Days of lying around reading and watching TV, too sick (and without car) to go anywhere, but too healthy not to be bored out of my mind by this fact are starting to catch up with me. So today, I’ve added vacation planning to my routine. I know, a week out sick from a job I started this month is probably not the ideal time to plan a vacation, but as I said, boredom has gotten the better of me. Plus, I haven’t actually take a real vacation since just after the ‘06 election (given my job, I’ve gotten used to taking November vacations). Anyway, planning for future vacations made me start thinking about that last trip.
At that time, I went on a Civil Rights tour of the Deep South with my mother. We flew into Memphis to start, and checked out the Lorraine Motel — the site of Martin Luther King’s assassination. The motel has been converted into the National Civil Rights Museum, and was definitely impressive. It’s set up chronologically, so you can walk from the days of slavery through the present. Headphones are available for a narration of all the exhibits — I think they cost a few bucks, and aren’t necessarily worth it. The outside of the hotel is entirely preserved from the day of the assassination — April 4, 1968. Interesting stuff.
After a couple of days in Memphis (had to hit Beale street and everything), we drove down the Mississippi Delta and stopped in Greenwood Mississippi, which had once been dubbed “the most Southern City on Earth.” Greenwood wasn’t the site of any of the most famous civil rights events, but still had a lot of symbolic relevance. The town of Money, where Emmett Till was killed is just a few miles north, and Byron De La Beckwith, the assassin of Medgar Evers, hailed from Greenwood. Even though this was planned as just a small stop on the way to Jackson, it definitely had the most “time travel” feel to it. The town was extremely segregated, with shotgun houses dotting the outskirts of town. It was a Saturday night, but we could only find one restaurant open downtown, “The Crystal Grill.” Everyone who walked in the restaurant knew each other. Our waiter actually said “Y’all ain’t from around here, are you?” and a patron behind us turned around and said “What brings y’all all the way down here?” Could’ve been polite and innocent, but then the waiter, after giving us directions back to the road to Jackson, added kinda cryptically, “watch out for deer.” Seemed weird. We cut short our stay in Greenwood, and stayed that night in a hotel between Greenwood and Jackson. Still, as we soon learned, it was a treat to get to eat in a local restaurant at all — all too often we had to settle for national chains like Applebees and TGIFridays – nothing else seemed to be open beyond a couple hours a week.
Headed into Jackson the next day. They also have a civil rights museum at the old statehouse, but it has been closed indefinitely due to damage in Hurricane Katrina. We had lunch at the Mayflower cafe in the middle of town, and then went our to see the Medgar Evers house. Apparently, the house was really dilapidated until the filming of Ghosts of Mississippi in the late ’90s. I guess the city was sort of motivated (or a cynic might say shamed) into restoring the house and the site of the assassination.
From Jackson, we drove East to Meridian — where James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner, and Andy Goodman worked to register black voters in ‘64 before being murdered by the Klan (well, Goodman hadn’t really worked there — he had just come down from the Freedom Summer training the night before his murder). We took a side trip to Philadelphia Mississippi, the town where the actual murders took place. Nothing there to mark it except a stretch of road named after the trio. Back in Meridian, we went to the Chaney gravesite, which sadly lies next to what seems to be a dumping ground. This became kind of a pattern there — with historical sites being fairly poorly cared for. Although Schwerner and Goodman’s parents had wanted the three to be buried side by side, segregation laws forbade it and the other two were ultimately buried in New York. Meridian, for some reason, has marketed itself as a center for carousel horses, and the downtown area is strangely filled with these statues. Guess its better than being known for the site of one of the most well-known crimes in U.S. history.
Continued eastward into Alabama, and stopped in Selma. We of course stopped at the Edmund Pettus bridge, which was made famous when John Lewis and the other marchers in 1965 were stopped and bludgeoned by Alabama troopers, leading to Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Act. That actually did live up to its billing, and we were able to take quite a few pictures of and from the bridge. Disappointingly, the Voting Rights Museum was closed for repairs, and appeared to have been for some time. Also disappointingly, two people who worked at a shop less than a block away from the museum, and had lived there their entire lives (one black, one white) seemed to not even know of its existence. It’s Selma Alabama! It’s not like there are museums on every corner! Overall though, Selma struck me as a pretty nice little town.
It’s a short trip from Selma to Montgomery, and Montgomery was probably the site I was most anxious to visit. The Cradle of the Confederacy, the birth of the modern civil rights movement, a stop for the Freedom Riders, etc… The downtown is easy to navigate on foot, and we headed down past the statehouse, and over to the bus stop where Rosa Parks was arrested. It’s in front of a movie theater now, and it’s all pretty unremarkable. We found a Rosa Parks museum nearby, which was by far the weakest museum of the trip (it basically offers a quick re-enactment of the arrest and then opens to a room with a few facts and plaques and not much else). We did strike up a conversation with a woman in the gift shop there, and that was nice and fairly informative. Oddly, she recommended we buy a specific book on the civil rights movement, which she described as the best book on the subject she had read. We did, and when we got to the hotel that night, we realized it was a children’s book.
The last scheduled stop on the trip was to Birmingham — a couple hours north of Montgomery. The home of King ally, Fred Shuttlesworth, Birmingham had been used as a testing ground by movement leaders in 1963 and was famously dubbed “Bombingham” after a number of bombings, most tragically the one at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church which killed four young girls. We started out visiting Kelly Ingram Park — site of the Bull Conner’s police dogs and firehoses, and the whole “Children’s revolution” thing. The park has monuments to all of the events, which are actually quite nice, but unfortunately most of the park has become a haven for drug users and dealers. We struck up a conversation with a homeless couple in the park. The man claimed to have been in the park the day of the protest, and also in the vicinity the Sunday the church bomb went off (the church is only a block or so from the park). I’m not sure how true his stories were, but he was very informative about the area, and we bought him and his wife a chicken dinner. Next to the church site was yet another civil rights museum. Still feeling burned by the Rosa Parks museum in Montgomery, we almost passed this one up, but it was our last stop, so we headed in. Definitely worth visiting. It certainly wasn’t as grand as the National museum in Memphis, but it had a lot of information and media worth seeing.
That same night, we began driving Northwest toward Memphis, stopped in Tupelo Mississippi for the night, and flew from Memphis to Baltimore the next morning.
That’s a hard vacation to top. Ideally, I would like to continue that sort of “tour of America,” but I can’t think of a good theme, or even region to explore next. This one was tailor made — not only am I a student of the civil rights movement, but I really like the South. It’s so quirky and unpretentious, and the food ain’t bad either. Plus, it makes for a very affordable vacation, which is good for someone on my budget. I could always stick with the South, and move just East (to Charleston and Savannah) or just West (to Little Rock and New Orleans), but neither of those seem to live up to the last one.
I could head North, maybe take in some New England towns, but I can’t find a good narrative around the trip, and I did live in Boston for a year (and then spend my three years with GCI traveling there every other month) so New England has lost a bit of its charm for me. And I hate hate hate the Red Sox. I’d like to check out some of the old rust belt towns. I’ve been to Pittsburgh, really liked it there, and would love to add Cleveland or Milwaukee or Detroit to the list, but most of those places are too spread out to visit on one trip.
I don’t really have any interest in the western United States, believing to the annoyance of everyone who knows me that America should only extend to Louisiana in the South and Minnesota in the North. I spent about six months in Albuquerque and was absolutely appalled at the lack of character and history in the Southwest. Albuquerque is actually better than many other cities in the region, such as Phoenix and Vegas. Everything in the west is dedicated to convenience and newness over any kind of quirks or history.
So, I’m back where I started. Still sick, still bored, still trying to think of a good vacation to match the civil rights tour…
