Both of my Heritage Tour trips to Selma, AL included stops in other locations with significant historical presence from the civil rights era. My 50th anniversary trip included a stop at the 16th Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, AL, where, on Sunday, September 15, 1963, when I was merely two years and about two weeks old, a bomb, later discovered as being placed by three Ku Klux Klan members, killed 11-year-old Denise McNair, and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson. How disgusting. (Pictured from left) Peggy Jayne Lee, Esq., Brittney, Susan Lee, Ekpe Abioto, and Elaine Lee Turner. The group met up with Hertiage Tours participant Jimmie Franklin on the Edmund Pettus Bridge after the 50th anniversary march in memorandum of Bloody Sunday. The event was held in Selma, AL in 2015. This year, we visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum, both in Montgomery, AL. The Legacy Museum is dedicated to the thousands of people who were lynched all over the southern states of America and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which sits directly across the street, is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people who were terrorized by lynching, humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence. Located in the middle of an otherwise normal-looking Alabama neighborhood with large antebellum homes, the museum sits on the site of a former auction block where enslaved blacks were once warehoused in the heart of downtown Montgomery, Alabama, just steps away from the very dock and rail station where tens of thousands of them were trafficked during the 19th century. We returned home early Monday morning, the day before Super Tuesday which had me up at 4:30 am for an anticipated arrival at my polling location by 5:45 am. The doors, open at 6 am for poll workers and were opened an hour later at 7 am for voters. This was the first time Election Day voting had taken place at this normally Early Voting location and from the time the doors opened until the time they closed, it seemed as if every third person in line to vote had to be sent to another location to cast their ballot. Why is it that we, as black people, don’t know our history? It wasn’t taught to me in school either, but I took it upon myself to learn about the things that negatively impacted my ancestors and I’m still learning new things every day thanks to Mrs. Elaine Lee Turner and her Heritage Tours and Slave Haven Underground Railroad Museum. You didn’t ask, but if you’ve read this far I’m going to give this, my opinion about black people, anyway. We are still slaves and some of us just don’t want to be free. An equally disgusting fact, again, in my opinion even though you didn’t ask me for it. Thanks! 4
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