The picture I had of Camila for our final day together, didn’t really express who she was. So I took something from a webpage describing her what she does. Her current work is with Resuena, an organization “set out on a dream to expand the access to Nonviolent Communication in Colombia so that it becomes part of the day-to-day culture.”
Below is the bad picture I took of Camila at a diner for breakfast. She really wasn’t unhappy at the time. One of the aspects of Colombian cuisine that Michael really appreciated is the soups, and the fact that Colombians eat soup at breakfast and lunch. I remember with fondness Colombian pastries on previous trip. I
t struck me that this simple diner had works of original art all over the walls. I said it seemed like I saw art everywhere I went in Bogota. Camila told me its presence was especially prevalent in her bohemian neighborhood.
A love of beauty and plants also helps describe Camila’s character. She has plants in every room of her apartment except the utility room. I documented them here:
We decided to go to the Bogota public market and eat all the fruits we hadn’t eaten yet (and we had eaten a lot of different fruits.) The excursion turned into buying fruit that doesn’t need to be turned into juice. Of the fruits you see here, we liked the mangosteen the best (the little brown ones). Since Colombia is full of microclimates, almost anything can be grown. Camila also took us to visit her friend who organizes community-supported agriculture (and allows artists to use her space, because, well, it’s Bogotá).
What else? By the time I got to Bogotá, the bruise I got from my fall in Medellin had grown considerably worse. As it dissipated over time, I realized it had hematoma at the center, which explains why the muscle in my thigh hurt so much when I moved it. I used one of my hiking sticks as a cane for the rest of the trip.
Our guide Camilo told us this artist is famous for painting animals in apocalyptic situations
Returning to Camila’s place gave me a chance to rest my knee—which I did the day after a graffiti tour of Bogota with a young man from a tour company run by Camila’s friend. His name was Camilo, and he had been an art student at one of the more than 100 universities in Bogota. He went all the way back to graffiti as a movement in the 1960s, to Cornbread, a young man who began ,spray-painting, “ I am Cornbread“ on walls all over New York City to impress a girl. People began to ask, “Who is this Cornbread guy?“ However, when the girl rejected him, Cornbread wrote on a wall, “Cornbread has retired.” The graffiti movement started in New York and then Philadelphia, and soon began spreading. Bogotá is now the global center of street art, with 500 km of painted walls.
Tagging is the most basic form of graffiti, in which individuals or “crews” paint their logos on walls. The higher up on a wall, the more street cred you have. Camilo says he has seen them as high as three stories. The artist that painted the two homeless kids kissing (whom he had seen on the streets) incorporated tags from all over the city into their pants. The painting is called The Invisibles, which, Camilo said, is appropriate, because graffiti is a way that invisible people use to make themselves feel visible.
Tags evolved into “bombs,” huge, balloon-like letters. When Camilo began his career as a street artist, he used stencils, and only then began to appreciate how much skill it took to spray paint these bombs freehand.
Felipe Diego Becerra used Félix the cat as his logo. One night in 2011, as he was painting a wall, the police shot him in the back. At the hospital, the doctor asked his parents why the the police had shot him. When they told him the reason, he asked them to quickly come into Diego’s room and take a photo of his hands covered in blue paint. The police accused him of pulling a gun on them. Graffiti artists all over the city went on a 24-hour graffiti-thon, in protest, many of them painting pictures of Felix the Cat.
The Diego Becerra story continues oddly, two years later when Justin Bieber came to town for a concert. Noticing the art on the walls, he asked if he could try his hand at it—with a police escort.
The public protests that followed Bieber’s visit compelled the Municipal government of Bogotá to decriminalize all graffiti and street art. Three of the art departments in Bogotá’s 100+ universities teach street art. The community of street artists has established a consensus that everything that goes up on a wall is graffiti, so that some will not be more privileged than the others.
Some businesses ask street artists to paint their walls, and sometimes Bogotá chooses particular walls to become art exhibitions, asking artists to express themselves on them.
A Belgian artist came to Bogotá and added little men dressed in typical workers’ uniforms to some of the art.
Political graffiti also abounds in Bogota. One of my clear memories of the 1982 course I took through Bluffton College here in 1982 was seeing all the graffiti by M-19, a militant group opposed to the government that eventually became a political party. The current president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, was affiliated with M-19.
The words on the black and white mural say, “I did not choose war, but I was born a warrior.” The wall of people’s faces refers to the scandal of the “false positives,” in which the Colombian army murdered ordinary people, dressed them up in guerrilla uniforms, and claimed they were guerrillas in order to receive a bounty. The wall of army officers standing in a row reads, “Who gave the order?” (to kill the civilians.). And of course Palestine is on everyone’s mind, and would appear on the walls of all the cities we would visit.
Of course we wanted to see Camilo’s street art! The picture on the left was commissioned by a bank. It was meant to be two women weaving, but it kept raining and turning the threads into a rainbow of water. Finally the bank said they like the way it looked. (By the way, I kept that wedding hair-do for more than a week.)
Camilo and his team of artists receive a commission from Bogota’s emerald traders to paint the above. Pablo Escobar and other drug lords had laundered their drug money through emerald traders, who didn’t really have the ability to refuse if they wanted to keep their families safe. As a consequence, the traders developed a reputation for being a part of the criminal class.
When Camilo’s team asked what they wanted on the wall, they assumed the traders would want something that showed their status as normal part of Colombian society. But what they wanted was the Indigenous legend of how emeralds came to be.
In the land of what is now called the Magdalena River (where Community Peacemaker Teams works, incidentally) the Muzo creator God, Are, swept over the areacreating the mountains and valleys. On the shores of the sacred river, now called Minero, he formed two figures—one male (Tena) and one female (Fura)—and threw them into the river. There, they were brought to life. Once alive, Are taught Fura and Tena how to take care of the gardens that He had planted and make pottery. He gave them rules to follow including the requirement of fidelity in their husband and wife relationship. Are taught them that violating the laws he had established would lead to aging and eventual death. For a long time, Fura and Tena enjoyed their ageless lives in the beautiful land Are had prepared for them.
Then, one day, a young man appeared. His name was Zarbi. Zarbi was looking for a flower that could cure any illness and had crossed mountains and rivers, looking high and low for the flower without success. So, he asked Fura for help, and being a compassionate soul, she began to follow him throughout the forests looking for the flower. Soon Fura became aware of her attraction to Zarbi. She was unfaithful to Tena with Zarbi and as a result immediately began to age.
Realizing her error, she returned to Tena, who upon seeing her in her aged state realized that she had broken the law that Are had given them and would soon die. Not wanting to be left alone, Tena laid down on Fura’s knees and stabbed himself in the heart. For three days, Fura cried with the body of her husband on her lap, and her tears changed into emeralds.
Soon, Are returned to visit Fura and Tena and realized they had broken his laws. He changed the couple into large rocks. Angered, he also banished Zarbi, who in his own anger changed into a raging river in order to eternally separate Fura’s rock from Tena’s rock.
I’d say something about these crazy kids being so in love, but that would not reflect the meticulous planning they put into this wedding for a year. They succeeded, and they’re still so in love.
The flowers were lovely.
The friend who introduced them performed the ceremony and described their almost love at first sight meet-up in a way that made every one laugh.
What more shall I say? Should I mention that music after the wedding dinner was at a decibel level that made the furniture vibrate in the next room? And that I lay on a vibrating couch with my head turned away from the banquet hall because the flashing lights would. have triggered a migraine?
Have I mentioned yet that Michael’s daughter Beth got married on February 24 in Medellin and that was the whole reason for our South America trip? Well, now you know.
Michael and I left for Medellin on the morning of February 21. For lunch, we ate at Champi, a few blocks from the hotel, which was our first exposure to traditional Colombian food. Michael is a fan. It’s bland, has at least two, usually three starches in the meal and generous servings of meat (beans in less privileged areas.) The coconut lemonade was superb. Cuban coffee was the most expensive coffee on the menu, more expensive than cappuccino. But I noted with appreciation its use as a remedy for headaches.
In the evening, we had dinner with the Taberlys, the family of Eric, whom Beth is marrying. The guy in front is a cousin of some sort and owns the restaurant, Bárbaro, which is famous in Medellin for its steak.Clockwise: Eric’s younger niece, Eric’s sister Simone, Beth, with Eric’s older niece on her lap, Marta, Eric’s mother, Rubens, Eric’s father, Michael, me, Juan, Simone’s husband, and the aforementioned cousin. They may be the nicest family I have ever met, and we are beyond thrilled that Beth is now a part of the
After lunch, Michael and I were passing by a pharmacy and encountered three Venezuelan women. They had laminated papers with pictures of themselves and their children. In English, the papers explained that they were not asking for money, but needed baby formula and diapers. Colombia took in more than a million Venezuelan refugees, but they are not as welcome as they used to be. Michael bought the diapers and formula.
In the evening, we had dinner with the Taberlys, the family of Eric, whom Beth is marrying. The guy in front is a cousin of some sort and owns the restaurant, Bárbaro, which is famous in Medellin for its steak.Clockwise: Eric’s younger niece, Eric’s sister Simone, Beth, with Eric’s older niece on her lap, Marta, Eric’s mother, Rubens, Eric’s father, Michael, me, Juan, Simone’s husband, and the aforementioned cousin. They may be the nicest family I have ever met, and we are beyond thrilled that Beth is now a part of that family.
Our first disaster of the trip happened the next morning when we were going out for breakfast. as I stepped off the curb, my ankle collapsed, and I fell. In the course of the fall, I twisted my left knee and landed hard on my left thigh. The three pictures show my thigh and knee on the day of the fall, February 23, and my thigh on February 27. Fortunately, I had brought some walking sticks in case we would be hiking on rough terrain, so I began using one as a cane.
Friday afternoon before the wedding, we went on a tour of that Eric and Beth arranged of Medellin’s city center. However we first wrote on the metro, which, as our guy, Giuliana, told us, is the only subway system in all of Columbia. Paises, as people in Medellin call themselves, are very proud of it.
The visit to Botero Square was memorable. Perhaps our favorite part of the visit was a Venezuelan rapper who created memorable lyrics at the top of his head. I have finally gotten a video clip of him loaded, which appears at the bottom of the post.I have always thought that Botero was a one trick pony. People refer to his “gordos,” or “fat people,”or “gorditos,” roughly “charming little fat people.” But he never liked this designation. For him, his art was about playing with proportion, according to a Julianna (with the gray backpack). She pointed out that the horses in his paintings have thick legs and tiny heads. If you look up his paintings that show houses, they often show people who are far too big to live in those houses.
I was in too much pain to finish the tour, so Juliana called me an Uber, and I went back to eat lunch at the hotel. Michael and I had been enjoying mora juice, which is blackberry juice, and I ordered it at the hotel restaurant for the first time. The waitress asked if I wanted it with sugar or without, I ordered without and learned that the blackberry juice we had been drinking, and probably all the juices we have been drinking have been full of sugar.
That night we attended a party for which the requisite attire was “cocktail dress.” I hope I passed. Every thing advertised as a cocktail dress looks itchy to me. I found a second-hand silk dress that felt great, except for the itchy tag. Although, it may look like I’m drunk in the picture, I drank only water. The decorations were real fruit and quite lovely, although David’s mother-in-law hinted that maybe I shouldn’t eat the centerpiece. David wrote a beautiful tribute to Beth, and Eric’s mom and sister did the same for him.
The event was really for the young people though, who apparently enjoyed shouting at each other over over the extraordinarily loud music.
Michael and I got to the airport by three to catch a 5:00 flight yesterday morning, so we were tired when we arrived at our friend Camila’s beautiful apartment around 7:30 in the evening, but we enjoyed catching up a little.
Camila generously offered us her bed and I slept better than I had in weeks. Next morning we ate a fruit called guanábana for breakfast. It’s called “soursop” in English. We weren’t sure we liked it.
Even though it looks custardy in the picture, it’s kind of stringy. But I looked it up and apparently it’s really good for diabetes and it’s an anti-inflammatory, and it started tasting better after that. It’s also illegal in the U.S. because it’s an invasive plant.
I needed to get my glasses adjusted, so we followed Google Maps to an optical store and discovered we were in a six-square block area of almost nothing but optical shops. After walking around some more, we lunched at La Puerta Falsa (the false door). A Colombian-Israeli friend of Michael had recommended a particular traditional Colombian soup, Ajiaco Santafereño. Awesome recommendation.
Michael and I are drinking blackberry juice there. Avacados, crema, rice, and capers come with the soup. Michael and I swapped rice and avacado. Camila initially wasn’t going to eat anything but after seeing the soups, she ordered one too.
For dinner, we were lucky that Milena Rincón thought it was worth traveling more than two hours by bus to meet us at Crepes and Waffles. C and W is a Colombian chain restaurant that buys its supplies from small farmers and focuses on teaching low income people, especially single mothers, financial skills. Milena was the first Colombian to join the CPT Colombia team, then the Colombia Program director, and is now the director of all the programs that CPT runs. Since Camila works with an organization that tries to create a culture of nonviolence in Colombia, Michael and I thought it it would be good for them to meet. Also, the food was delicious. I had a salmon Caesar salad and a passion fruit frappé.
I am currently in Medellin and it’s two days later. I thought I’d see what its like to travel without a laptop and blog with an iPad. Turns out it takes a lot longer.
The museum doesn’t allow you to take any pictures, and it didn’t sell any postcards of the pictures I wanted to take, most significantly the wall with the names of all those who died participating in the struggle for civil rights. For those who are interested in going to the museum–the film that they show you at the beginning of the self-guided tour pretty much tells you everything you will see in the museum.
Have you ever heard of the Greensboro Massacre? It sounded familiar to me; my thoughts went to something labor-related. Michael and I were both shocked to learn it happened in 1979 when I was a senior in high school. It started out as a “Death to the Klan” rally sponsored by the Communist party in a low-income housing development. The Klan had been trying to divide workers along racial lines that the communists had been trying to organize in the textile factories. Well, the Klan and the Nazis showed up and killed five of the rally participants—with the collusion of the Greensboro police, as it turns it out. When the police finally turned up, they arrested the rally participants. As part of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 2004-2006, the city agreed to erect a memorial to those slain at the housing development, but so far, just this plaque marks the event—Marker J-28 in the North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program.
We had dinner that night with friends of Michael, who had decided they preferred North Carolina weather to Rochester weather.
On our way to Chapel Hill the next day we stopped to see a friend who used to live in Canandaigua and who also does not miss the snow.
In Chapel Hill, we discovered some significant human rights events. Heard of the freedom riders who de-segregated the buses in the South? What dates come to mind? Well, these folks were doing it in 1947 and were put on chain gangs for their resistance. Respect to the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the brave citizens of Chapel Hill.
Chapel Hill had its own sit-ins, but high schoolers set off the movement here in 1960 instead of college students.
We spent the night in Hickory, NC with Michael’s friends Kathleen and Kevin, who showed us lovely hospitality, and of course, I forgot to take a selfie of us. I also didn’t find much in the way of sites in Hickory that marked the Civil Rights movement. But I did find a thesis on the desegregation of Hickory High School.
On our way to Clemson the next day, we decided it was time for us to participate in another southern tradition. Verdict: my waffle and Michael’s burger were tasty.
The week that the Belarusian government intercepted a RyanAir flight and arrested Roman Protasevich, western governments and media expressed outrage. News outlets described him variously as a journalist, blogger, activist, and leader of the opposition to authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko.
They did not describe him as a fascist and fighter in the Ukrainian Azov Battalion. Prominent human rights groups accused this militia of war crimes while it fought Russian separatists in Ukraine. They flaunt their Nazi sympathies, using the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich as one of their original logos. Currently, they have tilted it to the right. Photos of their soldiers show them sporting Nazi tattoos. The U.S. blocked aid to the Azov battalion in 2018 because of its white supremacist ideology.
Protasevich claimed that he was covering the war in Ukraine as a journalist. However, photos in several online publications show him in uniform and armed with an automatic weapon. An issue of the Azov recruiting magazine appears to have his image on the cover.
Western media also praised presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and her party as “pro-democracy” activists in their bid to overturn Lukashenko. As they have with Protasevich, they built up a heroic narrative for her: an ordinary housewife married to a dissident whom Lukashenko imprisoned for his criticism of the government. They did not mention that one of her proxy speakers, Nikolai Solyanik, praised Hitler during a rally on behalf of Tikhanovskaya in Grodno and said Belarusians needed a leader like him. The opposition movement Tikhanovskaya leads expelled him, but only after outrage on social media; Tikhanovskaya chalked the episode up to his “extreme psychological conditions.” Other members of the opposition have expressed sympathy for Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in WWII.
And we must not forget Alexander Navalny. No one deserves to have their government poison them, and he has shown great courage in returning to Russia, knowing of his probable imprisonment and worse. However, he has also referred to Chechens as cockroaches, wants to ban Muslims from the Caucasus and Central Asia (many of whom are Russian citizens) from entering ethnic Russian areas, and deport all immigrants. Navalny supported a 2013 campaign, “Stop Feeding the Caucasus,” which pledged to halt government subsidies to the poorer and less developed non-ethnic Russian republics in the North Caucasus.
“I consider Navalny the most dangerous man in Russia,” Engelina Tareyeva — a member of the Yabloko party that expelled Navalny in 2007 — wrote of him. “You don’t have to be a genius to understand that the most horrific thing that could happen in our country would be the nationalists coming to power.”
In February 2021, Amnesty International withdrew its designation of Navalny as a “prisoner of conscience.”
As we mature, we learn to hold multiple realities in tension. Our parents may commit crimes, love their children unconditionally, and care about cruelty to animals. Our friends might be generous, fountains of wit and emotional wrecks. A government may care about providing food, shelter, and education to its citizens but repress minorities. Another government may talk of democratic freedoms for its citizens but only grant them to certain sectors of society and actively work to suppress them in other countries.
Our media need to grow up. Journalists can be fascists. People resisting authoritarian governments can also be fascists or willing to work with fascists. And just because people oppose authoritarian regimes does not mean they are pro-Democracy.
This morning on NPR, I heard a Republican commentator say our government works best with a “loyal opposition.” He was referring to those of his party who did not support overthrowing the most recent election results.
That, I thought, is a low bar. Members of this loyal opposition have had no problem with disenfranchising people in districts that are likely to vote for Democrats. They were fine with exploding the national debt to provide tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest U.S. citizens. They were fine with the rise of the homeless population, the impunity of the police state, families going hungry and without healthcare. And when I say, “fine with,” I mean they enacted legislation knowing that their votes would result in these violations of human rights.
When I think of a loyal opposition, I think of those people who have challenged the corporate Democrats: the people who have hit the streets, sometimes for decades, demanding that politicians reallocate money from the police and military to communities in ways that would end homelessness, provide affordable housing, employment, food, and healthcare. I think of the politicians who have primaried incumbent Democrats, saying they no longer represent the people they serve, but the donors who fund them.
A few months ago, I heard another Republican on AM Joy say that he no longer saw a future in the Republican Party because it had stopped generating new ideas. It simply said, “no,” to everything. Does anyone think, he said, that the U.S. will not have some form of universal healthcare like most of the developed and developing world? The debate on what that will look like is happening between the two factions of the Democratic Party. He wanted to be a part of that discussion.
In the past week, the progressive nature of Joe Biden’s executive orders has surprised me. I am still not enthusiastic about some of his cabinet appointments. The Border Police are still holding children in cages. I think his response to the climate crisis is not crisis-y enough. But it seems that he is listening to the people who put him into office—including the loyal opposition.
The new fruit of the morning was pitaya, a mild flavored fruit. Wikipedia says it’s the same as dragon fruit, but most of the dragon fruit I’ve eaten is almost tasteless. (I had a yellow version at the hotel in Medellin on Feb. 22, and it was more flavorful.)
After breakfast we went to the Colombia National Museum. I didn’t see any signs forbidding photos, but I furtively took this photo anyway. For those who aren’t aware of the sordid history of United Fruit in Latin America, check out this article.
General Smedley Butler was obliquely referring to United Fruit in this famous quotation:
Some of you might not be aware that U.S. corporate elites tried to stage a coup when Franklin D Roosevelt was President. They asked Smedley Butler to lead it and become the first U.S dictator. Instead, he turned in the plotters, which included J.P. Morgan, Irénée DuPont and executives from BirdsEye, General Motors, and General Foods. He was disgusted when these wealthy individuals got off scot free. Rumor has it that FDR told them they wouldn’t be charged with treason if they supported his New Deal.
Right next to the museum, was a restaurant called The Wok, where we met Camila and her dad for lunch. He is also a writer—mostly short stories— and loves Henry Miller. Even though he doesn’t speak English, we managed to discuss what happens when the story takes over in ways we don’t expect, e.g. when characters decide to do things we hadn’t planned on them doing, or when minor characters decide to become important. When I am trying to figure out a sentence or paragraph that isn’t quite right, I walk or work in the garden. He sweeps the floor.
The conversation reminded me that I need other writers in my life. And I need to prioritize the writing.
Final Leg of the Journey: Florida, Georgia, Carolinas, Virginia, Home
Our first stop on the way out of Florida. We knew that Jacksonville had plenty of Civil Rights history, but we basically did a drive-by shooting of the James Weldon Johnson Park. He was the author of Lift Every Voice and Sing. Below was the shot; I’m posting full size for ease of reading.
Limited Demographic Productions
Our next stop was Brunswick, Georgia. What do you think when you see this neighborhood below?
Nothing impressive, right? Quiet suburban neighborhood. On February 23, 2020, Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William “Roddie” Bryan stalked Ahmaud Arbery as he went on a run through this neighborhood and killed him. We used Google maps to find the spot where he died near the street signs above. Our car is parked in front of it. We expected to find a small memorial as you see for fatal auto accidents, but all we saw was the withered flowers above. We left stones as is done in the Jewish tradition, which we had picked up in Selma. You can see them in the picture.
By 1964 when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to visit Savannah, he called it the most desegregated city in the South. This was largely in part to the work of hundreds of teenagers and young adults who protested and boycotted during the Civil Rights Movement. Not only did the students boycott Broughton St. and hold sit-ins at local restaurants and department store lunch counters (Figure 1), but they also held wade-ins on the segregated beaches at Tybee Island, kneel-ins at white churches, ride-ins on buses, and stand-ins at movie theaters.[i] They fought for equality in all aspects of lif
Ravi gets wounded
Michael parked illegally in a loading zone, I ran across the intersection pictured below to the former Levy’s Department Store/current community college and snapped a picture of the plaque. Took less than five minutes.
We were very pleased with the comfort and performance of our new Rav4 plug-in hybrid on this trip, although I have to say it still floors me that I am driving a vehicle more expensive than the house I grew up in. Therefore, I am sad that Gorilla tape is currently holding its bumper together. The plaque about the slave auction is located in a small wedge of a park in a residential neighborhood with limited parking. As Michael tried to maneuver out of his spot, he caught the bumper on a very low flatbed trailer. We tried putting the notches and tabs back together, but a couple of hours later, as we were driving to Columbia, SC to spend the night, we heard scraping and weird wind noises. Pulled over to a truck stop/mini-mart, and saw the bumper had come apart, and rubber and fabric stuff was hanging down beneath the engine. We got some tape in the mini-mart and tried to pull out the stuff that was hanging down. A kind trucker with tools then helped us out.
Our last stop in Harrisonburg, VA
I actually have five book projects I’m juggling right now. But two of the top three include Tony’s memoir (see Part V: St. Petersburg/Tampa), and the one I’m working on with Lisa Schirch about Mennonite collaboration with Nazis during the Third Reich. I also thought the note on her dryer was funny.
Thus ended our 3 and 1/2 week saga.
Final Thoughts
A unifying theme of the trip was that in every southern city, young people organized and served as the nonviolent foot soldiers in voting rights movement and against segregation. If they were here today they would be part of the Movement for Black Lives. If young people in the Movement for Black Lives had been born in the 1950s and 60s, they would have been the ones on the stools at Woolworths, in the swimming pool in St. Augustine, with the freedom riders on the buses.
The question for us: are we going to be part of today’s Civil Rights Movement or let the smears of craven politicians and media pundits turn us around?
And finally, more than once I was sad that I couldn’t share these experiences with my father, who died on New Year’s weekend this year. He met Fannie Lou Hamer and participated in a voter registration drive in Mississippi in the 1960s. He was also my most loyal blog reader.
After Montgomery, we headed to Lake City, FL for some downtime with my college friends Paula and Mark, but we decided to do a quick stop in Albany (pronounced al-BAENY), GA on the way. Using a willingness to face mass arrest, the Albany Movement had the ambitious goal of desegregating the entire city using the strategy of mass arrests. Sheriff Pritchett just kept sending them to jails within a 200-mile radius of Albany. Dr. King considered Albany a failure, but within two years of these arrests, the town was desegregated. Cynthia, our guide at the museum, was surprised that anyone had thought it a failure.
Cynthia kind of interfered with our plans to do a quick look around and then travel on to Lake City, five hours away. However, since she was brand new at the job, and we were the only people in the museum we didn’t have the heart to tell her we didn’t need a guide. When the time got to about an hour later than we had planned to leave, we had to tell her we weren’t going to tour the church, but we did get a selfie with her.
Lake City Florida: Paul and Mark Moser
We arrived late afternoon at the Moser land. They hold about sixty acres jointly with Paula’s sisters, and it’s full of trails, trees, and gardens—what my friend Tony whom I visited on March 3-4 called Old Florida. I became friends with Paula and Mark when we went to Bogota, Colombia (gulp) 40 years ago for a semester to study Latin American History and Liberation Theology. I think when something transforms how you view the world, you are always attached to the people you were with at the time.
We went out for a 6:45 am walk the next morning with Paula and met up with two of her sisters. We stayed with Pam, the sister with the cane, when we drove from Bluffton to Miami on I-75 and caught the flight to Bogota.
After the intense learning experiences of the previous few days, hanging out with Mark and Paula in their hot tub, catching up on events of the past decade and just conversing with two interesting people was what we needed. I think they do retirement better than anyone I know. Paula has turned Michael on to a dizzying array of new games like Absurdle, Nurdle, etc., which he is enjoying. If we don’t see them for another 10 years, I know we will pick up right where we left off.
St. Petersburg and Tampa: Tony Treadway and Glenn Hasek
We spent a couple days in St. Petersburg where I reconnected with my friend Tony Treadway, whom I hadn’t seen for decades. He is working on a memoir and I’m helping him out with editing. Tony is spending his retirement playing in four, count ’em four, different bands. We also had dinner with my old college friend, Glenn Hasek, with whom I co-edited Bluffton’s college paper, The Witmarsum. He, his wife Miriam, and son Ben currently live outside Tampa in Odessa, FL, where he works from home, publishing Green Lodging News, a newsletter about environmentally sustainable practices in the hotel industry.
Did I remember to take selfies of either of these encounters? No, I did not, but Tony sent me the photo on the right after the fact. He sent me several and wrote
“The one with the tin foil – I put that on when the Tortugas perform the song ‘Alien Teenagers,’ and I tell the audience the foil prevents them from getting inside my head.”
Miami
Selfies aplenty occurred in Miami, where we visited Michael’s relatives and his daughter Beth. Interestingly. When I tried to find civil rights history that occurred in Miami, I found exactly nothing. Tony (see above) said that it’s the difference between Old Florida and southern Florida. Southern Florida was invented by PR firms, according to him.
Nohelia Jarquin is the daughter of the cousin of Michael’s first wife. He remains close to that side of the family, so “relatives” seems a good description for them. We had lunch with Nohelia, her husband Alejandro and their son Diego. Knowing how much Michael loved nacatamales, a Nicaraguan delicacy similar to, but more elaborate than tamales, she bought hime some frozen ones from a woman who made them, with instructions to boil them the next day.
These instructions left us with a conundrum: how were we going to boil them in a hotel room? After some thought, we bought an electric kettle at the St. Augustine Target, because we could use one at home, and used it to boil the nacatamales. They were superb.
Coral Gables: Beth Melissa, Eric and Eric’s Parents
We had a really good time in Coral Gables with Beth Melissa and her boyfriend Eric. Beth gave us a tour around the area, and Eric took us to his favorite Cuban restaurant, the Versailles. We also had dinner with Eric’s parents, Marta and Rubens Tabarley who were pretty much everything you would want in friends; I wish our conversation could have continued, but my back wouldn’t permit it. Marta is originally from Colombia and Rubens is from Argentina, but they have lived in Coral Gables for many years. Eric cooked us a traditional Asado. I knew I shouldn’t have eaten so much sausage before the skirt steak, but I did. If you are offered blood sausage, do not let the name keep you from eating it.
Of course, this event took place after weeks of my worrying that Michael and I would be presentable enough. Our lifestyle trends more casual than Beth’s does. If you zoom in on our picture with the you will notice that I got my nails done. Michael wore one of the new shirts he bought because Florida was warmer than he thought it would be.
St. Augustine
The ACCORD Civil Rights Museum is the type of repository most according to my taste, I’ve found. A small enterprise, run by enthusiastic volunteers with some surprisingly valuable historical artifacts. Our guide clearly regarded all of the objects with great affection, and spoke withpride about the dentists’s office, which houses the museum, having the first integrated waiting room in St. Augustine. (After our travels, I wondered whether it was the only one anywhere in the South during the 1960s.)
Dr. Robert Hayling, the only oral surgeon of any color for miles around, was one of the driving forces behind the St. Augustine Movement which influenced President Lyndon Johnson in his passage of the Civil Rights Act. Do you remember the film of a white man dumping acid in a swimming pool to get black people out of it? That was St. Augustine.
The following eyewitness account of a Klan meeting in St. Augustine describes the threat that forced Dr. Hayling to leave town. I am putting them in full size so that you can read them easily.
We could easily have spent a week in Montgomery, Alabama and the area around it, but we decided to focus on the Legacy Museum and the Memorial for Peace and Justice (aka “The Lynching Museum.”) Like others who have visited, we had trouble finding the words to describe the museum. The designers take you from the Middle Passage (and you feel like you’re underwater as you read about it) through the error of racial terrorism following Reconstruction. You continue to the present New Jim Crow in our prison system, where you can sit in a chair behind a glass panel and talk to real people about what brought them to prison, and what burdens they are bearing.
In the museum, we found the jar of soil that Rabbi Tom Guttherz and his community brought from the spot where John Henry James was lynched (see Part II) on a giant wall of jars, but we weren’t allowed to take pictures of that or anything else in the museum. And the gift shop didn’t have postcards that captured some of the amazing exhibits, so that was a bummer.
We were allowed, however, to take pictures in the memorial, which records all the lynchings that took place in southern counties.
That evening, we had dinner with the family of Jalil’s daughter, which provided a much-needed shift in mood and a good space to talk about our visit to the museum and news events. Antoinette, or “Toni,” is a fabulous cook, and we were way too full of food and fellowship by the time we left. We were a little distressed to learn that Antoinette and her daughter Amina were making $2.50 an hour working as servers.
The next day in Selma was quite different. The museums and historical markers were less sophisticated but more accessible. The Legacy Museum almost felt as though it came down from On High. You definitely saw the work of dedicated human volunteers keeping the witness of Bloody Sunday and the marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma alive.
After the park, we made our way across the bridge and explored the city of Selma.
We walked back over the bridge again and found a small, unassuming museum open across the street from the gift shop. Unlike the high-tech museums we had visited, we could take as many pictures as we wanted in this one.
Returning from Selma to Montgomery, we stopped at the Rosa Parks museum an hour before it closed. We could only take pictures of the sign out front and her statue in the foyer.
We finished our long day amongst the cloud of witnesses at Connie Bs, which had some darn good soul food. I just ordered sides.
From Clemson, we drove to Atlanta, where we stayed with our friend Billie and spent a couple of dinners visiting with her daughter Stephanie.
We did not see all the Civil Rights History-related sites in Atlanta; that would have taken a week. But we figured learning what it was like for Billie and Stephanie to be the only black family living in Skyline, Utah was living Civil Rights history. Also, waiting almost fifty years for their Black Panther son and brother, whose trial the FBI meddled with, to get out of prison counts, I think.
We confined our official civil rights touring to the Martin Luther King National Historic Park one afternoon. Ebenezer Baptist Church, his childhood home, MLK and Coretta Scott King’s tomb, and other significant landmarks all lie within the boundaries of this park.
We noticed that all the historic landmarks and the interpretive center were closed due to Covid, but for some reason, the gift shops at each place were open.
I found it hard to leave Billie, currently spitting Stage 4 cancer in the facewith great joie de vivre. Thinking about coming back in the summer.
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