Pilgrims on the Road to Freedom

DANA KING: This afternoon, we are going to hear from two amazing young women. Ashley Hayes, a senior at the university of Michigan, and Zaynab AbdulQadir-Morris, who is a graduate of UC Berkeley. These two exceptional women were part of the organization in the Bay Area called Cinnamongirl, Inc., which mentors and provides leadership opportunities to young women of color.

Welcome Ashley and Zaynab. It’s so great to see you both again.

I traveled with Ashley and Zaynab and about 30 other people as part of The Commonwealth Club group tour in early March to the U.S. South. We visited sites critical to the Civil Rights Movement and met some truly inspirational people.

We st a r ted i n Jack son, Mississippi, where we visited Medgar Evers’ home. We went to

the Mississippi Delta and sat in the courtroom in Sumner, Mississippi, where Emmett Till’s murderers were acquitted. We went inside Little Rock High School and heard from Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, and into the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where we met with bomb survivor Reverend Carolyn McKinstry. In Memphis, we visited the [National] Civil Rights Museum and saw the room at the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stayed the night before he was killed.

Then we walked across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama. We ended in Montgomery, where Rosa Parks and many other women inspired the Montgomery bus boycott and where we experienced the deeply moving National Memorial for Peace and Justice. There were, of course, many things that we did and saw, including eating some really great food and listening to some incredible blues music, but that gives you a sense geographically where we traveled.

Our trip also started just two weeks after Ahmed Aubrey was murdered while jogging. We walked across the bridge in Selma the day that Breonna Taylor was murdered in her bed. And it was two months before the murder of George Floyd. So a lot happened on our journey and since our journey.

I’d like to start it by turning it over to Zaynab.

MORRIS: Every time I’ve started to draw up my presentation for today, attempting to articulate what it was like to tour the American South, tour trauma, tour property, tour afterlife of injustice, I couldn’t help but be swallowed by

scholars joined a Club trip to Jackson, Little Rock, Memphis and other historic sites of the CIvil Rights Movement. We invited them to tell us in their own words the trip’s impact on them in terms of today’s events and their visions for the future. From the June 2, 2020, Inforum online program “On the Road to Freedom: Through the Eyes of Young Leaders.” Produced in partnership with Cinnamongirl Inc. ZAYNAB ABDULQADIR-MORRIS, UC Berkeley African-American Studies Major ASHLEY HAYES, University of Michigan Afroamerican and African Studies Major, Education for Empowerment Minor

DANA KING, Journalist and Artist—Moderator

sorrow. It’s a type of sorrow I felt 6 years ago sitting on the carpet of my childhood bedroom, unable to concentrate on packing shirts away for my first semester of college, because I could only stare with futility at Trayvon’s face against asphalt, a deep red pooling from his head to city gutter. It’s the sorrow that shouted over me throughout my first semester of college. The sorrow that led me into the streets of Berkeley and Oakland night after night, screaming from the cavity of my chest that my life mattered. After a hot-blooded first year, I decided that I was done with sorrow. I was tired of making my pain palatable for white and non-Black people of color. I made sure to amplify every name, every hashtag in the years following, but I never allowed myself to get emotional, to get personal, already aware of what misery it would bring me.

I’ll be clear: This trip was not an miserable experience. What I learned from the lips of those on the frontline, the freedom fighters, the wounded healers is invaluable. Every day, every city I was inspired. The grief the trip triggered was . . . our price for trying to find answers in ancestral homeland.

For me, this trip was not about policy or protest, but origin. My grandmother, Uli Morris, was raised in Greenwood, Mississippi in the 1920s, her parents sharecroppers. In adulthood, she migrated to California, Compton, where my father was raised. I kept this in mind all throughout the trip in which Ashley and I kept journals. We were asked to write how we’re feeling so not to forget the experience.

On that first day, I woke with Mississippi’s morning light,

Left: Participants, some carrying American flags, marching in the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965. (Photo by Peter Pettus.)

immediately reaching for my camera. I hurriedly brushed my teeth, washed my face, slipping on boots, a dress, rushing out of the hotel, determined to discover Jackson, to document and witness the city. I started down the street—city hall. Andrew Jackson immortalized in bronze stood tall, . . . one arm akimbo, the other, pressing a staff firmly into the statue’s base, still declaring that this was his providence. Brilliant pillars stretched to the hazy sky behind him. Aside from his shadow, Jackson was deserted. There are no cars rushing past, no tour groups crowding to take pictures perhaps whispering about the general’s legacy—a bustling plantation of 300 slaves, genocide of the indigenous. It was just me and him. I climbed up State and President Streets, hoping to get a closer look at the city, getting near to a tomb. Placard absent, I can only identify its purpose by reading what had been chiseled in stone, “CSA, Confederate States of America.” The monument honored its sons, their sacrifice.

After looking at the monument, I started toward a railroad track and then a white man suited in button-down slacks waived for my attention. I wasn’t sure what type of white Southern man he was, but I pulled my headphones down. as he approached. He wanted a

picture in front of the monument; his grandfather, a Confederate soldier serving Jackson. He came to chase that history, driving from one battle site to the next. He continued on to me about his Southern heritage, but I could only think of the Negro soldiers that fought against the Confederacy in their starch uniforms, head high, chest out freely marching in a scorching April heat. Freedom finally clear in the scopes of their rifles, thinking, “At last, we are countrymen.” What a rich history I offered the man, and he started crying, dabbing his eyes with the red, white and blue tie barcode with the word “Vote.” I took his picture landscape and then portrait to capture the entire monument. He insisted that I also take one.

I walked 12 more miles that day. Drenched in the afternoon sun, I escaped the cool shade of the capital’s lawn, watching the broad polyester body of the state’s flag, its Southern cross, Confederate stars proudly rustling in the wind, it’s ripple echoing for me in Jackson.

On the fourth day of the trip, we drove as dawn emerged across Arkansas’ horizon to arrive at Little Rock Central High School. We began with the tour of the school, pausing for a moment at its mouth, taking in the 150,000-square-foot structure. From the stairwell we were greeted with four female statues, each dedicated to an educational theme. I could only remember Opportunity. She stood there in a flowing gown to plate braids, almost sneering at us below, hands preoccupied with her dress, unaffected, uninterested in what goes on down below.

After making our way through the hallways of the school, we crossed the street to the visitor center, where we listened to Elizabeth Eckford and Dr. Sybil Jordan Hampton’s testimony about what it meant to be the first. Due to a breakdown in communication, Miss Ekberg accidentally arrived early on September 4, 1957, to then be denied entrance to the Little Rock campus at every entrance she approach. She recounted that that day only two people affirmed

her humanity, wiping spit from her curls and the dress her mother, a seamstress, prepared for her. An education journalist and a teacher serve as the only barrier between mob and child, wiping her tears, talking over the litany of curses and threats. They told her, “Don’t let them see you cry.” Elizabeth had already thought ahead, arming herself with sunglasses. I began vibrating with anger, hearing about the complicity of soldiers, a city, a country, while children were attacked before cameras; pressing nails into the palms of my hands to hold back tears, hearing about violence in the classroom, that stalked in the hallways, bathroom stalls; the tirade; their sacrifice. I could only make out a thank you before sobbing on my knees before Miss Eckford and Dr. Sybil Jordan Hampton.

On the morning of September 15, 1963, the day the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed, the pastor’s Sunday school message was love that forgives, grounded in Matthew 5:43 and :44. “You have heard it that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Walking through the restored church and up the carpet and stairs, where the Klan

Above: The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church as seen from Kelly Ingram Park. A statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. faces the church. (Photo by Chris Pruitt.)

detonated seven sticks of dynamite, suspending Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair in the air, with torn Bible passages in pews, I could not imagine such a permissible God.

Over lunch, Reverend Carolyn McKinstry assured me and Ashley of the necessity of forgiveness, tenderness as well, warning us of the consequences of being consumed by vengeance and bitterness, of clutching to hate, closing yourself off to living fully.

On our final day, we entered the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, pantheon of the lynch, a constellation of death. We wandered through its copper columns, each engraved with every date, every name of the victims, requiring curving, leaning, twisting to comprehend the pillars above our shoulders, many reading, “Unknown,” “Unknown,” “Unknown.”

I was one of the first to leave the Memorial. Down the hill, I walked around the corner, only a few feet from the legacy museum, sitting in front of an abandoned building. I closed my eyes trying to concentrate on the rush of a fountain across the street. I opened my eyes to historical markers. The signs were erected in every city

we had visited. This one read, “Montgomery slave market.” I shut my eyes once more. The cultural preservation work . . . was impressive, but I still could not shake the deep feeling of disappointment. To borrow from King, . . . it was disorienting to see what endured, to confront ghosts of the past and the living, to encounter aftermath and afterlife of anti-Black racism, America’s foundation, and witness it as an imperial spectator, but finishing Dr. King’s quote, “There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.” It, too, was endearing to witness a love that endured somehow, that sculpted and erupted new sculptures, new literatures, new histories—love dreaming defiantly. In March on this trip under the Southern sky, facing and contending with broken promises of liberty, justice and equality, I was overcome with a disappointment, but I also learned the utility of dreaming again. ASHLEY HAYES: I’d like to begin with the quote that reads “For the hanged and beaten, for the shot, drowned, and burned. For the tortured, tormented, and terrorized. For those abandoned by the rule of law. We will remember with hope because hopelessness is the enemy of justice. With courage because peace requires bravery. With persistence because justice is a constant struggle. With faith because we shall overcome.”

Entering a new setting for the first time, my guard is always up. I have to be observant of where I’m at, who I’m around, what my role is in this space. I was either the only, or one of the only in this room. I’m the youngest person in the room. I’m a black female; the only one from the Midwest, the Detroit area. Those identities overlap with one another in this experience of how I processed everything that we took in along this week together. But I always try to take something positive away from my experiences, even though it was uncomfortable at times. We learned about Black history on a deeper level, which was a lot within itself.

Our group comprised of primarily an older, white audience, only two people under the age of 25 and only four black women. If the demographics were reversed, the entire cultural dynamic would have been probably different for how this trip would experience bias.

I have to understand that I want to hear what everyone else thinks, how they feel, and because it gives us a greater perspective of what the world really is. It’s much bigger than my own or just how Black people feel. Then I think about the Black lives that have innocently been lost for centuries, systematically, strategically, frightfully. You see Black people being shot and killed by white people, white people being acquitted or not tried at all. Then I understand the hate, the anger, the hopelessness that my people feel regularly, and we haven’t been able to shake it. James Baldwin once said, “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

This trip was painful. Trying to love the people who look like the people who hate me, learning together about the Civil Rights Movement and applying that knowledge today, was painful. But it stuck with me the most.

My experience compared to that of the travel group was transformative. Ideas were challenged for me. My mind was open. And I had to evaluate what I knew if I took in what new knowledge was presented before me. This is something I wondered and wanted to process before putting it out in the atmosphere for me to talk about with my group. How they felt learning about Black history, civil rights in America, alongside the majority white audience, or even learning about blackness in America with only four other Black women—these are two separate ideas, both of which were vital in my processing and development of how I experienced our week together. I grew to love it for what it sparked

in me intellectually and personally. Most days after we experienced whatever we have for the day, we had a dialogue or conversation, we came back together and recapped the day. [These] where some of the most formative moments of this trip, based on the conversations we had, reflection, emotions, a lot of thoughts where our group honestly told us that they didn’t know that certain things happened in America.

But then I think about my own experience at U. of [Michigan] in classrooms, where we talk about different experiences and things that are going on today or have happened recently. And students say, “I’ve never heard of the Dylann Roof shooting. I never knew that this happened in this part of the world.” And at first to me it sounds crazy; how do you not know that certain things are going on or certain things haven’t happened during your lifetime or in the past, which isn’t so far gone? But that’s our reality that we live in, where some of us know, some of us don’t. On this trip, I learned about things I didn’t know myself, and I had to give others grace, because I can’t ridicule somebody else for not knowing something. . . . It is so often said that Black people shouldn’t be responsible for educating people on our history or experiences. But I will challenge that, because no one has ever made a difference by being like everyone else. So my question is, When are we—the ones that care so deeply to make our history known, our lives matter—going to start educating other people on that? So often we tell other people that, “It’s not my responsibility to be the one that educate.”

When we are so passionate about this, we should be the ones willing to help someone else to learn. To be one of the only Black people in a space is draining. and doing this work individually is back breaking. But if we work collectively to find a place for everyone to work and learn and fight, it is achievable. This wasn’t light work for any one of us. It still isn’t, but it’s necessary.