Revisiting America's Broken History

Here’s an unusual edition of my travel blog. Usually I blog as I travel. But at the beginning of June I went on a service trip with our church’s high school youth group. I had some intentions of blogging while I was there, but you might not be surprised to hear that it’s hard to find downtime when you are helping lead a group of 20 teenagers.

We travelled by bus to Jackson, Mississippi, and we spent a week at the Spencer Perkins Center there. Dr. John Perkins was a civil rights activist, and he is a well-regarded thinker and writer about Christian community development, racial reconciliation, and in general hopeful living as a Christian in a fallen world. The center is named for his son, Spencer, who started a Christian community there devoted to racial reconciliation.

Morning Bible study found us listening to Dr. Perkins or his grandson, Big John, learning among other things about how to love our neighbor with new insights into the Good Samaritan story. After Bible study, we went to work either painting inside a couple of houses that the Perkins Center owns or doing landscape and yard maintenance in the neighborhood.

The Perkins Center is located in West Jackson, an area dogged by poverty and crime, as is much of the city of Jackson since white flight left a “donut hole” in the middle of suburbia. Our first night there, we attended a rally organized by area churches in response to the 10 murders that had happened in the previous month’s time. The church leaders were joined by the mayor, councilmen, and even a congressman. They prayed, preached, and outlined steps that they plan to take to help end the violence. It was a moving experience to hear these leaders crying out to God and encouraging their community to see the value in everyone around them. 
 

So far this doesn’t seem like much of a travel blog entry, since I’m telling you some of the downsides of visiting Jackson, Mississippi. But bear with me.

Jackson and the nearby town of Mendenhall were true eye-openers to our students and adult leaders alike. We took a break one day to tour the area. Before we headed out, we stopped in at a coffee house, Koinonia. Koinonia is an intentional effort to establish local, black-owned businesses. Opening such a business is an act of faith, and it requires community buy-in. While we were there, a side room was filling up with local leaders who make a point of holding their meetings at the coffee shop. Local business is always a hard row to hoe, and even though the Jackson State University is practically across a couple of lawns, students there tend to frequent the Starbucks recently added to the campus.

The night before the tour we watched the movie “Ghosts of Mississippi,” in which Alec Baldwin plays the lawyer who decides to look into the case against Byron de la Beckwith, who stood in a wooded area and shot Evers in his own driveway. We passed the Mississippi Supreme Court building, confederate flag flying high, where Medgar Evers’ killer was finally brought to justice more than 30 years after his assassination.

Driving through the downtown area of Jackson, we saw the former Woolworth’s where black and white patrons staged “sit-ins” to protest Jim Crow laws.

We passed through the business district that houses the funeral home where Evers’ visitation was, a business district that white customers refused to patronize as black business owners moved in.

And then we went to see Medgar Evers’ home. We had just watched the movie the night before, which focused mainly on the trial, but it connected us to the personal impact of the assassination. That Wednesday morning we stood in the driveway where this man was gunned down, with his wife and children hiding in the bathtub as they had been trained to do in case of any threat. The house was built with no front door, with windows higher than normal. Their children were trained to move directly from the passenger side of the car directly to the door of the house to minimize their risk. It was an emotional moment for everyone.

We took a break at Louise’s Restaurant in Mendenhall, where we encountered a long buffet of fried chicken, fried catfish, hush puppies, greens, dressing, cornbread, and a million other things. Not to mention about 15 different desserts. I think we all overdid it, but it was a treat!

After that interlude, we saw more of Mendenhall, where we could see “the quarters”, the black area of town with a name that alludes to slave quarters. Narrow roads and housing that flooded every time it rained for decades opened up to wide streets with neat sidewalks as you cross the railroad tracks into the white side of town. Our tour guide shared with us astonishing facts about the lack of integration until very recent years in nearby churches, and she pointed out some of the community development work that Dr. Perkins and others had been involved in—early childhood education, health clinics, and other basic needs for people with minimal resources.

When our week was finished, we headed back home on the bus. But we made one more stop in Memphis.

There we visited the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and which is now the home of the National Civil Rights Museum. Here we saw the culmination of our week and our year. Starting with seeing what a portion of a slave ship might have been like, we experienced the history of black America in chronological order.

We learned that after abolition, and before Jim Crow laws started to come about, there was a period of time when newly freed slaves experienced unprecedented opportunity. During the Reconstruction period, 15% of officeholders were black. That is a higher percentage than in 1990.

We could step onto a segregated city bus while we learned about the boycott of Montgomery, Alabama buses after Rosa Parks’ arrest. People, including MLK, who were part of the boycott—meaning they walked or participated in carpools—were arrested for interfering with businesses!

We learned more about the Freedom Riders who traveled from the north into the south on Greyhound buses that were legally integrated at the initial station in the north but illegally integrated at the southern destination. We had seen the former Greyhound station in Jackson, where one of the buses with Freedom Riders was bombed.

Many of our students had seen the movie “Selma”; at the museum we could begin the journey across a replica of the bridge.

The tour ends with a reconstructed view of the two hotel rooms that MLK used. A replica of his suitcase included, as did his real suitcase, a copy of his most recent book at the time, “Strength to Love.”

The National Civil Rights Museum is fantastic, painful, and inspiring. We could have spent many more hours there. I highly recommend a visit.

A very different kind of travel recommendation, but so important and profound. If you want to understand why we have racial tensions in our country today, this museum will make clear the complicated, heartbreaking history that we still struggle with.