights Museum at the former Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, they did their best to make sense of the nation’s endless dance of race — from slavery to freedom; from Reconstruction to Jim Crow; from civil rights to backlash and today’s pushback against the right to vote — an endless cycle of progress and regression that shows no signs of abating. | And at the National Civil Rights Museum at the former Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, they did their best to make sense of the nation’s endless dance of race — from slavery to freedom; from Reconstruction to Jim Crow; from civil rights to backlash and today’s pushback against the right to vote — an endless cycle of progress and regression that shows no signs of abating. |
| More than half a century ago, as the Civil Rights movement heated up, Howard Zinn, then a young historian at Spelman College, came to the South much as these students did. He saw what at first seemed an alien place that seemed as if it was marked off “as with a giant cleaver from the rest of the nation.” | More than half a century ago, as the Civil Rights movement heated up, Howard Zinn, then a young historian at Spelman College, came to the South much as these students did. He saw what at first seemed an alien place that seemed as if it was marked off “as with a giant cleaver from the rest of the nation.” |
| But after seven years in Atlanta, even at the height of the Civil Rights era, he came to see something else. The South, he wrote in 1964, “is not a mutation born by some accident into the normal lovely American family. It has simply taken the national genes and done the most with them.” While the South may be going through the early stages of a kind of shock therapy, he wrote, the rest of the nation should understand, “that it stands by not as an administering doctor but as the next patient in line.” | But after seven years in Atlanta, even at the height of the Civil Rights era, he came to see something else. The South, he wrote in 1964, “is not a mutation born by some accident into the normal lovely American family. It has simply taken the national genes and done the most with them.” While the South may be going through the early stages of a kind of shock therapy, he wrote, the rest of the nation should understand, “that it stands by not as an administering doctor but as the next patient in line.” |
| I, at first, thought this trip might seem a little like ancient history to these students, something that played out long ago in a different place and time. It didn’t. Instead, they spoke the language of Trayvon Martin and Black Lives Matter, mass incarceration, Ferguson and stop and frisk. It never occurred to them that the Southern experience, the Civil Rights experience, was not the American experience. | I, at first, thought this trip might seem a little like ancient history to these students, something that played out long ago in a different place and time. It didn’t. Instead, they spoke the language of Trayvon Martin and Black Lives Matter, mass incarceration, Ferguson and stop and frisk. It never occurred to them that the Southern experience, the Civil Rights experience, was not the American experience. |
| Everyone knows the enduring quote from Dr. King: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But what if it doesn’t? One student described feeling confusion and disappointment entering Selma “as I expected to cross the bridge and enter a town as lively and powerful as its history.” But then, as another noted, the Civil Rights era should be seen not “as distant history but as an incomplete story,” its ghosts still hovering in the air, its arc uncertain, its end nowhere remotely in sight. |