As we left our motel around nine in the morning, I knew rain was near because the air was familiarly humid and dank and close.  Because of that forecast, we’d decided to visit the outdoor Memorial first and the indoor Museum later, but the woman who sold us tickets urged us to reverse our schedule.  A group of 400 was to arrive in half an hour–half to go to each exhibit–so she promised us time in the museum with very few other guests, so we stayed at the Museum site.  Whereas the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. is encyclopedic in scope, this one has a single focus–everything in it is about the enormous number of lynchings that have taken place in this country–4,000 and counting.  What that means is the depth of research is overwhelming in detail.  One whole room is made up of long gray strips at the bottom of each is a white panel on which is written the names of victims of this barbaric behavior.  The panels also have a short entry detailing why each person was lynched.  We could have spent an entire morning just moving from strip to strip, absorbing how absurd these incidents were and taking in just how heinous and inhumane each was.  I decided to read just a few since there was no time to concentrate on this room because there were many other rooms I wanted to visit.  One of mine listed three names–two women and one man–all of whom were servants in some white person’s home.  They were hanged because their employers accused the servants of poisoning them.  Of course the white people were fine a few days after their accusation.  They probably just ate something that gave them momentary food poisoning, but that caused the legally sanctioned deaths three other human beings.

As my friend and I had spoken about what we might see in this museum, we wondered about photographic evidence since it seemed unlikely that people would take photographs of such horrible examples of white racism.  Well, that was naïve.  Like the Nazis who photographed life in the concentration camps with great alacrity, white Southerners seemed fascinated with recording for posterity the actual events at which blacks were lynched or burned or shot or all of the above in sequence.  While many of these photographs are of angry white men in the act of killing someone, others show crowds of people, often dressed up as if for church or a party.  Mothers are there with children and picnic baskets and parasols to protect them from the Southern sun.  The lynching has to have been advertised to bring so many to the location outside jails and courthouses as well as in open fields or protected woodland sites.  Standing in front of so many pictures made me have to face just how callous these atrocities were.  Angry bigoted whites had no need to conduct their torturous deeds in seclusion or under the cloak at night.  And newspaper write-ups often told us that a given black person had been dragged from the local jail house, leaving little doubt about the tacit support from so-called law-enforcement officers or sheriffs.  These newspaper accounts seem excited, even proud, to tell readers how many people attended and how much satisfaction everyone seemed to glean from watching and participating in what they called “justice.”

One of the most moving rooms in the Museum is the one containing the many jars of soil and other material dug from official lynching sites.  These jars occupy an entire wall and, if they were not evidence of such horror, they would be beautiful since soil comes in myriad shadings.  Some part of me that was detached from the reality of what is inside them had a few moments of thinking this wall was like some of Louise Nevelson’s or George Morrison’s compositions made of strips of wood in so many similar shadings.  That response was quickly replaced by a feeling of being in sacred space, since inside each glass receptacle were remains of some human being’s DNA, lovingly or respectfully or, perhaps even guiltily, salvaged from where a black person or persons lost their lives to satisfy a crazed mob’s hysterical need to assert absolute power over a fellow human being.  In order to have a jar included in this display, the locale involved has to demonstrate to the staff of the project that the community is doing something right now to assist some non-white group in their midst, so the wall also reminds viewers that in 2019 we still discriminate against some group we have defined as “other.”

The part of the Museum exhibits that moved us the most, however, was a video in which several people who were filling a jar allowed camera people to film them.  I will never forget two such vignettes.  One involved an older black heterosexual couple, the other a long black man.  The couple were dressed in such a way to suggest that they were solidly middle class.  She sat on some grass while he was scooping dirt and grass bits with a trowel.  When the jar was filled and the lid screwed on, he said “Let’s say a little prayer.”  His words were few and heart-felt before he handed the jar to her.  Clearly it was important for each of them to hold the precious material while they prayed.  She spoke more personally about the person being honored–clearly she was a distant relative and wanted to verbalize that connection.  The other subject was a middle-aged black man recently released from prison where he’d been serving a sentence that turned out to be all wrong.  DNA had proven that he was innocent–something he’d been saying all along.  His jar had been filled with soil and other natural material gathered from a shoulder of a two-lane road that had no traffic on it during the filming.  He held his filled jar close to his chest, rubbed his hand over its lid and said how glad he was to have his relative’s remains in the special jar.  He also said “I’m just glad I can take you to someplace where you’ll be respected and honored—and not just leave you on the side of a road somewhere.”  Both these filmings make clear just how sacred that space is in the Museum and how powerful is the act of filling each one by whomever has claimed that person as their own.

After about half an hour, just as our museum guide had said, a large group of black women and men began to fill the rooms where my friend and I were slowly making our way through informative and powerful displays.  Usually I can quickly feel oppressed in such situations, but not that morning.  I noticed that many of the lanyards around the men’s necks had names beginning with “Rev.” indicating that they were ministers of some sort.  My friend finally asked one of the women what group they represented, and we found out that all 400 were members of a national faith-based group working to promote justice for current black people and another racial or ethnic minorities.  They’d organized a conference to share their efforts, and people from all across this country were in attendance.  The conference was being held at a hotel across the street from the Museum and that day focused on the group’s visiting both the facilities built through the heroic efforts of Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) based in Montgomery.  Rather than feeling oppressed by all those bodies occupying the same relatively small space with me, I felt surrounded by people intent upon translating their belief system into concrete healing action.  It felt comforting to move among them as we all were trying to absorb the results of ten years of research by the staff of the EJI and then figure out what to do with what we were facing about the depths to which white supremacists had gone and still can go to insure their position of ascendancy over people of color.

After about two hours inside this storehouse of hard data and deep emotion, my friend and I left for lunch.  Then we’d brave the humid afternoon and go to the Memorial for Peace and Justice a mile or so from the downtown Museum.   How did I feel as we exited?  Ashamed of my fellow white people and deeply grateful to Mr. Stevenson and his staff for helping me face and move past that shame so that I can actively work against current manifestations of that same impulse to eradicate through any means available people somehow deemed to be outside some mythical definition of human being.

What Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative have built in Montgomery is unlike any other civil rights project I know of.  A good friend and I flew from Minneapolis about a month ago to see both the indoor Museum and the outdoor Memorial to the astounding number of lynchings executed all over this country.  Upon my return, I was moved to write a blog much like I did after spending two intense days at the Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.  Each time I’ve sat down to begin that blog, however, I have burst into tears.  So I’ve told myself I just need more distance from the actual event.  Recently, however, the friend with whom I went to Montgomery helped me figure out another reason I may have been unable to write.  As a child growing up in Fairfield, AL, a near suburb of Birmingham, in the 1940s and 50s, I was surrounded by blatant racist speech and behavior.  I recall with frightening vividness waking in the night when I was about six to see flames out my bedroom window. When I asked my parents the next morning about what I’d seen, they just said it was a fire in “Colored Town.”  Haunted by the angry flames that must be burning down people’s houses, I remember asking my father, who read the Birmingham News every day, to tell me what the paper said about this frightening event.  There never was a word written about that fire.  When I got to junior high school, I often cut through a black neighborhood adjacent to our house because it was quicker than going in the white part of town, and because there was a little store I ducked into many mornings to get a handful of hard candy from the ever-so-friendly older black man who ran it.  I saw white school mates stomp on beautiful flowers growing in the black people’s front yards or throw rocks or sticks onto their porches.  I also heard them shout horrible epithets at the adults sitting on those porches in the early morning, talking with friends.  In high school, I heard boys snicker often at their lockers about hearing of another “coon” pulled out of a nearby river or about a black body found by their dads who hunted in the woods on a weekend.  

Occasionally the newspaper did include photographs of white people dressed in their Sunday best, going to or coming from a hanging of a black person whom the paper said had committed some heinous crime–usually having to do with a white woman and having distinctly sexual overtones though at that time nothing explicit could be printed in the paper.  Because each of these articles included serious words about law and order or getting justice for the white victims, and because no counter-narrative was ever offered to me, I silently assimilated the images and explanations. While these atrocious moments seemed somehow “wrong” to me, I had no language with which to speak about them.  And I came to intuit that asking my mother or father why those boys did or said such nasty things to “Negroes” ended in mutterings or attempts to distract me so I’d shut up about such things.  So the impressions just accumulated over the years.  Even as an adult, I didn’t speak about them very often with friends, but seeing the several hundred bronze rectangles hanging in the Memorial building as my friend and I walked toward them brought it all back, I believe.  At one point, we drove across what a sign told me was the Coosa River and I felt a coldness that had nothing to do with the thermometer.  My father spent many a weekend with his friend Mr. Kelton fishing the Coosa River.  Though he seldom brought home any fish for my mother to cook, it now haunts me to consider that he might well have snagged one of the nameless bodies of black youths.  After all, those high school boys’ lewd narrative accounts often involved dragging bodies of blacks out of nearby waterways.

James Baldwin once said that not everything that is faced can be healed, but that nothing can be healed until it is faced.  It’s entirely understandable that I had no language with which to handle white atrocities against black people as I was growing up.  I can no longer, however, retreat into prolonged silence by telling myself I just need time to gain “distance” before writing about what I experienced in Mr. Stevenson’s created spaces.  So I will soon write Part 2 about my visit to Montgomery, Alabama, that has forced me to face the fact of thousands of lynchings of innocent black people by white people who acted as we did because we could do so with impunity.

The OED (Oxford English Dictionary) tells us stasis means equilibrium, coming from a Latin word meaning “stopping circulation or movement.”  When this word comes into my mind, I picture two people on an old-fashioned see-saw when they are eye-to-eye and the board is perfectly horizontal.  I also picture a perfectly still small pond in a quiet wood just before someone tosses a pebble into its midst, making lots of “circulation or movement.”  In the Renaissance, scientists and philosophers believed that each planet, newly observable because of the invention of the telescope, gave off its own special sound.  They then posited that if the planets were perfectly aligned, those individual sounds merged into perfect harmony, something they called the Music of the Spheres.  This paradisal moment was possible only when the universe was in stasis–hence it was rare indeed.

The closest we come today to any understanding of stasis occurs on March and September 20th, when we mark the Vernal and Autumnal Equinox, 24 hour periods in which there is exactly the same amount of light and darkness.  We’ve just experienced the 2019 Vernal Equinox, so I let myself sink into how it felt to know of this delicate and short-lived perfect balance:  light was on one end of the planetary see saw while darkness was on the other.  They looked each other squarely in the eye and some of us marveled at the ontological significance of this momentary secession of one state’s having dominance over the other, even if only for a few seconds.  

In the Canadian Native writer Tom King’s wry Pan-Indian novel, Green Grass, Running Water, we encounter three very ancient and very dead Native American elders who keep showing up for brief visits to the land of the living.  They make these visits at the two Equinoxes because they believe that on these magically static days, the world has a chance to wipe the old slate full of the white man’s dominance, abuse and trickery clean.  In other words, these wise old visitors from the dead hold out hope that those in power will see the error of their ways, start over, and do better.  Though all the evidence that accrues on the days and months following the Vernal or Autumnal Equinox show the old men that we whites are not facing our errors and vowing to do better, they promise to return at the next moment when light and darkness experience equilibrium.  They keep believing that if we have the courage to stop all the bad wheels and just remain at rest for a few hours, there is hope.  I thank their spirits and Tom King as their creator for being so optimistic.  And, on March 20th just past, I sat quietly in my sun room with my companion kitty, Patches, and imagined a world in which all sorts of principalities and powers stopped their gyrations and hovered long enough to glimpse a more equitable world.

When I began my career teaching literature at the University of Minnesota in 1964, I lectured.  That’s how I’d been taught as an undergraduate and graduate student, occasionally by brilliant lecturers who gave me hoards of facts and concepts, some of which I still remember.  I spent untold hours researching my authors and works and then shaping all that into 50 minutes packages that seemed to captivate and please my students.  Then this country increasingly involved in the Vietnamese War and students at Minnesota, like students all across the country, began protesting.  There came a moment here when they would politely come up to us faculty members, show us little wallet-sized cards on which was printed “Crime Against Silence.”  If we took one, it meant we were agreeing not to remain silent if we were at some social gathering where someone defended the US’s sending more and more troops to that little country.  I signed the back of mine and carried it on my person.  Once I even had to do what I’d promised and speak up about my own resistance to all the killing that was going on there.

As that war dragged on, student protests became more organized until on my campus small groups began picketing many buildings on campus where we held classes.  This presented many faculty with a choice–were we or were we not going to go inside our buildings and teach our classes?  Because my father had been a paycheck to paycheck worker at his mill, he was not paid if there were a strike against the huge company which was a subsidiary of U.S. Steel in Pittsburgh.  He taught me that crossing a picket line set up by such workers was a very bad thing to do, so I knew I was not going to walk past the young men and women outside the English Department building.  Unlike some of my colleagues, however, who say this as a classy way to avoid teaching for a while, I also knew that I wasn’t going to stop teaching Shakespeare and Milton.  So I contacted several undergraduates until I found two students who had an apartment they thought would hold all of us and we moved class to the student living section of campus called Dinkytown.   Talking about Hamlet or Paradise Lost in a tiny grungy space seemed just fine to me, the students didn’t complain, and I felt loyal to a precept my father held dear.

Maybe that change of venue dislodged my firm conviction about lecturing, so when I happened to read a short article by some radical professor teaching in California that argued that lecturing to groups of impressionable students was an imposition of our “take” on some subject matter and that there might be value in letting students express their “takes” on the same subject matter, I started to think about how I felt about delivering my carefully crafted and passionately felt words to groups of silent students who wrote down as much of what they heard as they could.  Gradually I came to understand that this pedagogical practice was not unlike what my country was doing in Viet Nam, a place I barely could find on a map and about which I knew almost nothing.  I was colonizing brains so that my students would adopt my way of thinking, never mind what might be rattling around in their own formative minds.  At one point, I remembered the pain I’d experienced as an undergraduate English major at the University of Alabama.  A professor would pose a question about Keats or Shakespeare or Thoreau.  He’d (I only had one female professor in the four years I was an undergraduate) look at hands raised, one of which was mine until I stopped bothering raising it, and call on one of the young men in class.  Rarely was my response solicited, so I eventually just sat quietly, at first holding on to my own reading of our author but finally not even bothering to let my inchoate views develop inside my own brain.

Midway through the “conflict” in Viet Nam, I decided to stop lecturing and start asking students what they thought was going on in our author.  The fact that I had no knowledge or models for conducting discussion classes, my earliest ventures in this new pedagogy were pretty awful.  I’d start class by looking out at the group of eager learners and say something like “Let’s get into small groups and then you talk about what you think is important about King Lear’s anger at his daughter, Cordelia, or why you think Tennyson is so sad over the death of his dear friend Arthur Henry Hallam, or which character appeals to you in To the Lighthouse.  I’d then sit quietly while my poor students floundered or sat in uncomfortable silence, unable to do what I asked with any real competence.  Gradually I began finding articles written by faculty across the country who were similarly experimenting in loosening their hold on what they students were being told to think about their subject matter.  I even attended a faculty seminar run by a professor in the College of Education who actually knew a lot about how to run a rigorous discussion format.  Many of my colleagues in the English Department told me I was “coddling” to student pressures to be allowed to voice their own opinion about the works we assigned them.  As I formulated responses to these accusations of leniency, I came to understand just how deep the lecture method really was colonizing thought as it produced generation after generation of new critics/readers who reproduced what their professors believed to be germane about an author or their writing.

While I and some similarly inclined colleagues were making our clumsy opening attempts to change our method of teaching, groups of black and then Native American and then Hispanic students were forcing the University of Minnesota to listen to their growing demands to have curricula the reflected their histories and struggles and ideas.  I am so grateful that my own personal confrontation with the lecture format came before their demands because that meant I could grasp the very essence of what they were demanding.  They wanted knowledge to include and embrace their worlds and not just continue to perpetuate whiteness as the only academic currency.  I was able to stand with these brave young people as they asked at first quietly but eventually quite loudly because no one was listening to the quiet and logical arguments coming from them.  Finally, the black students, who were the best organized at first, demanded that the President and his staff establish an African American Studies Program.  Though Malcolm Moos, who was that president, was not unresponsive, he couldn’t issue an executive order.  Rather he had to get the Faculty Senate to approve a modest proposal to set up a department and let faculty with some knowledge base begin offering courses while the University hired faculty with direct specialization in African American history or literature or political science.  Too many members of that Faculty Senate had no intention of diverting resources to what they considered to be ancillary at best and irrelevant at worst.  So the students began an extended sit-in in the building that housed the President and his administrative staff.

My immediate impulses were to support this effort in any way I could.  So I signed petitions from faculty that encouraged those in charge to recruit two or three new faculty members with expertise in African American history and culture.  Simultaneously, however, I figured out that the young people sitting in hallways in Morrill Hall needed tangible support, so I would buy foodstuffs that I smuggled in to their groups occupying those hallways.  Eventually President Moos was able to force a few departments in the College of Liberal Arts to begin searches for new faculty.  A small amount of office space was set aside to house a Director and a secretary and our program was born.  Recently, I attended a dance performance (of the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, ironically enough) in Northrup Auditorium, the main venue for large cultural events.   Northrup had also been the primary location for all outdoor protests of the war in Viet Nam and then of the demand for an African American Studies Program.  On an upper floor of the Auditorium a friend and I found the small and powerful exhibit documenting the prolonged sit-in and its leaders.  I remember all the faces and the scenes from hallways in Morrill Hall full of students sitting peacefully outside the President’s office.  And there’s a huge blow-up of the three black students who led the protest demanding the formation of an Afro-American Studies Department:  Horace Huntley, Rose Mary Freeman, and Warren Tucker, Junior.  It’s cold outside so they are in warm jackets with fur-lined hoods and warm gloves.  And the photographer has caught them striding along the Quadrangle sidewalk, smiling and alert, completely focused on where they are going, proud to be together as they speak truth to the academy’s powerful.   The opposite wall of the exhibit is plastered with Western Union telegraphs, typed letters on an assortment of letterheads from law firms or other colleges or local corporations, and many hand-written letters, all to President Moos.  The left half of the wall has letters from those who were violently offended by the fact that undergraduate students dared disrupt traffic in the halls of central administration.  Some told Moos he should expel the students or have police come arrest and jail them, expressed in harsh and at times offensive rhetoric.  The right hand half of the wall contains mail from people thanking the president for his measured responses and for being open to what the students argued for so forcefully.  As I walked from image to image, I felt glad to have been part of the campus during such moments of activist resolve and clarity about what education owed those who had been (and still are) ignored or barely mentioned or (worst of all) misrepresented by those posing as educators.

So I stopped handing down “truths” about British writers from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf for some of the same reasons the anti-war activists picketed our classroom buildings and the black students pressed for curricula based on their history and culture.  We all wanted to move beyond academic colonization of students by empowering them to read and respond to information that could change not only how they thought about some subject matter area, but how they would come to maneuver the world of thought and investigation.  I was in incredibly good company.