Those responsible for keeping this particular story alive, across the United States have, it seems to me, done an exceptional job in providing markers and memorials that both focus and amplify the meaning of the events they commemorate. Allow me to take you with me, briefly, to some of the places where I have stood, that you might sense something of what I have felt.
The USA, of course, has some experience of memorialising significant, yet relatively recent events. Coming from the UK, where I’m used to public monuments largely celebrating victory, glorifying generals and affirming a pretty static sense of solid certainty, it’s refreshing to witness commemorations that provoke as many questions as they provide answers, that promote reflection and challenge, as well as inform.
Washington DC is, of course, a city of memorials. Some of the most well known are, strictly speaking, outside of the remit of my trip, but it seems wasteful not to visit nonetheless.
The monuments to Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington himself are famously huge, grand and imposing, yet, to my mind at least, the most moving Presidential memorials are those to Roosevelt and Mason, the forgotten founder. Relatively small, humble even, thoughtful, the small wheelchair bound figure of Roosevelt, almost lost within his own expansive legacy, generously populated with the images of others, especially the poor, they put aside prestige for the sake of the personal.
When it comes to war, there’s a welcome note of ambiguity, whether you are scarred by the gash in the landscape that is the Vietnam memorial or haunted by the staring eyes of the Unnamed soldiers of the Korean war, catching you accusingly with their glance, there’s no place for mere glorification here.
Of course, the one non president remembered on the National Mall, takes me to the heart of my journey. Martin Luther King stands, tall and majestic, emerging, literally, out of the rock face behind him. ‘Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.’ Powerful, in every respect, but I would have to go elsewhere to find his humanity.
Like to his birth home, in Atanta, beside the very dining table where he was told by his father that the reason the inseparable friend of his pre-school years dropped him as soon as school began, was because of the colour of his skin, and that it would happen over and over again. Or, later, at the kitchen table of the parsonage of his first church in Montgomery, where, having cleared up the wreckage from his bombed porch, he wondered, in the middle of the night, if the burden he was carrying was too great to carry, and yet, right there, experienced an encounter with God that fuelled his every succeeding day.
Maybe to Boston, the most recent, abstract yet tender monument to the ‘Embrace’ between him and his wife, a marriage far from perfect, yet powerfully enabling.
Or perhaps standing in his very footsteps, marked for posterity, at the Lincoln memorial for the March on Washington, the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, perhaps the most searingly evocative place of all that I visited, or behind his own beloved pulpit from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery. In each and every place, recalling all the different stories, you get a feel for the man, his pain, and yet his faith.
Then there were the larger museums, interpretive centres and institutes, designed to show the bigger picture still.
Like the enormously impressive National African American Museum of Art and History (NAAMAH), part of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, where, I joined, in quick succession, a weeping line of black American visitors, filling past Emmett Till’s open casket, then, the same crowd, cheering the recorded promise of a Dream.
The Civil Rights Museum of Birmingham, charged with overseeing the 16th Street Baptist Church, and the place, just outside the ladies’ rest room, where a bomb exploded. killing 4 young girls, just as a service was about to begin, as well as the pretty little park opposite, with its startling sculptures of snarling police dogs and water cannons.
There was the Legacy Museum, from Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, in Montgomery, where you’re immediately overwhelmed by storm force waves crashing all around the walls and ceiling, enveloping you in the immersive experience of the transatlantic slave trade. Before peering into a tiny cell and seeing a holographic figure come to life before you, a slave waiting their auction, telling you their story. Then, much more up to date, being ushered into a prison visiting room, picking up the telephone to hear the convict’s take on contemporary racial injustice.
