A Legacy and Justice Visit to Montgomery

On the Sunday of Labor Day weekend last year Dianne, our son Amos and I made a trip to Montgomery. Our destination? Two places that had just opened the previous April 26: the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The Equal Justice Institute operates both facilities. The Legacy Museum covers black experience in the U.S. "From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration" as its subtitle states. The National Memorial documents the victims of lynching in the United States, a project that continues.  

As is often the case, that September day in Alabama was very hot. Yet both locations were crowded with people black and white. 

The opening of the museum and memorial attracted international attention. You can read two responses here and here. According to an email I recently received from EJI, almost 300,000 people had visited the sites by January 31, 2019. 

Further comments are below.  

Photos are not allowed in the Museum. The facility is 11,000 square feet and  was very crowded on the day we visited. People taking photographs would have been distractions from the message and perhaps disrespectful as well. Through various types of exhibits the museum describes the past oppression of blacks in the U.S. and current problems such as high incarceration rates. 

The exhibits and displays are not meant to comfort. The terrors of slavery and its aftermath of Reconstruction and sharecropping and the contemporary issues surrounding mass incarceration are vividly expressed. One display contains samples of soil from lynching sites across America. Naturally the vast majority are in the southern states. Another vivid exhibit uses video technology  and slave pen recreations for narrations of first person slave accounts. 

This pair of sites offers a very well-done and thoughtful series of exhibits and experiences. Their addition to Alabama's already impressive Civil Rights Museum Trail will bring even more  state, national and international tourists to learn the history. 

This sculpture by Dana King is dedicated to the women who sustained the Montgomery Bus Boycott

The National Memorial building contains over 800 hundred six-foot long steel monuments representing each county in the U.S. where lynchings have taken place. On the grounds outside the building are an equal number of monuments that will be available for counties to claim and install locally. 

These monuments are one part of EJI's Community Remembrance Project. Other initiatives include historical markers at lynching sites and the collection of soil from those sites. 

Since we live in Shelby County, I especially noticed these names. I'll have to do some research...

Sculpture "Raise Up" by Hank Willis Thomas 

The Legacy Museum is located on the site of a slave warehouse, and is one block from the site of Montgomery's slave markets. Also nearby were the river docks and train station where tens of thousands of slaves were moved in and out of the city. 

Doctor Who Visits Montgomery in 1955

February 4 was the anniversary of Rosa Park's birth. As luck would have it, just a few days earlier I had watched "Rosa", an episode from the most recent season of Doctor Who.That British show has been around since 1963, but despite being a science fiction and fantasy fan, I've only seen a few episodes. I watched this one because of the Alabama connection, and enjoyed it so much I'll have to catch some more. 

Doctor Who is not the only television show to make a time traveling leap back to segregated Alabama. Perhaps one day I'll do a blog post on those Quantum Leap episodes...

Further comments are below.  

Doctor Who fandom is massive, which is not surprising since the show has survived so long. If you want to learn a bit, start here

. 

The 2018 series brought something new to the Doctor Who universe. For the first time, the good Doctor is played by a woman, Jodie Whittaker. She is the 13th actor to play the lead in the BBC series. 

Malorie Blackman is an author of young adult novels and children's books who often uses science fiction settings. Chris Chibnall is currently Doctor Who's showrunner and head writer.  

Our episode opens with Rosa boarding through the front door and sitting in the white section of a bus in 1943. She was ordered by the driver James F. Blake to get off and enter from the back door. That same driver will be driving the bus Rosa boards twelve years later.

Rosa reluctantly gets off the bus intending to enter through the back door. As was apparently fairly common in those days, the driver took off before she could get back on. 

Doctor Who is an alien Time Lord, so she and her friends make their way around the universe in a time machine, the Tardis, disguised as a British police box. Bradley Walsh, Tosin Cole, and Mandip Gill play the Doctor's newest travelling companions, Graham O'Brien, Ryan Sinclair, and Yasmin Khan, respectively. 

They have quickly learned how things are in the segregated U.S. South. Ryan--a black man--is punched for touching a white woman, and Yasmin--a Pakistani--is called a Mexican. 

Who and friends set up shop in a motel--fictional as far as I've been able to determine. Ryan and Yasmin must of course remain out of sight. Who and her third friend must pose as a couple to take the room. They have all spent the day of their arrival learning the nature of segregation in Montgomery in 1955. The groups happens to meet Rosa Parks, who sets them straight on some of life's parameters in Alabama. 

 The group has arrived in Montgomery in 1955 by accident, but decide to stay after detecting another time traveler. The four soon learn he has come to change history by preventing Parks from riding that bus, hopefully preventing the boycott, a major spark of the Civil Rights movement in America.

Why? Well, evil time travelers do that sort of thing. Hey, it's this episode's McGuffin. But rest easy--Doctor Who and companions are going to make sure Rosa boards the right bus.

One of the delights of this episode are the realistic background touches that help recreate Montgomery in 1955. Doctor Who and the others use these bus schedules and phone books to try and locate where Rosa Parks will be on that fateful day. 

We also see an ad for the Montgomery Fair department store, the real place where Parks worked as a seamstress. Once the bus boycott began, she was fired from this job. 

Here's the Montgomery Fair department store where Rosa Parks worked as a seamstress as depicted in this episode. 

And here is the real department store ca. 1940. You can see more photos at the online Department Store Museum.

Source: Alabama Dept. of Archives and History 

Parks was living in unit 634 of the Cleveland Heights Apartments when the boycott began. 

Doctor Who and Rosa meet again. 

The black man among Doctor Who's companions, Ryan Sinclair, makes his way to Rosa Parks's apartment where she is meeting with Martin Luther King Jr., and attorney Fred Gray. 

A determined Rosa takes her seat in the white section of the bus. 

She refuses to move, the driver calls the police, and Rosa is arrested. History is not interrupted. 

Back aboard the Tardis, Doctor Who winds up the episode with a rousing explanation of what happened next in the Civil Rights movement.

The episode ends with Doctor Who and friends viewing the asteroid named after Rosa Parks.

"Rosa" is not a documentary, and some liberties are taken with historical reality. But as this article notes, "Rosa" is remarkably accurate for an episode of a weekly fantasy series. 

Hale Infirmary: An Early Alabama Hospital for Blacks

In 1890 Hale Infirmary opened in Montgomery as one of the state's earliest hospitals for blacks. The facility was largely the work of one man, the city's first black physician, Cornelius Dorsette. I've written an entry on him for the Encyclopedia of Alabama, so let me quote myself on the origins of Hale Infirmary:

"Soon after his arrival in Montgomery, Dorsette had married Sarah Hale, but she died after less than a year. Her father was James Hale, the wealthiest black man in Montgomery at that time, and Dorsette convinced him that the city needed an infirmary for blacks. Hale donated land, and a white women's club helped Dorsette raise money for the building and its operation. The first such facility for blacks in Alabama, Hale Infirmary opened in 1890 and operated until 1958."

Dorsette came to Montgomery in 1884 at the urging of Booker T. Washington; the two were classmates at Hampton Institute in Virginia. By then Washington had been in Tuskegee for three years, and felt a black physician could be successful in Alabama's capital city. He was right. 

Dorsette also had constructed a three story professional building on Dexter Avenue that included his office. He helped found and served as the first president of the National Medical Association, an organization for black doctors, and served as a trustee of Tuskegee Institute and as Washington's personal physician. Unfortunately after a hunting trip on Thanksgiving Day in 1897, he caught pneumonia and died.  

Another prominent black Montgomery physician was also associated with Hale Infirmary. David H.C. Scott, an Alabama native, returned to the state after graduating from Meharry Medical School in Nashville. He practiced in Montgomery until his death in 1920, and often operated at Hale Infirmary which was on Lake Street near his office. Scott married the daughter of a prominent contractor, who built his son-in-law a three story building that housed a drug store and offices. Scott was also an important member of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. 

More information about Hale Infirmary can be found in the article below. As noted there, Hale Infirmary cost $7,000 to build its two stories that could hold sixty patients. 

See also Thomas J. Ward, Jr.'s entry "Black Hospital Movement in Alabama" in the Encyclopedia of Alabama. Ward says the first hospital in Alabama for African-Americans was the one at Tuskegee Institute, which opened in 1892. However, the article below notes that the James Hale Infirmary Society was incorporated in Montgomery in 1889 and presumably the facility opened the following year. 

This photo and article depict the infirmary and staff in 1919.

Source: Clement Richardson, National Cyclopedia of the Colored Race. Montgomery, 1919, p. 129

Hale Infirmary, also around 1919

Source: Alabama Dept of Archives and History

Cornelius N. Dorsette, M.D. [1852?-1897]

David Henry Clay Scott, M.D.

Source: Clement Richardson, National Cyclopedia of the Colored Race. Montgomery, 1919, p. 78