peace

somewhere, in the middle of this week, between researching hezbollah and watching two ROTC guys walk across the street with Jimmy John's sandwiches, it hit me that everyday we are fighting a war. we are a country, fighting a war we initiated - and we have been and will be fighting for a long time.

we are fighting a war, everyday, but usually, when i read the front page of the times, i glaze over the headlines of x number dead in iraq; background. it's just there. expected. inevitable.

one of my wise professors once mentioned in a conversation a year or so ago that we, as a people, as a civilization, as a species, should have evolved, should have advanced beyond war by now.


duh, right?

there is a bumper sticker pasted on the back of a green honda civic that i see most everyday when i walk back to my apartment in the university commons: it has a picture of a broken heart colored as an American flag and reads: "my other half is in Iraq." i assume this is the car of one of the female employees.

for so long it just registered in my head as, well, bumper-sticker patriotism.

but recently, i have felt my heart tear a little bit more as i walk past, and i think of whoever is missing half of her (or his) heart in there a little bit more often.

as a community, as a nation, i think our hearts our broken over the iraq conflict.

but we still have another half. what are we going to do with it?


about a half and hour ago, i looked up peace in the back of my NIV. there are tons of entries for peace (peaceable peaceful peacemakers), peacable (peace), peace-loving, etc.

so i'll end with some bumper-sticker peacemaking:

Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness.

- James 3:18

Sweet Home Alabama

I was reminded last week that to be a minority is indeed a state of being. Looking out from the backseat of a baby-blue Chrysler 300M (the rental agency all out of Civics) on route 80 West towards Selma, Alabama, I began to re-enter scenes driving along highways in Jo-Burg where I could feel my existence as a white person. I've not sorted out exactly what this means, but it was startling to me that my perception of control distinctly switched depending on the race of the driver passing me by, and I found myself disappointed when the driver was white because it turned me back into a view of shared assumptions and complacency.

I was in the South (Georgia and Alabama) all of four nights and three and one-half days to get a first-hand look at historic Civil Rights locations, people, and institutions. The invitation came at random towards the end of a long lunch conversation at Casa with Professor Michael Gray, the OU professor of African American and African studies who lead my first trip to South Africa during my sophomore year. So, of course I said, why not, and as I neatly placed my napkin on the table, looked up past the ceiling, shook my head, and grinned. (Requests for understanding sometimes have a funny way of working out)

So here are a few threads and pics from the trip:

I headed with Professor Gray along with bright, activist-minded freshman student Chelsea to Atlanta, Georgia on Thursday, March 1, arriving late in the evening after being delayed several hours because of stormy weather. Bedding down in a hotel right outside the airport, we woke early the next morning to a great sunrise- and news of a bus crash that killed several students from Ohio and tornadoes that had killed several people in the Alabama city of Enterprise. After wondering if our route would be hindered by the traffic backup from the crash, I went downstairs to the lobby to eat my oatmeal and gulp my daily dose of caffeine with Fox News coverage of Anna Nicole Smith blaring the background. Priorities?

We spent early Friday morning at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in downtown Atlanta. The center is well done and here is a particular quote I remember from one of the signs in the King Center display because it caught my attention two years ago right before I left for Cape Town:

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of selfishness. This is the judgment. Life's most persistent and urgent question is, what are you going to do for others?

Carrying that thought with me, we headed out and strolled down King's old neighborhood, passing the Ebenezer Baptist Church where King's father, and eventually King himself, used to preach.

Then, "because it's all about the food" as Professor Gray says, the serious life question became turnip greens or collard greens? as I determined which three veggies would accompany my cornbread in a serious soul food restaurant named Kenley's. I eventually chose turnip and collard greens along with yellow sqaush - all wonderful and washed down with the best iced-tea I've ever had. I was so glad to feel okay in this restaurant with every inch of free space covered in framed pictures of the owner smiling with various African American national and local celebrities. The owner obviously noted that we were "tourists" and volunteered to take a picture of all three of us together.


After spending the morning in Atlanta, we headed about two and one-half hours south to Birmingham. There, we eased our way around the hoard of Secret Service to walk around Kelly Ingram Park where in 1963, Civil Rights protesters (many children) where hosed, clubbed, and harassed with dogs at the order of "Bull" Conner. The Secret Service was there to keep watch for a group of Congressional Delegates in the area and a press conference held in the park with prominent Civil Rights leader John Lewis.
John Lewis is a member of the House of Representatives and was president of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that played a key role in the end of segregation.

Unfortunately, the amzing Civil Rights Institute was closed because of the delegation, so we left Birmingham after about an hour to drive on toward Montgomery.


Arriving there in early evening, just as the sun was beginning to set, we breezed downtown Montogomery which was bascially vacant, despite the fact that it was Friday evening. We did run into an intriguing group of three historians standing outside the historical Dexter Baptist Church who gave us some interesting snippets of Montogmery's Civil Rights legacy. After that, we stopped and ate at a Mexican restaurant and then met our wonderful host Denise Gabriel. Denise was formerly a faculty member in the theater department at OU and is now a faculty member at the Alabama Shakespearean Festival in Montgomery.











Saturday morning, we woke fairly early and went downtown Montgomery to a black barbershop, possibily my favority experience of the whole trip. The barber used to cut Dr. King's hair while he was in Montgomery. Again, I felt okay being there because we were with Professor Gray, but still aware that Chelsea and I were a bit out of place.

After the barbershop stay, we met Chris, one of Professor Gray's fomer students who is now a district attourney for Alabama'smiddle district, at Walt's diner.

Here is a picture of my breakfast. Grits and toast: serious stuff. As Chris noted, Montgomery is still a segregated city. One thing that I noticed right away in Walt's is the change of pictures hanging on the walls. Instead of Civil Right's leaders, they had old pictures of horses dressed up with ribbons, women in big dresses, and old stately homes. There were few African Americans in the place, though it was just down the way from the Barbershop.

After breakfast, Chris gave us a tour of the courthouse, the Greyhound bus station where the Freedom Riders were beaten, Maya Lin's Civil Right's memorial in front of the Southern Poverty Law Center (where we heard the some of the Congressional Delegation, Rev. Shuttelsworth and John Lewis sing "We Shall Overcome") and some other city landmarks. Professor Gray, Chelasea and I then went to the Rosa Park's Museum downtown.



Alabama is a very poor state in terms of public money to fund schools and state patrol. The public schools, with the exception of the few magnet schools, are terrible- real-estate taxes are very low, compared to Ohio (Chris mentioned that for his suburban $ 200,000+ home, he paid $300 a year in property taxes). Then, Chris estimated that there were probably only thirteen state patrol persons in the WHOLE state.

In the early afternoon, we headed up to Selma for quick experience Bridge Crossing festivities - mainly food, music, and stuff. I picked up my first copy of the Militant, a socialist, pro-labor publication, and ate plain rice since everything else was fried or meat. I did attempt fried eggplant, but once I peeled all the batter off, there really was no eggplant anymore. Oh, soul food....



On the way back to Montgomery, we stopped at a couple of campsites of the Selma-to-Montgomery and Viola Liuzzo's memorial. Liuzzo was a white civil rights activist murdered by the Klu Klux Klan after giving rides home to marchers in the 1965 Selma-to Montgomery march.






Rushing back to Montgomery, Chelsea and I prepared to go to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman at 7:00 the Shakespeare Theater while Denise and Professor Gray had dinner. After watching a fair production of Salesman and generally feeling depressed about life and capitalism (wait, are they separate?), Chelsea and I chatted a bit with Denise and Professor Gray. Then, it was an attempt at an early bedtime to rise in time to see Obama speak in Selma Sunday morning.

We left Montgomery the next morning at 5:15, picked up Chris downtown at 5:30, and headed to Selma. Noting plenty of standing room outside Brown Chapel Church, the group went to McDonald's for breakfast. We then stood outside for about three hours to wait for a seat inside.


Let me try to set the scene for this event: Sen. Obama was speaking at Brown Chapel Church while Sen. Hillary Clinton was speaking across the street at the same time. The Rev. Jesse Jackson was also in town - so lots of energy in Selma. However, as Professor Gray constantly reminded us, none of these high profile people, with the exception of Bill Clinton and of course The Rev. Jesse, had been to Selma before this year.



Waiting was long, but also one of the highlights of the trip. This was my first real political rally, so to speak, and I loved the energy and comeraderie that surrounded it. However, my feet nearly froze because I stubbornly decided to wear my Tevas. Something about feeling the energy/historical ground through my feet....? I don't know, but after about 30 minutes, I wasn't feeling anything in my feet. But, true to Southern hospitality and what I think is the general compassion in humanity, a very nice teacher held my hands and piled her cloth bag around my feet in order to keep me warm. We had a good time joking about how slighly crazy I was: all the women around me just kind of laughed and shook their head when they noticed I had on Tevas. Then we talked about the neighborhood and volunteer projects, our families and school. It was a moment that I feel charachterized why we were all there in the first place.


Arriving at the church at 6:50am, we were fairly close to the doors when security finally decided to open them at 10:00. However, it was still a mad push to get inside as we battled people cutting in from the sides, etc. Chelsea and Chris were stubborn and lucky to find a seat inside: Professor Gray and I behaved somewhat and thus were sent to the basement to watch the program on a screen since all the seats for the public had already filled up. I was mad, to say the least.



Anyway, the program was okay and we basement convicts sang hymns softly along with the TV. Before Obama spoke, John Lewis and Bishop Kirkland had already prepped the crowd with some stirring memories and reflections of the past struggle.


Obama's speech was passionate, but precise. Compared to Lewis and others, he was not as charismatic, but as a Yale Law grad, I'm guessing that is not really his style. He opened by connecting himself to the Civil Rights movement, stating that his existence as the son of a white female from Kansas and a Kenyan would not have been possible without Selma (Civil Rights movement in general). Framing the speech in Biblical terms, he addressed the triumphs of the Moses generation, the giants like Lewis who lead the Movement forward, but stressed the important challenges of the present and future generations, the Joshua generation. On this note, I perked up as he spoke about a "poverty of ambition" in a materialistic youth culture, problems of educational achievement being perceived as "being white" by many youth, and problems of "economic discrimination", health care, family, and education. A key point in all of this was taking individual initiative: "not what the government can do for us, but what we can do for ourselves." And then, addressing strained and broken families where children are in poverty and fathers are not acting like fathers, Obama encouraged his listeners to push back the negatives that have been pushed on them in the past: "We must fight the opression in each of us."

Most people then exited after Obama spoke. Unfortunately, I also had to leave, but was able to hear "We Shall Overcome" through the doors while standing in line for the women's restroom. And - I got a close shot of Obama as he exited the building.

After that, we mingled in the hundreds of people outside the church and Professor Gray, Chelsea, and Chris all had some kind of pulled-meat sandwich. Soon after, we headed out where the three stopped at someone's porch grill for some Southern fried fish. Then we went back to the market/food area downtown area so that I could eat some more rice. This time, I think that lady had more compassion for vegetarians in Selma and served me heartier portion. :)



After browsing a few more tables and stands along the way, we hustled over across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to secure a spot from which to view the march. The Edmund Pettus Bridge is a particularly important marker as the site of March 7, 1965, known as "Bloody Sunday" where police brutalized peaceful Civil Rights demonstrators. Now, Civil Rights leaders and this year, Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton formed the front line of the march. We waited there among a hoard of press and camera crews for about an hour before the dignitaries made it across the bridge.


Above: Obama in the white shirt looking towards the American Flag with some Black Power fists raised in the background.





Right: Bill and Hillary are buried in the upper left-hand corner of the picture.


Also to the left out of this picture was a journalist from the AP taking pictures from the top of a step ladder next to the side of the bridge. I am so thankful that he didn't fall in....sheeesh.

About 5:30 ish we drove back to Montogomery, stopping again along the way to take a few more shots. Dropped off Chris downtown and then drove on to Atlanta. Arrived back in Atlanta about 8:40ish and stayed with Nancy, another one of Professor Gray's former students now an attorney with Delta Airlines.
Left Nancy's about 7:45 Monday morning, caught our flight to Columbus, and headed back to Athens.