The final leg of my trip took me back to Tennessee, first to Memphis and then to Nashville. I had a few issues with my accommodations in Memphis (let’s just say that I ended up repairing my Airbnb’s toilet with a piece of dental floss), so I only stayed one night instead of two.

I kicked off the morning with a visit to the National Civil Rights Museum. The website said to allow 1.5 hours, so I was there when the doors opened at 9:00, because I was meeting a friend for lunch at 11:00. I wished I had allowed more time, as I was hurrying through the last exhibit and didn’t get to visit the other buildings. Of all the museums I visited, this one had the most comprehensive history of the civil rights movement, and I would recommend putting aside at least two hours if you go.

I walked down Beale Street in Memphis and had plans to visit Sun Studio and Stax Records that afternoon, but honestly, I just wasn’t in the mood. Next time. I did take in some music history in Nashville, where I met up with my daughter Katherine. I benefited from her encyclopedic knowledge of music at the Country Music Hall of Fame and the National Museum of African American Music, and we both enjoyed our night at the Grand Ole Opry.

I’m going to briefly return to the beginning of the week to mention one other Nashville site I visited. It was July 4th, I had just realized that most places were closed, and I was trying to figure out how to spend the day. As I looked for a place to eat breakfast, I realized that I was near The Hermitage, home of U.S. President Andrew Jackson. I’m not a fan, but keeping in mind what I’ve been reading about public history in How the Word Is Passed (mentioned in yesterday’s Mississippi post), I decided to go to see how Jackson was portrayed at his homestead.

Unlike most places I went (except the Museum of the Mississippi Delta and the Grand Ole Opry), there was pretty much an all-white crowd, many dressed in red, white, and blue for the Fourth. I took the guided tour of the house, then walked around the grounds to the slave quarters. Compared to what I saw the next day at the Legacy Museum, slavery was portrayed in a pretty benign light, with Jackson represented as a man who tried to provide well for the enslaved people on his property. Interestingly, a sign describing slave life was half-hidden by an open door, and another one called “Determined Resistance” was covered by plastic so dirty and scratched it was difficult to read.

I include this, because as I traveled through the South for a week, I kept thinking about how history is the stories we tell, whether we are telling them to our children, to our students, or to ourselves. The stories can shine a light on certain people and events and keep others hidden away in the dark. They inform the way we move forward into the future, helping us decide who we want as leaders and which groups of people we want to lift up or to oppress.

One night in Alabama, looking for some comfort food after a long day, I stopped at an Applebee’s for dinner. My waitress was a young Black woman, cheerful but exhausted at 8 1/2 months pregnant. She told me that she was having a girl, and I asked her if she had a name picked out. Sincere, she said, a name she had chosen with her girlfriends years ago when they were back in school.

I’m sure Sincere has arrived by now, and I think of her, a Black girl growing up in Alabama, her mom full of hopes and dreams, working hard to support her. I hope Sincere can grow up learning the truth about her history, but also knowing the pride in her heritage, and with the confidence to pursue her dreams. And I know that if she does, it will be because of people like those Mississippi legislators who fought for more than a decade to get their civil rights museum, or the workers who replaced Emmett Till’s bullet-ridden sign for the fourth time, or the people (maybe you?) who write and promote books and fight to keep them in schools and libraries so that they can tell the truth about the past and offer hope for the future.

Books about Tennessee

Civil Rights

Evicted! The Struggle for the Right to Vote by Alice Faye Duncan (Calkins Creek, 2022)

Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop: The Sanitation Strike of 1968 by Alice Faye Duncan (Calkins Creek, 2018)

Martin Rising: Requiem for a King by Andrea Davis Pinkney (Scholastic, 2018)

Chasing King’s Killer: The Hunt for Martin Luther King Jr.’s Assassin by James L. Swanson (Scholastic, 2018)

Music

Elvis: The Story of the Rock and Roll King by Bonnie Christensen (Henry Holt, 2015)

Swing Sisters: The Story of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm by Karen Deans (Holiday House, 2015)

We Rock! (Music Lab): A Fun Family Guide for Exploring Rock Music History by Jason Hanley (Quarry Books, 2015)

Muddy: The Story of Blues Legend Muddy Waters by Michael Mahin (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2017)

The Roots of Rap: 16 Bars on the 4 Pillars of Hip-Hop by Carole Boston Weatherford (little bee books, 2019)

Elvis Is King! by Jonah Winter (Schwartz and Wade, 2019)

Thursday, July 6, and I was on the road from Newbern, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi. Along the way, I stopped for lunch in Meridian, Mississippi, where I felt very Southern eating collard greens, summer squash, fried green tomatoes, cornbread, and the best macaroni and cheese I have ever tasted. The restaurant staff and clientele, like almost everywhere I went in the South, were far more racially integrated than anywhere I can think of in Massachusetts.

In Jackson, I spent most of the afternoon at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. Like the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, this museum is less than a decade old, opening on December 9, 2017, after years of stalling by the Mississippi government (you can read the tortured history here). The $15.00 admission ticket gets you into both this museum and the adjacent Museum of Mississippi History, but even I have a limited museum capacity and decided that one was enough for me. I spent about two hours learning about Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, Emmett Till, and a host of other Mississippi people and events that shaped the civil rights movement.

I spent the night in Jackson then drove to the Museum of the Mississippi Delta in Greenwood, which was quite different from the other museums I’d been visiting. With a mission to “to collect, preserve, interpret and exhibit tangible artifacts which enable the Museum to educate the public about the art, history and natural history of the Mississippi Delta and its surrounding regions,” there was much less focus on civil rights.

Another family was visiting at the same time, two young white boys and their grandparents, and I overheard them in the military history room, the grandparents telling them about their ancestors who fought in the Civil War. There was a children’s area next door where kids could dress up as Confederate soldiers and pretend to be aboard the Star of the West, a Union-turned-Confederate ship that ultimately sank in the Tallahatchie River near Greenwood.

Over 600,000 people died in the Civil War, approximately 2% of the population, which would translate to roughly six million Americans today.  We’re taught in history that wars have winners and losers, but who in America “won” in the Civil War?  I thought about this as I listened to the family in the Mississippi Delta museum talk about their ancestors who fought in a war for a cause that now seems abhorrent and inhumane to many of us.

I was reading a book on my trip called How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning of the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith (Little, Brown, and Company, 2021).  Smith writes about his visits to historic sites around the country and his observations about how the history of slavery is told. Here’s a quote that captures some of my thoughts that day in the museum (page 142).

What would it take–what does it take–for you to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been told throughout your life?  Even if it means having to fundamentally reexamine who you are and who your family has been?  Just because something is difficult to accept doesn’t mean you should refuse to accept it.  Just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true.

It was a short trip from Greenwood to Money, the town where Emmett Till was brutally beaten and lynched by two white men in August of 1955, his body dumped in the same Tallahatchie River I read about earlier that day. His mother, Mamie Till, was another one of the unsung heroines of the civil rights movement, insisting that her son’s body be returned to Chicago, where his open casket funeral allowed people all over the world to bear witness to his savage murder. Overcoming unimaginable grief, she went on to graduate from college and worked for civil rights for the rest of her life, something I didn’t know until I read about it last year in the book Choosing Brave by Angela Joy.

Emmett was murdered for “flirting” with Carolyn Bryant, the 21-year-old white woman working in her family’s grocery store, an accusation Carolyn would deny later in life. I went looking for the ruins of the Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, which supposedly is still standing, but I couldn’t find them, although I did find the sign commemorating the event. Before I went on my trip, I read about another sign, marking the spot where Emmett’s body was found, that’s on its fourth version, the other three having been thrown into the river or shot full of bullet holes.

I felt a bit spooked when I turned off the highway in search of the store, and it felt like the landscape hadn’t changed much since 1955. There were acres of crops in all directions, and I realized from the puffy white stuff blowing around the sides of the road that these were cotton fields. The road turned to a mix of gravel and red dirt shortly before I spotted the sign, and I got out to take pictures and walk around a bit in my fruitless attempt to find the store. Like so many times during the week, it seemed almost unreal that I was standing in a place where history had been made–the Freedom Riders stepping off a bus at the Montgomery Greyhound Station where the Freedom Rides Museum now stands, people being put up for sale at slave markets on the same land the Legacy Museum is built on, and 14-year-old Emmett Till walking up the dirt path to buy candy at Bryant’s Grocery Store in the spot where I now stood across from endless cotton fields.

Books about Mississippi

Greenwood

That Flag by Tameka Fryer Brown (HarperCollins, 2023)

Midnight Without a Moon by Linda Williams Jackson (Clarion Books, 2017)

Choosing Brave: How Mamie Till-Mobley and Emmett Till Sparked the Civil Rights Movement by Angela Joy (Roaring Brook Press, 2022)

Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2018)

Revolution by Deborah Wiles (Scholastic, 2014)

Jackson

Midnight Teacher: Lilly Ann Granderson and Her Secret School by Janet Halfmann (Lee and Low, 2018)

The Lucky Ones by Linda Williams Jackson (Candlewick, 2022)

Freedom School, Yes! by Amy Littlesugar (Philomel Books, 2001)

Loretta Little Looks Back: Three Voices Go Tell It by Andrea Davis Pinkney (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2020)

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor (Dial, 1976)

Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer: Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement by Carole Boston Weatherford (Candlewick, 2015)

This summer I decided to travel to the Deep South. I flew to Nashville, rented a car, and drove to Alabama, Mississippi, and back to Tennessee, where I visited Memphis before returning to Nashville. Aside from a marching band trip to the Mardi Gras when I was 15, I’ve never traveled in this part of the country, and I was curious to experience it for many reasons.

Thanks in large part to books that I’ve read and reviewed here over the years, I have learned far more about Black history than I ever did in school, and I wanted to see some of the places that I’ve learned about. The history of the South continues to have an enormous impact on the United States today, and I wanted to experience for myself what this part of the country is like and to witness the ways that its history is told. I’ll be writing three posts to cover the eight days I spent on this trip.

I arrived in Nashville on July 3, with a plan to start in Birmingham on July 4. Yes, July 4. Not the best planning on my part, as both the 16th Street Baptist Church and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute were closed for the holiday. I made a quick stop so that I could at least see the outside of the church, then drove on to Montgomery.

I started my tour of Montgomery the next day with a trip to the Rosa Parks Museum and Library. The museum does a great job of bringing Rosa Parks’s contributions to life with a re-enactment of her bus ride and arrest, and plenty of artifacts and information about the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

One recurring theme for me on this trip was the marginalization of women in the civil rights movement, and it started at this museum. I learned that Rosa Parks and her husband lost their jobs and received death threats due to her activism, leading them to move to Detroit. There, Parks continued to work for civil rights, often embracing a more militant philosophy than Martin Luther King, Jr. She was included to the 1963 March on Washington, but only introduced and recognized, not invited to speak.

From there, I headed for the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum. These are both part of the Equal Justice Initiative, have a total admission fee of $5.00, and are about a five-minute drive from each other. I started at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a memorial for the victims of lynching. It’s a 600-acre open-air space on top of a hill: a roof with slab after slab suspended from it, arranged by state and county, each one listing the victims of lynching in that county with each person’s name if its known, race, gender, and reason for and date of their murder.

The Legacy Museum’s full name is The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, and it explores the legacy of racism in America, beginning with the African slave trade and continuing through slavery, Jim Crow, chain gangs, and the mass incarceration of the Black population that continues today. There are lots of interactive exhibits, and it would be easy to spend most of the day at these two institutions.

They are hard places to visit, and probably best for middle school kids and older, but I wish every American could see them. I would suggest starting with the Legacy Museum. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is described as a “sacred space for truth-telling and reflection about racial terrorism and its legacy,” and serves as a place to reflect on what is shown in the museum. I saw a man weeping in the middle of the Legacy Museum; you may want to plan on some breaks along the way.

I finished up in Montgomery at the Freedom Rides Museum, which provides an engaging history of the 1961 Freedom Rides, but after my other museum visits, I couldn’t help feeling discouraged by what I learned there. The Supreme Court ruled in 1946 that segregation on interstate buses was unconstitutional, but southern states ignored the ruling. The Freedom Riders endured a bus fire, arrests, and lengthy imprisonments in inhumane conditions just to finally get this 15-year-old ruling enforced.

I asked the tour guide about Diane Nash, whom I recently learned about from the book Love Is Loud by Sandra Neil Wallace.  A leader in desegregating Nashville’s lunch counters and organizing the Freedom Rides, Diane is another woman who was key to the success of the civil rights movement, but whose name is not as well-known as many of the men.  She continues her activism to this day, and I learned that, while Representative John Lewis agreed to record some of the narration heard in the museum, Diane Nash refused. The museum is run by the state of Alabama, and she didn’t want to support the state government in any way.

I had an AirBnB reserved in Newbern, Alabama, and drove through Selma on my way there. I saw a bridge ahead and realized it was the Edmund Pettus Bridge made famous by the brutal beatings of demonstrators on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, and by the Selma-to-Montgomery march. I stopped for a photo and walked around the interpretive center there. I had plans to visit the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute but felt too fried by my day to do much more.

A Black man approached me as I was heading for my car and told me that he had two uncles who were in the 1965 march. They were never bitter, he said, and believed that we are all “99.5% the same.” He and his wife are teachers, and he was selling a newspaper about their work mentoring local kids. He shook his head at the amount of gun violence in his community and the lack of political will to do anything to stop it. I found myself tearing up from all that I had seen that day, and after I bought a paper from him, we hugged at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Books about Alabama

Birmingham

Let the Children March by Monica Clark-Robinson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018)

The Watsons Go to Birmingham–1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis (Delacorte Press, 1995)

The Youngest Marcher: The Story of Audrey Faye Hendricks, A Young Civil Rights Activist by Cynthia Levinson (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2017)

We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children’s March by Cynthia Levinson (Peachtree, 2012)

Montgomery

Because Claudette by Tracey Baptiste (Dial Books, 2022)

Twelve Days in May: Freedom Ride 1961 by Larry Dane Brimner (Calkins Creek, 2017)

Rosa by Nikki Giovanni (Henry Holt and Co., 2005)

Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose (Square Fish, 2009)

Rosa’s Bus by Jo S. Kittinger (Calkins Creek, 2017)

Rosa Parks: My Story by Rosa Parks (Puffin, 1999)

Sweet Justice: Georgia Gilmore and the Montgomery Bus Boycott by Mara Rockliff (Random House Studio, 2022)

Love Is Loud: How Diane Nash Led the Civil Rights Movement by Sandra Neil Wallace (Paula Wiseman Books, 2023)

Selma

Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My Story of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March by Lynda Blackmon Lowery (Dial Books, 2015)

Because of You, John Lewis: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship by Andrea Davis Pinkney (Scholastic, 2022)

The Teachers March! How Selma’s Teachers Changed History by Sandra Neil Wallace (Calkins Creek, 2020)

Child of the Civil Rights Movement by Paula Young Shelton (Schwartz and Wade, 2009)