Montgomery

We arrived here Tuesday evening and the camp host, Chuck Norris, explained he didn't do that hand stuff but he did have a 9mm. He then looked at his reservation board and offered us an available site by the river which we quickly accepted. This is a COE (Corp of Engineers) site and the price for holders of a Senior Citizens pass get water and electric for $9.00 a night. Unlike an RV resort, these sites are spacious. Here's the view from our site after the fire (see below);

Wednesday we took a short tour looking for supplies and sampled some of the small local stores which had plenty of Bud-lite and chew but not Almond Milk. I've had an unannounced fear of the Southern states all my life which was fostered mostly by my imagination, but also by knowing of the prejudices of the good ole boys depicted in so many movies. So far we're just treating each other like people and it is working very well.

Thursday we went to Montgomery to view two museums created by organizations depicting life in the South for slaves and the Jim Crow era. 200+ years of domination by white Europeans. (Not sure it has ended yet.) The first place, called Legacy, depicted the treatment of slaves, the expressed opinions of whites about the black race, and how families meant nothing to slave owners. Then the museum continued to show the treatment of blacks from emancipation to the civil rights years. Finally showing how prison populations have increased dramatically since the Nixon years and the war on drugs which was really a new way to round up and punish blacks. One example of the white opinions of blacks is the surgeon Sims, known as the father of gynecology. In the 1800s, this enlightened fella performed his experiments on black women without anesthesia because he felt they didn't feel pain. We added our picture to their collection of visitors;Note: The jars in the background contain soil from each county where a lynching occurred.

We also had lunch.

    We took a shuttle to the other museum, not a year old, to see a representation of the 4000+ lynchings held into the 1950s. Each county, in each state, was represented by a steel box much bigger than a coffin onto which the names (if available) had been engraved. Called the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, this is a solemn place. These boxes are at eye level for the beginning part, but then you descend a ramp and the boxes gradually become higher representing lynchings.  I learned that on one day in the 1800s, 22 people were lynched in one county. The museum created duplicates of each box and laid them out like coffins. Someday they hope that each county will claim their steel box and honor those, named and unnamed, who were lynched there.

These pictures give you and idea;

  

Today we learned more about Rosa Parks and the history of what led to her stand on December 1, 1955 and how a boycott of the Montgomery buses began and lasted for 13 months. Of course retaliation was prevalent in the harsh treatment of the black community, bombing and beatings. Ms. Parks legal case was settled in the Supreme Court. After that she and her husband never got jobs in Montgomery again and moved to Detroit. We made a brief stop at the Montgomery church where MLK preached in his younger years.

In other news the camper next to us emptied his barbecue into the leaf litter which caught fire. We were lucky that another camper spotted it, alerted staff and also began hosing around Rosie. We were downtown but received the report of our luck from the front gate. All is well.