The Past Walks with Us

By Michael Penn MA'97

Hope, in some ways, is the most courageous of emotions. It takes a resolve of character to say, in the midst of a world seemingly gone mad, that things will work out all right in the end. Birmingham was our first lesson in hope.

I was thinking about hope while sitting on the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the site of a 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing that killed four young girls who were inside getting ready for choir practice. From the steps, I could see across the street into Kelly Ingram Park, where children were playing in the fountains, splashing each other with plastic cups full of water. The park was once at the epicenter of African-American resistance in Birmingham, the locus for many protests and marches and heated skirmishes with police. By the mid-1960s, so many blacks in Birmingham were already in jail or had lost their jobs for participating in protests that civil-rights leaders had to recruit children to fill out their marches. On one occasion, hundreds of children were attacked by police dogs and sprayed with fire hoses in the park while they organized for a protest.

The park is now ringed by statues designed to make tourists imagine the terror that those children must have felt. I walked the circular Freedom Walk, passing within inches of the jaws of snarling dogs, into the gun like aim of the nozzles of fire hoses, and behind the iron bars of a jail cell. On the other side of the bars were the figures of two children, and inscribed at their feet were these words: "We ain't afraid of your jail."

Also in the park was a stand of four columns, each one cracked, in memory of the four girls killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Looking back toward the church, I was struck by how indestructible it appears. It was a little brick bulldog of a building, with soaring towers. Nothing, it seemed, could shake its foundations.

The bomb that ripped through the basement in 1963 didn't bring the church down, nor did it deflate the spirit of the members of the congregation. Even at the girls' funerals, mourners sang "We Shall Overcome," a gesture of hope that so moved Yoseph Teklemariam, a communication arts major, that he sat down and wrote a poem of tribute to the girls and the ones they left behind.

"That they were singing in the face of everything against them . . . ," he told me later. "I don't know how my faith would have held up in those circumstances. I don't know that I could have continued to believe if one of those girls were my sister."

Kelly Ingram Park doesn't only have a past; a few students also saw a glimpse of its present. "Under one of the monuments, there was a black man sleeping in a box," said Patrick Jones. "To me that speaks to where the movement is currently. Things have changed, but the struggle is far from over."

That night, the congregation of the Body of Christ Deliverance Ministry hosted a special program for the group. Among the people there to greet us were Autherine Lucy Foster, who attempted to integrate the University of Alabama in 1956 but was expelled days later after the university feared mob retaliation; Myrna Jackson, one of the children who participated in marches and was arrested, for the first time, at age eight; and Colonel Stone Johnson, who did night watches to protect Birmingham's most vocal civil-rights organizer, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, and his church from bombings. There were others present: people who organized, marched, sang, sat, fought, taught, or lent moral support during those years. The diversity of their stories vivified one of the themes of the course: that there was no monolithic "movement" for civil rights, but rather a thousand individual stories of perseverance and resistance.

Johnson's job in those years was to spend the night on the sidewalks in front of the church, removing the paint cans full of gasoline and explosives that from time to time showed up at the front door. His story differed notably from those of people like Diane Nash, an organizer of the original Freedom Rides whom students met in Chicago, and the Reverend Jimmy Webb, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who met the group in Selma. While Nash and Webb were planners and thinkers, Johnson represented the calloused hands pushing the movement forward. He gave the students a new lens on the activism of the time. When someone asked the Colonel what he had with him to guard the church, he smiled and answered, "a nonviolent .38 police special."

The next day, amid the provocative displays of the tiny National Voting Rights Museum in Selma, one of the students spotted Johnson in a photograph from a sixties march. He wasn't identified, but there was no mistaking his tall, gaunt frame, standing between Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fred Shuttlesworth. We had our Duck Hill moment. He was there, as Muddy Waters might say. We all knew he was there.

Selma gave me a chance to see a queen-sized hotel bed turned into a classroom. Over the previous days, I had seen Tyson, Kantrowitz, and Werner use many unconventional settings to teach: they lectured from city sidewalks, from the front of a moving bus, from hotel lobbies, from crowded lunch tables. A lot of this was planned. The professors had carved out every possible moment to present material that would help the students place what they were seeing in context. But, as Kantrowitz joked at one point, "the half-life for our lesson plans is about five minutes." There were too many spontaneous moments, too many worthy conversations that were already spreading through the bus. So, mostly, the professors winged it.

Coming off the whirlwind tour of Alabama, tensions on the bus had been rising. It wasn't hard to understand why. A lot of people get nervous talking about race, especially among a racially mixed group. These students had been thrown into the deepest end of that pool, and they were starting to flail just a little. Some were reluctant to talk openly about what they were feeling. Guilt and self-doubt crept in, making a few in the group defensive and uncomfortable.

The professors saw a chance to get beyond that discomfort - to "lean into it," as Tyson said - and talk meaningfully about race. "Racial discomfort is one of the most instructive experiences you can have," he told them.

That night, Tyson opened his hotel room to students who wanted to work through their feelings. Although he had a lecture to prepare, he spent three hours with students, helping them to break down and analyze their emotional reactions. A parallel discussion was going on in Werner's room, and on other nights any of the three professors was likely to be up until two or three in the morning, engaging white students and black students, helping them share their perspectives with each other.

No one was getting any sleep, but we were all too wired for sleep, anyway. We were headed for Mississippi, and all that its very name evokes. There's no place quite like Mississippi, a beautiful state of woods and bayous and bountiful soil, but a state pocked by desperate poverty, and a history of unparalleled brutality and racial savagery. Patrick Jones put it well when he said, "In Alabama, we saw things that made us cry. Mississippi
just pisses me off."

As the bus made its way toward Hattiesburg, we discussed the details of the murder of James Chaney, who along with two white civil-rights workers was found buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964. As we watched footage of Chaney's funeral in Meridian, we passed directly through that town - a reminder, again, of McGuire's statement that the past walks with us. The ghosts of Mississippi were in our midst.

In Hattiesburg, the students attended a conference at the University of Southern Mississippi, where they heard from, among others, Ellie Dahmer and her son, Vernon Dahmer, Jr. In the 1960s, the Dahmers were one of the most prominent black families in Hattiesburg.

Vernon Dahmer, Sr., owned a grocery store and a four-hundred-acre farm, and he used his wealth and position to help African-Americans in need. As president of the local NAACP, he organized many protests against Mississippi's long-held practice of disenfranchising black voters, which didn't make him popular among white supremacists in the community.

He received so many death threats that he and his wife slept in shifts.

The Dahmers said that once the National Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, they believed that the worst was behind them, and that Vernon would finally realize his own dream of voting, a right he was denied for many years after supposedly failing tests administered by white poll workers. Vernon received his voter registration card on January 25, 1966 - but it was too late. Two weeks earlier, during the middle of the night, several men had fire bombed his house and store. Vernon helped his family escape the burning house, but ultimately died from the attack. He was able to fire shots at the men, puncturing a car tire that helped lead to their arrest.

Although some of the men present at the fire bombing were convicted relatively promptly, it took the Dahmers until 1998 to see Klan leader Sam Bowers held accountable for organizing the attack, and attempts to convict another Klansman in the case recently resulted in a mistrial. This, along with the recent conviction of one of the men responsible for the Sixteenth Street church bombing, made our trip into the past strikingly current. These events weren't so long ago, and, in many cases, we still haven't learned the whole picture. We still have a long way to go.

But set against that despair and discouragement was the elegant grace and quiet strength of the Dahmers, who learned to find hope in heartache the hard way. Ellie Dahmer, now the county election commissioner, talked enthusiastically with students about the good that their being there represented. She maintained that, while her family paid an immeasurable cost, it was a cost that they were prepared to pay for the sake of morality and justice.

Back on the bus, Werner, as he did so often at these moments, selected a song that he thought appropriate to the mood. As a tribute to the Dahmers, he chose a song by soul artists Mel and Tim. It's a familiar tune that most of us had heard before, but never in the way we did that day. The chorus goes like this: "Starting all over again/It's going to be rough/So rough/But we're going to make it."

I had always thought of it as a love song. Hearing it anew on the bus that day, I discovered that it, like many things that seem simple on the surface, pulls from a deeper source.

back, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, next
On Wisconsin home page