Wynn Worlds

Vagabond photographer in an Alto trailer

Alabama

Hard Truth

Hard Truth

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On a hillside in Montgomery, Alabama, there stands a monument that exists to expose to the world the cruel and inhumane behavior that one group of people can perpetrate on another group. This is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which in the words of its founder is a “sacred space for truth-telling and reflection about racial terror in America and its legacy.”

My own words cannot capture the context of this place as clearly as this text  from the entrance to the Memorial:

Like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the structure of the memorial itself is part of the experience. It is laid out in a rectangle, with four sides to walk through, one by one. The rusted steel boxes are the shape and size of a coffin, one for each county in the United States where a lynching took place. The names and dates of each Black person lynched in that county are cut into the steel below the name and state of the county.

When I first entered the monument, I was walking among the markers. Reading each name became impossible once I saw how many names there were. I read places and dates, then let the sheer number of names wash over and through me.

As I turned the first corner, the floor sloped down gradually on that second side.

What was once eye level, as tall as me, rose up, and I had to look up slightly, then more, to see the names and dates on each marker.

The next turn was the hardest. Suddenly, there were hundreds of county coffins high over my head, so many I couldn’t really take it in. I craned my neck to read the county names and that’s when I realized the design was making me stretch my neck in the same way that the act of lynching stretched the necks of so many Black Americans. Tears slid down my cheeks as I stood there looking at the rows and rows and rows of coffin markers and the racial hatred and racial terror they represent. These were names and dates and places in physical form, not dry statistics or words in a book. I was completely overwhelmed.

I noticed a young Black woman reading the long plaques you can see on the walls in the photo above. She would read one, then slowly move to the next one and when she reached the end of the one side, she slowly walked back and started reading the other side. I realized each plaque was someone’s life and death. I couldn’t just walk by those names. I read each one, following her lead, both sides of the walkway. I owed it to each one of those names to recognize they were human beings who had been terrorized and murdered by white people like me.

I went back to the place where I had left off looking up and started reading the county names, one by one, row by row, down dozens fo rows. My neck starting to ache from looking up but I couldn’t let it go. I had to know. And then suddenly, there it was: Christian County, Kentucky.

That’s where my paternal grandfather’s family came from, and there are still small streets and gravestones in the cemetery with the family name. Two of dates were from when they were living there, before they moved out to Arizona. Were they part of a mob that chased down and lynched John Henry Skinner or Willis Griffey? They owned slaves, I heard tell, so they might have been in one of those lynch mobs. It’s a small county, so probably is more accurate than might, I think, as painful as that is to admit.

As I turned to enter the last side of the memorial, words on the wall shed a light of hope amid the darkness of the coffin markers.

As I walked underneath this last section, I could no longer read the names of the individuals, just the counties cut into the bottom of each one. More than 800 markers, more than 4400 names, in this memorial hall.

To see the people represented by this place is to realize how blind hatred and unfounded fear can cause people to do unspeakable things. One group of humans insisted that another group of humans was lesser because of the color of their skin, with political structures all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court backing them up.

I want to believe we are better than that now. But we are not. I see the evidence in the deaths of Oscar Grant, Michael Brown, and Sandra Bland. I see it in Facebook posts espousing hatred of Muslims, in the deaths of children in the custody of the U.S. Border Patrol.

I had been reading about civil rights before I visited this memorial. After, I realized I needed to learn about systemic racism and how it  affected Black people in America in the past and how it affects them today. And how, as a white person, it has benefitted me. I’ve been oblivious as to how my white skin has given me advantages in every area of my life.

This year, I started the painful, daily, work of recognizing my privilege and my own racism. I know that it is on me, on white people, to do the work of dismantling systemic racism. We are the ones who by our silence have been complicit in white supremacy. If you read this paragraph and think “not me” – well, that was me last year. This year’s me has learned it is me.

This has been one of the hardest posts I’ve written, struggling to capture how it felt to visit this place and then – as the weeks and months passed – how it opened my eyes to things I had not known. I’ve gone back and forth with words and images a half dozen times, and have finally decided that publishing an imperfect essay is better than not publishing anything at all.

If you’re interested in learning more about structural racism and white privilege, I have created an annotated reading list of books that I’ve found enlightening, educational, challenging, and, yes, difficult. All of them are worth the work. And so is justice for all, the pledge every American has said countless times without actually thinking what that really means.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” 

Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Letter from Birmingham, Alabama Jail
April 16, 1963

Update: Mar 27, 2019

Update: Mar 27, 2019

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After a pretty slow February and March as far as traveling around goes, I’ve now picked up the pace, heading to a weekend retreat up in northern Virginia. Friday, I said goodbye to Birmingham, home of good food, an old friend and a new one, and photographic opportunities, and headed up the road a few hours to Huntsville. My Alabama explorations are almost done now.

Underground at Sloss Furnaces

Huntsville has been on my radar since I started vagabonding, mainly because an old running buddy and his wife live there. I missed them last fall when I changed plans so we met up this past week and had a great visit. We both think the last time we met up was in St. Louis about a million years ago, when I was training for a marathon and he ran a few laps around the park with me to keep me going. Early nineties, maybe? As I said, we’re old. We don’t remember 🙂

St. Rich and the Vagabond

Huntsville also has two things on my “find them all” list of obsessions: SR-71 Blackbirds and Saturn V rockets. I was disappointed the Saturn V was not available for viewing; as it turns out, VP Pence was visiting the next day and security was already all over that building. But, since he announced there that we’re going back to the moon and beyond, I’ll cut him some slack. Just this once, though. Next time I’m in Huntsville, I better have access to the Saturn V building, dude.

Not a real Saturn V but this replica show how freaking big that rocket is.

Huntsville also has a great state park, Monte Sano, with a wealth of hiking trails and I took advantage of that a few times. The daffodils at the top of the post are from one hike here.

View of Huntsville from the North Plateau trail at Monte Sano

Now I’m on the move, a couple of one-night stands as I inch my way northeast up the Tennessee River Valley and up the other side of the Blue Ridge. Last night’s stop was at Melton Hill Dam, a TVA campground outside Knoxville. Quiet, small, birdsong and water views, what’s not to like about this place?

The view from Melton Hill Dam Campground

Oh, and the coolest thing I did this week? I touched the moon. Well, I touched a piece of it.

They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there – and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see.

Jack Kerouac

Southern Tour: Sloss Furnaces

Southern Tour: Sloss Furnaces

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It’s hard to separate the terrible labor history of Sloss Furnaces from the sheer beauty of photographing old things, but that’s how I’m going to do it here. Today’s post is all about how old things have their own kind of beauty. As Neil Young said, rust never sleeps.

These hot blast stoves, six in total at the installation, heated air before it went into the furnaces.

This gear at the base of one of the hot blast stoves fascinated me, from the colors to the grit of the decaying metal.

The base of the hot blast stoves, where the fire was, all displayed this pattern, perhaps from expanding and contracting over time. It is surprisingly smooth although it seemed from looking like it would feel more textured.

Inside the Power House, rust is slowly but steadily winning the battle against any kind of conservation effort. These are water pumps in the Blowing Engine room, the oldest building on the site.

Many round things can be found at Sloss, and this was my favorite, at the base of the hot blast stoves.

I’ll end with my favorite of the day’s effort: Furnace #1 in the foreground and the eponymous water tower behind. That furnace would reach temperatures up to 3800F back in the day.

For more on this location: Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark

No man can stand still; the moment progress is not made, retrogression begins. If the blade is not kept sharp and bright, the law of rust will assert its claim.

Orison Swett Marden

Tuskegee Airmen NHS

Tuskegee Airmen NHS

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I probably would not have known anything about the Tuskegee Airmen if my dad hadn’t had a lifelong fascination with all things aeronautical. He talked them up enough over the years that I knew the basics: an all-black squadron of pilots and support personnel in WWII who fought and died same as the whites they were segregated from by law and custom. My dad being in the Army Air Corps (non-combatant) at the same time must have known of them from way back, but I don’t know if he had even the slightest of interactions with them.

When I pulled off Highway 29 to visit the National Historic Site dedicated in 1998 (with a grand opening on October 10, 2008), I wasn’t sure what to expect. There were a half-dozen cars in the huge visitor lot, with RV spaces off to the left, so there was plenty of room for Bella, the Breeze, and me.

The walk downhill from the parking lot to the two hangars that house the exhibits shows off the airfield with two runways, the support buildings, and the surrounding low hills.

I could imagine the hustle of trainees and instructors, support crews, and even parachute folders, working hard every day in the war effort.

Most of the barracks and smaller buildings are no longer standing, so in their place are metal-framed outlines of each one, helping to establish a sense of how big the base was back in the 1940s.

Hangar One introduces the early phases of the Tuskegee Airmen story: recruiting and training. There’s a restored model of their primary training aircraft, along with informative displays of learning enemy ships and uniforms, as well as other areas they had to cover in preflight training.

Hangar Two unfurls the full, proud history of the Tuskegee Airmen, from battles in World War II to the medals awarded and the honors earned.

The displays are very frank about the other battle the Airmen fought: segregation at home. The film that is the starting point for Hangar Two doesn’t shy away from the hard point that as these people were flying to protect American bombers in Europe, they were denied entry into officers’ clubs on American soil.

The most moving part of the film was watching and listening to the old men who were pilots back then, talking about their training, their missions, their losses, and the cold fact of segregation in their daily lives during that period. 

Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony at the White House, 2007

The exhibits discuss how, during and after the war, the Tuskegee Airmen helped immensely to clear the way for integration, from the Army Air Corps (later the Air Force) to daily life, as they became activists, businessmen, and even policemen.

The sense of history they made is illustrated best with this exhibit: 

Dr. Mae Jemison’s flight suit (replica), first African-American astronaut in 1992

I’d kind of expected to breeze in and out of this site, but I ended up spending a few hours, reading every sign and looking at every artifact. My dad, once again, was right: the Tuskegee Airmen were heroes, both at war and at home.

One of the famous Red Tails of the Tuskegee Airmen

We’ve both felt the sting of those daily slights throughout our entire lives — the folks who crossed the street in fear of their safety; the clerks who kept a close eye on us in all those department stores; the people at formal events who assumed we were the ‘help’ — and those who have questioned our intelligence, our honesty, even our love of this country.

Michele Obama
2015 Commencement Address at Tuskegee Institute

Update: Mar 20, 2019

Update: Mar 20, 2019

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It’s been a busy week, although I’ve just gone from Montgomery to Birmingham, a two-hour drive. I’ve never been to any part of Alabama before, so it’s been an exploration month for me.

First, time out for fun: P!nk in concert was a blast!

Yes, that is her in the spotlight, flying upside down and all over the arena, and singing while she did it! My first arena rock concert in years and well worth the effort to make it up to Birmingham in time for the start.

For a complete change of pace, I hit up the Birmingham Museum of Art. Completely free, it’s a lovely museum with good collections of Native American art that made me miss the Pacific Northwest, African textiles and pottery, and and a beautiful collection of Wedgewood pieces.

Still trying to figure out how to fit this Wedgewood mantelpiece in my Alto…

Many years ago, at a NASA-sponsored event at JPL, I met a guy with a weird twitter handle (@neoteotihuacan). We stayed in touch, sharing interests in photography, science, travel, and anthropology. Kyle, and his wonderful wife, live in Birmingham, so he’s been my tour guide this week and I’ve had a blast.

Kyle in a time-lapse in one of the art-lit train tunnels in Birmingham

Birmingham is an interesting city. It’s less than 150 years old, so the State of California is older than Birmingham. Weird. It became the poster child for post-Reconstruction segregation and then ground zero in the fight for civil rights in the 1960s. Visiting the Civil Rights Institute and then the 16th Street Baptist Church were both moving experiences.

16th Street Baptist Church, active and also a National Historic Site

Walking around Birmingham is a constant stream of interesting architecture and the good thing about Kyle being a filmmaker and photographer is that he didn’t mind at all when I stopped to take a shot.

One of Birmingham’s many restored downtown buildings

As the cherry on the top of the week’s adventures, we went to Sloss Furnaces, a National Historic Landmark in Birmingham. This iron foundry is important for two reasons: it was once the largest producer of pig iron in the world, and (2) it was one of the largest users of post-Civil War convict labor, mostly African-Americans, who worked in the worst of conditions. Interestingly, this latter fact is severely downplayed on the official website, but well-documented in books like Slavery By Another Name.

Despite its checkered past, the place is a photographer’s dream and we shot till I ran out my camera battery before heading to lunch.

Birmingham is a foodie’s dream. From homemade pecan pie to Nashville-style chicken and some of the best tacos I’ve had in a long while, I’ve eaten very well in this city. It’s nicknamed “The Magic City” and I can see why; it is more than its history, on the cusp of becoming something else. I can’t wait to see where this city goes in the next decade or two.

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.

Letter From the Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Weekly Update: Mar 13, 2019

Weekly Update: Mar 13, 2019

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I’ve been a tourist this week, but in a quiet way. Making my way across Georgia, I lucked into a waterfront site with a view out the back window that was beautiful. The top photo (aka the cover photo) is that view, Lake Blackshear in the morning as the fog burned off and the sun rose.

Some of the touristing was catching the weird stuff, like the Ray Charles monument in Albany, Georgia. It plays his hits, no kidding.

When I showed up at the campsite near Montgomery, Alabama, I passed the entrance to Montgomery Motor Speedway. No events scheduled while I was here, but more than once, I’ve heard the growl of big engines and then the downshift as they hit the turns and it made me smile every time.

In between those two cultural landmarks, I hit up the Jimmy Carter National Historic Site, in Plains, Georgia, where I got to view his Nobel Peace Prize. That was pretty cool.

The more serious part of the week was visiting several sites key to the Civil Rights Movement.

In Albany, Georgia, at the Civil Rights Institute, a woman born the same year as my mother told me about growing up with White and Colored signs in the county. She pointed out one that had hung in the courthouse when she was a child, designating the Colored water fountain.

The Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site was one for my Dad, who thought the world of these pilots. As I toured the two hangers full of exhibits, I was impressed with how well the NPS covered the racism and segregation the Airmen experienced during WWII, not shying away from the ugliness of these behaviors. Watching the Tuskegee pilots as old men, recalling their missions and remembering the hurts, was very moving.

The Selma Interpretive Center, next to the infamous Pettus Bridge, was another small but thorough look at the struggle for civil rights, focusing on the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1964. A woman who was 11 years old that year talked about the events in Selma, including being beaten on that bridge on that Bloody Sunday and her memories of Dr. King. She is 65 now, just 3 years older than me. At 11, I was riding my bike around the neighborhood and playing with dolls; she was fighting for the right of her parents to vote. An amazing woman, and I stayed after to shake her hand.

Montgomery has many sites and I visited most of them this week. The Legacy Museum, small and crowded, covered the slavery through mass incarceration, and I knew most of the cold, hard facts as a result of my reading this past several months. The Rosa Parks museum was well designed and put you into that moment when a small black seamstress decided she would not stand so a white person could sit. The Civil Rights Monument, in front of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a Maya Lin design, the flat disc in front engraved with key milestones in the struggle.

What I didn’t expect was how overcome I would be walking through the National Monument for Peace and Justice. To walk around, then slightly under, then surrounded by hundreds of casket-sized steel markers, one for each county in the US where at least one lynching took place, was overwhelming.

I went back today and there was a group from Howard University (a historically black university) touring the grounds. I felt all kinds of emotions watching them go through the markers. At one point, a black employee walked them through a whole section, answering questions as they went. Afterwards, as he walked by me, he asked if I had any questions. I couldn’t speak for a moment, shook my head as the tears welled up, and finally said, I have no words for this.” He nodded and said softly, “I know. I know.”

I saw the students again as I left, posing for a group photo across the street at the Peace and Justice Memorial Center. That’s our future right there, I thought, people who can see this and remember it as they grow out into the world. Maybe these next generations will do better than mine has. I hope so.

True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it’s the presence of justice.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

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