The Justice Journey Pilgrimage

Day Four

           Bravery 

 

                 

Do you recognize this icon of the civil rights movement?

Today we visited the Rosa Parks Museum in Birmingham.  Hers is a story well known, told in many formats and languages.  It memorializes a woman who simply had enough and said, "No."  This was not part of an organized movement, not planned in advance, not encouraged by members of the nascent civil rights movement.  Simply put, Rosa decided to draw her line--this time not in the sand but in the streets of Birmingham for all to see.  "No," said Rosa Parks.  In her autobiography, she wrote, "I was not tired physically… No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”  Could you have been that brave?

We also toured the Legacy Museum at Tuskegee University.  The HeLa Cell exhibit celebrates the life of the Virginia born Henrietta Lacks, who was a tobacco farmer who suffered from an aggressive form of cervical cancer which landed her at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, MD. Her cells, harvested without her knowledge or that of her family, were discovered to possess the unique characteristics of growing and reproducing beyond measure. HeLa’s growth characteristics made it the ideal alternative primate host cell source for the massive testing of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine. Tuskegee University’s Carver Foundation was one of the sites selected to mass produce the cell line and distribute it to laboratories worldwide for polio vaccine testing and a variety of research projects from which we all benefit today (from the museum's website).  The second, United States Public Health Service Untreated Syphilis Study in the Negro Male, 1932-1972, is the reason for the Legacy Museum.  It is an outgrowth of the Official Proclamation by President William Jefferson Clinton against the misdeeds of the United States Public Health Service in its Untreated Syphilis Study in the Negro Male in Macon County, Alabama, 1932-1972.

Henrietta Lacks was not asked for permission to take her cells, nor were the Black men asked for permission to be in the syphilis study.  But once these transgressions came to light, Henrietta's family was brave enough to pursue the truth, as were the men enrolled in the syphilis study.  They didn't sit down.  They STOOD UP.

We ended the day at the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site.  The mantra of this all Black unit was, "We dared not fail."  Given the segregationist policies of Alabama, every one working to support the flyers also had to be Black.  For every one pilot in the air, there were ten on the ground doing the work enabling the Airmen to fly.  Since not all the airmen were from the South, those from areas where segregation was not enforced found it difficult to live under Jim Crow laws.  After the war, members of this unit returned to be told, "Whites to the left, blacks to the right."  The reward for their bravery and service to their country was reinforcement of segregation.  It was reported that captured Black soldiers were asked by German soldiers why they would fight for a country that didn't want them.  

The Tuskegee Airmen gained a reputation as excellent escort units.  Bomber crews called them the "Red Tail Angels" because of their planes' distinctive red tail sections and because they were known to never abandon bombers in their care. (from the National Park Service brochure, Tuskegee Airmen)

Tomorrow morning we head for Memphis, where our final stop will be the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered.  It is now the National Civil Rights Museum.

I would be remiss without leaving at least a couple sentences about our lovely, exceptional pilgrims--the kids.  (Yes, the shepherds, predominantly their mothers, are lovely and exceptional as well, as demonstrated by the children they are raising.)  They without fail are respectful, attentive, engaged.  They acknowledge that what they are seeing is often difficult to accept, hard to process.  

They give me great faith in our future.  And they should give you great faith in our future, too.