A further look back

I wanted to say a few quick words about our stop in Birmingham because it has had quite a profound impact on me, and I haven’t had the time to write about it yet. Being in a city with so much history where nonviolence blossomed and was successful really meant a lot to me. Perhaps it was my own doing, but I felt something in the air in Birmingham—a spirit of reconciliation, of turmoil, of triumph.

We visited the Civil Rights Institute and the 16th street Baptist Church, where a bombing killed four young girls. Upon arriving at the Civil Rights Institute, we were ushered into a small theater where we watched a movie about the city of Birmingham and the role of Blacks in creating and sustaining the city. The movie ended talking about segregation and a picture was shown of segregated water fountains. Then, the screen rose, and the very same water fountains that were in the picture were present before us. And this was the entrance into the museum. It was a really weird/surreal moment.

Everything in the museum was donated and is a real artifact of the Civil Rights era. The pictures/advertisements of Blacks were particularly disturbing to me. There was one especially disturbing—a handbill from Hot Springs, Arkansas—advertising a Black man giving a white man a bath. His features were exaggerated. His skin was really, really dark. And, he was saying something unintelligent. I teared up at the pictures of the lynchings, and with each new artifact I saw and each new piece of information I read, my lip began to quiver, and my whole being was just genuinely sorrowful.

I kept waiting to come to the Freedom Ride section of the museum. With every step I took, I got more anxious. And I finally made it and my breath was taken away. There was a large piece of the bus that was bombed in Anniston there. It was burnt and damaged. You could actually look inside and see the burnt seats and the smoke-damaged ceiling. I began to think back to the readings about the bombing that I have read. I pictured them—black and white—sitting there. Scared. Unsure. I saw the bus filling up with smoke. I saw them rushing out of the bus in a frenzy. I became overwhelmed, and before I knew it, the tension that had been building found a release. I was bawling. My entire body was convulsing in fits of sadness and disgust. I remember whispering to myself, “How could they?”

How could they do this to someone based on a benign characteristic like skin color? How could they?

I pulled it together after a hug from a friend and finished the museum. I was disappointed to see that the Human Rights section of the museum at the end failed to include LGBTQ issues…

and then I remembered why my presence on the ride was so vital. So necessary.

So that one day, the world will see Queer oppression as just that—an oppression that must be targeted and eradicated, just like all other systematic forms of violence and discrimination.