On May 28th Ricky and I traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, rented a car at the airport and visited the following ten civil rights related destinations. I did this to celebrate my completion of the 15 books in the Protest and Progress topic in the Best Books of the 20th Century.

1. Trail of Tears

In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act; President Andrew Jackson signed it into law two days later. In Worcester v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court, headed by Chief Justice John Marshall, ruled in 1832 that the Cherokee held sovereign land rights. President Jackson openly dismissed the ruling. 15,000 Cherokee, 4,000 Seminole as well as Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw were forcibly removed from nine states (FL, IL, NC, MO, TN, GA, AL, MS and AR) to Oklahoma. Hundreds died in the round up camps, the larger removal camps, or on the journey.

2. Birmingham Civil Rights

We stopped at the Gaston Motel and learned about the segregation that was enforced by law, custom and violence in Birmingham, AL during Jim Crow. MLK and others set up shop in the motel and planned Project C (C is for confrontation) in order to raise awareness of the injustices that were commonplace in the South. Under Project C they organized a teenager's march from the Batist Church to City Hall. Police under Bull Connor sprayed the marchers with fire hoses and directed six German Shepherds to attack the marchers. In the aftermath, a bombing of a Black church killed four young Black girls. All this brought the country's attention and the world's attention on Birmingham's segregation and it led to reforms.

3. Freedom Riders

In Morgan v. Virginia, the U.S Supreme Court ruled that segregated bus seating was unconstitutional. The ruling was not being enforced. In 1961, an interracial group of men and women boarded two buses to challenge the law. In Anniston, Alabama, white segregationists firebombed one of the buses and violently beat the riders in an attempt to stop the rides. The police did nothing to protect the riders. This led to 50 subsequent freedom bus rides. MLK did not participate in the Freedom Rides, but he and others involved in the campaign did see that provoking White Southern violence through nonviolent confrontation had a place. It attracted national attention and forced federal action.

4. Horseshoe Bend

This was where President Andrew Jackson won a battle that helped make him famous. In the battle, Jackson had 3,300 men (of which 49 were killed and 154 were wounded), while the Creek Native Americans he was fighting against had a force of 1,000 men (of which 800 were killed). The Battle (slaughter) of Horseshoe Bend ended the Creek War of 1813-14. Jackson surrounded the enemy encampment and killed anyone who tried to flee. The resulting peace treaty added 23 million acres of Creek land to the southeastern United States (3/5 of Alabama and 1/5 of Georgia).

5. Tuskegee Airmen

America's first African American Military Airmen that fought in WWII and helped desegregate the military during WWII and then came back to Alabama to help desegregate Alabama after the war.

6. Tuskegee Institute

Booker T. Washington, the first president of Tuskegee Institute, believed he could best improve the conditions of African Americans by teaching them practical job skills or helping those who were farmers become more efficient and productive. He recruited academics like George Washington Carver and instructors who could teach carpentry, bricklaying, printing, and many other trades.

7. Selma to Montgomery

a. The park ranger showed us a brochure written by the Klu Klux Klan that was distributed in Selma, Alabama when President Obama crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River (the bridge where the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery was started)
b. The propaganda stated that the Klu Klux Klan was a law and order organization, and that white supremacy was justified because Black and Hispanic people were more likely to murder people, be incarcerated, and drop out of high school.
c. Selma is economically depressed, most buildings in the center of the city next to the bridge are abandoned and crumbling.
d. We met a musician and when I went to leave him he shook my hand and almost pulled me to the ground.
e. Three voting rights marches took place over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the 1960's including the Bloody Sunday march in which non-violent marchers where sprayed with fire hoses, beaten, and tear gassed by Alabama state troopers.

8. Legacy Museum

a. The museum is located in Montgomery, Alabama on the site of a cotton warehouse where enslaved Black people were forced to labor in bondage.
b. 12m Africans were kidnapped.
c. One exhibit depicted the ship's used in the transatlantic voyages. The ship's holds in some cases had ceilings only 2 or 3 feet high where the enslaved people were forced to remain for months during the voyage. On average 75% didn't survive the transatlantic journey because of unhealthy conditions and when they died they were thrown overboard.
d. Another interactive media exhibit had a map of the Atlantic Ocean and started in the year 1,500 A.D., as the years proceeded into the future each ship full of enslaved people that made the transatlantic journey was represented by a black dot that started in an African port and traveled to a port in the Western hemisphere, in the early years there were few voyages, but by the 1,600's there were hundreds of dots making the voyage, the dots continued to cross the Atlantic in large swarms until the 1860's (the Civil War), most of the enslaved people landed in Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, Charleston, and South Carolina
e. There was an exhibit of a series of small jail cells or pens 3'x5' and when you stood in front of a pen and looked through the jail cell bars it would initiate the image of a life size 3d holographic ghost at the back of the pen and they would tell a true first-person narrative written by an enslaved person from the past that lasted about 15 minutes. Each pen had a different ghost telling a different story. The one I saw was of a young woman who had witnessed her sister being sold by a slave master to another plantation, she was put in the pen while she awaited being transported to her new plantation. Her mother and her sister (the narrator) came to the pen to visit her before the sister was taken away never to be seen again by the family. The narrator describes the whole tragic scene and the feelings she felt. Later in the story the same thing happens to the narrator.
f. An exhibit showed several of the laws that were written to regulate enslaved people, one law in Alabama decreed that free Black people were not allowed to live in the state.
g. There were data rich exhibits about segregation and the era of Jim Crow.
h. An exhibit had actual poll tests that were given to Black people that asked unanswerable questions, each poll test had a large jar of jelly beans on the desk and one question in the test asked how many jelly beans were in the jar.
i. An exhibit showed pictures of white bigots and their quotes related to enslaved people, many of them policemen (Bull Conner), governors (George Wallace) and members of the federal legislature (Strom Thurmand) and there were films of them giving speeches with their racist remarks.
j. An exhibit had an entire wall of large newspaper headlines about lynchings, how the mob took people from police custody, how if they couldn't find the accused person, they would grab the brother of the accused and kill him in place of the accused, how a lynching would be announced for the next day and thousands of people would travel to see it, how Black people were tortured in front of a crowd before they were killed, how one town had a postcard with two black people hanging from a bridge with a mob of people on the bridge looking on, how all of this happened with impunity.
k. There was an exhibit of mugshots of the 50 to 100 Black people who were arrested during the Montgomery Bus Boycott that is meant to provide inspiration to protest and question conformity.
l. There was an exhibit in which you were visiting someone in a prison and you sit in the booth in front of a holographic image of a prisoner, pick up the telephone and listen to the prisoner tell their story.
m. There was an exhibit about the incarceration rates of Black people and the injustice of it (one in three Black men born today are likely to be jailed or imprisoned).

9. National Memorial for Peace and Justice

More than 4,400 Black people killed in racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950 are remembered here. Their names are engraved on more than 800 steel monuments, one for each county where a racial terror lynching took place. There are also detailed descriptions of individual lynchings.

10. Freedom Monument Sculpture Park

This is one of the three legacy sites in Montgomery, Alabama. Protest art and original artifacts are on display here.