The Legacy Museum is extraordinary. I think of it as the second museum in the EJI collection, but it was the first, smaller and less comprehensive, then expanded and relocated to the warehouse district on a site previously used for slave trading and incarceration. We walk on its history and breathe in its legacy. The […]
Category: History
Key West – Surprises
Key West. The Conch Republic. Cayo Hueso (Bone Key). Mile 0. Southernmost Point. How many more names are there for a place so small? Each resonant of a different spirit to say nothing of the lost local names for areas, some remaining as tourist destinations, Bahama Town, many just lost, Sears Town. I had visited […]
Selma, AL
Maybe even more important for a Civil Rights experience than the Lorraine Motel, TN, or Jackson, MS, or possibly Greensboro, NC, is Selma, AL. Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden have walked the Edmund Pettus Bridge to celebrate the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and honor the marchers, including the late Representative John Lewis. I […]
Montgomery – My Planned End
I arrived in Montgomery exhausted. I had seen so much at such an emotional pitch from Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel to Emmett Till’s unpublished image as well as Civil War photographs and repeated Civil Rights images. I was a wreck. But I had promised myself that Montgomery would be the terminus of my […]
Magnolia State
I have fallen for Mississippi. It is an opera — great drama, tragic sadness, indomitable spirit. Geographically, there are four distinct regions: The Delta, which I had always thought was the area where the Mississippi met the Gulf, but is the region between the Mississippi and the Yazoo; the Northern Hills, a border region with […]
Lorraine Motel – National Civil Rights Museum
Note: If you have not been to or know about the National Civil Rights Museum experience, this is a spoiler alert. Read past the ================ demarcation and you will learn about the reveal for which I was unprepared. The National Civil Rights Museum is the most surprising museum I have experienced. The museum has a […]
Sumner, MS – Emmett Till
I cried at the door step on leaving. Joe Biden established the Emmet Till Memorial sites in 2023. In a store front, among vacant store fronts, at a sleepy intersection, in a past over town, across from the courthouse, with its National Park Service placard and shield, is the Emmett Till Interpretive Center. Unfinished concrete […]
Vicksburg
Gettysburg was disquieting; Vicksburg, peace and reconciliation. “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle […]
Native Americans
I knew sometime on my travels south I would cross wakes with Native American/US history. In New England their memory was all about us in places: Sakonnet Point, Wampanoag Trail, Narragansett Bay, or Aquidneck Island (for a time Rhode Island); in foods: quahog, tautog, or succotash; in culture: powwow, wampum, or sachem. But their presence […]
Gettysburg – Redux
Gettysburg launches my discovery of America. I had visited before (detailed in another post). The battlefield is hallowed ground, like Pearl Harbor that I visited in February. I mourn my wife’s death so these places hold a special appeal. A moment to pause, to reflect, quiet, private, although often strangers are with me. What is […]
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