| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
|
 |
|
And everybody takes pride in their history. Nobody says, 'WE were wrong. '
There is a room of Confederate Militia Uniforms and artifacts like swords, Civil War handguns, etc.
Then they have exhibits with the same sort of thing for each of the major wars since then, starting with the Spanish-American War and going through the Persian Gulf War.
Tattered Banners is a collection of original Civil War flags. Another room shows on wallpaper a panoramic painting of the French at Aigleville. There is a room of old artifacts including doctors instruments from the time of the Civil War. They are in good condition and the amputation saw still works. There is a no-frills typewriter that is little more than just the keys and the roller. It must have been made that way to be portable. There is a chamber pot with picture of union general, more or less as a negative editorial comment. Another exhibit has a hands-on room for kids to be able to touch toys of the time, dresses, and a stereoscope.
The Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church is the Church where Martin Luther King, Jr., came to national prominence as a young man. Built from bricks salvaged from streets dug up, the church stands about one block from the steps of the State House. The sign out front and the AAA book says tours daily at 10 AM and 2 PM, but there were only a couple of people there. The woman who answered the door said she was the one who gave the tours but we were told curtly 'we don't give tours for just two people.' There was, however, a tape telling about the history of the church and about the career of King. Then there is a mural showing scenes from the life of King and important people in the civil rights movement culminating in a picture of King, dressed like Christ, ascending to heaven. Then we were allowed to go up and see the sanctuary. By this point it was about 2:30 AM and we decided it would be a good idea to get some lunch. There did not seem to be a good place to eat nearby so we drove off to the south (to the right when you face the State House) and there seemed to be nothing there either. To the north we found a Wendy's.
We drove back and parked in front of the State House. The Alabama State House is more like a grand mansion than the palatial Louisiana State House. It has a large spiral staircase and a big rotunda three or four stories up three or four stories. The style of art reminded me a lot of the ceiling murals from the Kalavala on the ceiling of the museum in Helsinki. You know what I mean? Same use of color. Right.
There were portraits of former Alabama Governors including, of course George and Lurleen Wallace who were governors in a sort of tag team to get around the law. Our first week of the trip we were on the road and missed the big TV biography of George Wallace. I will say this for Wallace, he did say the three words you almost never hear from anybody and certainly not from a politician. When talking about his racist policies the has said 'I was wrong.' Not 'I was fulfilling the will of the people,' not 'circumstances were different then,' not 'I was mis-advised.' After all these years he does show a bit of class. Contrition is rare.
After that we went a few blocks over to the Civil Rights Memorial of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This is a memorial by Maya Lin, who designed the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. It is dedicated to a quote by Martin Luther King designed around King's quote 'We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.' It is a stone wall and a circular stone table, each with a glassy surface that is flowing water. The table lists out radially forty incidents, most of people being killed for the cause of civil rights. As Lin says, 'this is not a monument to suffering; it is a memorial to hope.' I suspect she meant to reverse 'monument' and 'memorial.' Even so, if you cannot tell yourself, she made a mistake. I guess I have a right to be critical. I am a long-time member of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
On the way back to the car we read how Confederate Brigadier General D. W. Adams ordered 85,000 bales of cotton and 40,000 bushels of corn set afire to deny it to the Federals. In doing that he nearly burned the city of Montgomery in the process. Only the winds changing and the heroic efforts of firefighters, many black, saved the city.
Well, from there we drove on to Birmingham. It was now late afternoon and it took about ninety minutes to get to Birmingham where we stayed at a Motel 6. We used the evening to do a wash and to dial in to work to read our e-mail. I tried to solve a few problems that came up in my absence. I also sent a quick note to my supervisor and my parents. The latter had sent a lot of mail to me. They are really getting on-line. Nova had a two-hour program on Einstein which I had on in the background. Einstein is no longer portrayed as the saint he once was. Of course, what is important is that he was a genius, not a saint.
|
09/10/97--Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama: Southern Flight Museum, Civil Rights Institute, Natural History Museum:
|
Omelet Shoppe for breakfast. Not a bad idea. It is a little lighter than the places we have been going.
The day is starting out gray in Birmingham and it looks a little smoggy though the claim is made that there is no smog in Birmingham. We are getting cool breezes for the first time.
The Southern Flight Museum was our first stop, a nifty little museum of flying in war and peace. You start with an exhibit hall with some real stuff like flying helmets, glasses, boots, and navigation instruments. It also has some models of planes. They have one case devoted to Von Richthofen. Evelyn asks what that has to do with Southern Flight. Maybe Southern modifies Museum. But there are people enough who take flying pretty seriously. These days that hardly qualifies as even being imaginative. There are much more imaginative things out there than flying. The future is coming faster and faster.
They have one hangar just devoted to amateur planes made from kits including two designed to use a Volkswagen engine, available cheaply. People are anxious to get up in the air, particularly if they can do it themselves. There are all sorts of interesting designs for personal fliers. There is a camber deal with a propeller in the back. One of the Volkswagen powered planes is leaking oil, we are informed by one of the caretakers swabbing the oil with a long pole.
They have some professional (as opposed to amateur) planes in a second hangar. Not a lot, maybe seven or eight. Then they have pictures around the walls like of the Shenandoah, a famous airship that foundered in a storm. The next room has models including the U-2D which was used for what they call the 'High Altitude Sampling Program.' Yup, it was sampling all right. The U2 plane was famous internationally for its high-altitude sampling.
From there we went to a film they have, a compilation of newsreel's of odd attempts at flight. Some work, some don't. Of course, weird flying machines were a staple of the old newsreels. And the suspense as to whether they would work is a complete fiction. You don't get in front of a camera without having already tested your design and knowing if it works. The people with non-working designs are attention-getters. The ones with working designs are attention-getters also, but they may be a bit more. The designs that work in the newsreels we saw have the small wing in front (early camber) or a Frisbee-like disk wing.
A group of Jewish school children come in to watch the film. I was a little surprised to see that a Jewish school has enough people to be a going concern down here. Well, at one time there was a large Jewish community in the South. How did I know they were Jewish? Several of the boys wore yarmulkes.
Upstairs was a set of plaques for the Alabama Flying Hall of Fame. The names I recognized were Wright. Von Braun, and Messer, who is a local flying hero in Alabama.
From there it was back to the center of Birmingham.
The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute is a Civil Rights museum on the order of the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. In this case I think that less is a bit more. First the admission is something like half of the other museum's. While they cover pretty much the same events, Memphis will explain it in four paragraphs and the Birmingham museum gives you one. Most people standing there are not going to want to read four paragraphs here and four paragraphs a few feet over. If it were a book, four paragraphs would be a better idea. If someone is going to stand there and read, you want them to be able to read it in about twenty-five seconds.
The visit starts with a film on Birmingham's history. The city itself was not founded until 1871 and then as the convergence of two rail lines. Capitalists moved in to exploit the strategic location as a manufacturing center. That brought in labor both black and white. That could have been trouble so they made some nice laws making sure the two would not mix. When there were mining strikes they were broken by force. The bad and low-paying jobs went predominantly to one of the races by an odd coincidence. I won't say which. The stage was set for the civil rights struggle.
At this point the film ended and the screen raises to reveal a museum behind it. In one of the first exhibits they quote Birmingham's Racial Segregation Ordinances. For example, a restaurant must serve only white, only blacks, or have a physical line painted to have a clearly delineated black area and white area. I assume a Thai would sit in the black area, though the law did not make that clear.
Some of the exhibits in the Memphis museum are very similar to the ones in this museum. There are colorless plaster statues, you can tell who is black and who is white by facial features (which seems a little racist to me). There will be a lunch counter and whites at it and blacks not able to be at the counter. The two museums have nearly identical exhibits.
The exhibit goes into how two cultures formed. They have an exhibit where you can choose a black singer and hear him perform. (I listened to Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and Cab Calloway.)
Along with explanatory displays there are four taped displays on a bus burning, voting rights, King's letter from Birmingham Jail, and the march on Washington.
One of the exhibits they got cheap. They tell about the church that was bombed in Birmingham and four young girls were killed. To display it they have a window. The church itself is right across the street.
Finally there is a tape on the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, each illustrated by an animator. Very creative. Then they show people whose human rights have been denied and you can hear their stories. This was something that was sorely missing in Memphis. The interest in Memphis was solely in blacks and in the struggle in the United States. This places American civil rights in a broader context. Of the two Civil Rights museums I give the edge to Birmingham's.
There is also a two temporary exhibits, one on painting and one on photography.
On our way to Anniston we stop at Arby's for a sandwich. Their fries are terrible. Their roast beef sandwich, however, is fairly healthy. (I didn't order the fries, Evelyn go them with her chicken finger special. The curly fries were horribly over-fried.) The problem with the roast beef sandwich is that it seems to require the horseradish sauce which has most of the fat of the sandwich.
One of best designed natural history museums I remember ever visiting is the Anniston Museum of Natural History in Anniston, Alabama. |
|
| Copyright © - "Mark R. Leeper" |
|
 |
| Other travelogues by the same author: |
|
|
|
