A p.s. from Memphis
I completely forgot to talk about the Civil Rights museum in Memphis. The museum is located in what used to be the Lorraine motel, the place where Martin Luther King was assassinated. The museum was really well presented with lots of interactive stuff like sitting on an old bus and being asked to move by the driver. It was especially moving at the point when you get to see the room Martin Luther King was using the night he was shot, which his been basically left unchanged since that night. They also have a museum across the road showing the sniper’s nest from where James Earl Ray fired. There are tons of conspiracy theories of course.
After the museum outside I noticed an african-american woman protesting against the museum. I went and chatted to her and her problem was that the Memphis state government owned the museum, have turned it purely into a tourist attraction and make money out of it. She thinks that the museum should be used to ‘further the dream’. I think she has a point. After that I was pleased to read that in Birmingham Alabama, and in Atlanta Georgia the venue’s important to Dr King were owned by the King family. I heard that the King family are in a great deal of conflict over who gets what with regard to the Dr King’s estate. It really is a sad state of affairs.
The thing I find most perplexing is that the 60’s civil rights movement is hailed as a wonderful time of change and progress. Civil rights leaders and prominent figures are now celebrated. There are statues, museums, awards for all these people. It is spoken of like they won the battle against racism and segregation. Most neighbourhoods I have been in have one racial majority, the vast majority of homeless people I’ve met or seen have been african-american, the american army has platoons divided on the basis of race, the amount of young african-american men in jail is disproportionately higher than those of other races. Even the election news, who’s got the white vote, the black vote, the hispanic vote. My impressions are of a hugely divided culture here, formal equality there may be but social equality there certainly is not.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Good fodder for conversation, Mark, and we’ll discuss when you arrive in Virginia. There’s a complexity about race and culture in America that really doesn’t have parallel images anywhere else in the world–which is certainly not to say that racial complexity does not exist elsewhere. And no one–*no one*–has illusions about racial tension having been resolved by the Civil Rights momements of the 1950s and 1960s. Civil Rights leaders are celebrated, but there is simultaneously a great sadness about the loss of momentum and organization when their era passed. Your observation of the difference between formal equality and social equality is astute, though there is great complexity to that difference as well. It is impossible to pin down a single, static relationship between race and culture in America–as you’ve had plenty of grueling Greyhound hours to witness, it is a huge country, with unprecedented diversity and histories.
At any rate, we’ll keep the conversation going….
August 20th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
*wealth* of histories, I should specify in my previous comment….