The video you are about to see is brief, but it has some disturbing images. Please take care of yourself, breathe, and if you need to, close your eyes. But if you can, watch. This is America.
Opening Words
The video you just saw was made before the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative conceived of this memorial, unlike anything in this country. Inside there are more than 800 large steel monuments, one for each county in America where lynching was known to take place, inscribed with the names of those who died. Considered one of the significant works of American architecture in the 21st century, more than 100,000 people have visited since it opened in April of 2018.
This spring my friend Ekan Amy Darling reached out to me to ask if I would consider traveling to Montgomery with her on a pilgrimage to the Memorial. We are both longtime Zen practitioners, and we have both been engaged with anti-racist work. She has also led a Zen group inside the largest Washington state prison for many years. You can see Amy in the picture on your Order of Service, which I took inside the National Memorial. Some of those immense metal monuments are directly above her.
We spent several days together in Montgomery, in the humid days of late May. Although we went on a pilgrimage to the National Memorial, the experience went far, far beyond the memorial. And deep, deep into my heart. This is what I hope to share with you today.
Sermon
The city of Montgomery was not what I thought it would be. We hear stories about the economic boom in the new south, but downtown Montgomery, the state capital of Alabama, with the legislature in session – in fact , it had just passed the most draconian abortion law in the nation – felt more like a ghost town: downtown a maze of empty streets without trees or shade, empty storefronts. The first morning we were there I kept saying, “Where are all the people?”
We were staying in the only black-owned Airbnb available in the city, just a few blocks from the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and walking distance to downtown, in an old, clearly once lovely neighborhood.
It took about a day to realize that there was almost no one living in the houses in that neighborhood. There were no grocery stores, no corner markets, no cafes. Only later did I learn that not one but two major highways were put through the historic black neighborhoods of Montgomery, effectively cutting off the life blood to them.
And only later, at the Legacy Museum, did I learn that Montgomery was a city built by and for the slave trade. After 1836, when, the last tribal nations were removed from Alabama by force, and the white plantations were established, I learned that Montgomery became the largest auction for enslaved people in Alabama, and one of the largest in the south.
People were brought in chains elsewhere in the US by boat and rail and on foot, and marched up Commercial Street, the biggest street in the city, which leads directly to the state capitol building – and the first White House of the Confederacy. And I learned that almost every building downtown housed businesses whose business, in one way or another, was slavery. The legacy museum is actually in a building whose basement was used to hold people, including children, before they were sold, in tiny dark barred cells.
As I learned this history, the first two days there, it felt like my eyes were changing, that there was sort of a double vision of the place – the Montgomery of 2019, looking much like any other city (though far fewer people visible) and all the other Montgomeries – or maybe I should say what I think of as America and all those other Americas, inextricably entangled in our terrible history.
And I learned that after the South lost the Civil War, after slavery ended, and the post-Civil War oversight of the South ended, that brief time of hope, the reign of terror began. More than 4,000 people are known to have lost their lives to lynching, mostly in southern states, between 1877 and 1950.
We went to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice on the second day.
It occupies six acres on a hill overlooking the whole downtown and the capitol, one of the most spectacular locations in the city. Beautiful flowers are planted outside the gates, Inside the gates, a walkway curves up a grassy hill to the memorial, partly covered, partly open, containing those 800 steel monuments, one after another after another, first at eye level, and then rising, higher and higher, like the bodies of those who died, inscribed with so many names.
Amy and I spontaneously went silent. I walked from one monument to another, my hands in gassho, the Zen gesture of respect, reading the names quietly aloud, feeling the names of these human beings in my voice, an unspeakable number.
On the walls, these facts: Only 1% of lynchings led to a criminal conviction. Nearly six million black Americans left the south between 1910 and 1970, many fleeing racial terror as refugees.
And outside the memorial there are duplicate copies of the monuments, lying horizontally, waiting for counties to claim them, to do the work of facing their past. The work we all need to do.
There is much more I could say about the memorial, but something else happened for me in Montgomery, that I also want to share with you. These two learnings, together, changed me.
Because there is something else really important about Montgomery, beyond its history of slavery and terror, something I didn’t fully know before I went there. It was truly a cradle of the civil rights movement. Museum after museum there pays homage to this history, from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the Freedom Riders and the March to Montgomery.
As I spent time in those museums, and even had a chance to meet people who had lived through that time, this human flowering of courage against the reality of terror and trauma, struck me to my core. People said, “Enough” so strongly, so bravely – more bravely than I can even imagine, with the possibility of violence ever present, that change came to a system determined to never change, a system determined to keep people frightened, disenfranchised, and bowed down forever.
I would imagine that many of you know about Rosa Parks and the yearlong Montgomery Bus Boycott, begun in 1955, that brought a very young Dr, Martin Luther King Jr. to national attention. I knew this history, in a vague way.
But I didn’t know who the organizers of that boycott really were, who really made it happen. They were the black women of Montgomery, members of the anti-segregation Women’s Political Council, hundreds of women who worked in government, as teachers, and as faculty members at the historic black Alabama State College. And I had the privilege to meet one of those women. Every morning the woman I met, in her 80’s now, leads tours of the parsonage where the King family lived from 1954 to 1960.
This is what she told me, though you can read about this yourself in the history books. The Women’s Political Council had had, as a primary goal, for years, desegregating the humiliating Montgomery bus system.
After Rosa Parks was arrested, a deliberate act of civil disobedience, Jo Ann Robinson, an English professor at the college and the founder of the Women’s Political Council, stayed up all night in her office, making 35,000 leaflets on a mimeograph machine. Students distributed them all over the black neighborhoods of the city the next morning, an entire system of helping people to get to work and school without riding buses was organized, and the boycott began.
It was the organizers of the boycott who recognized the gifts of a certain 26 year old new Baptist preacher, just out of seminary. They asked him to lead. It was up to him to say yes or no, knowing, as every black man or woman in the south would know, what it might mean to say yes. Those steel monuments engraved with names were 60 years in the future, but the probable consequences of standing up to Jim Crow – those were known.
We think our heroes and saints are somehow superhuman, different than we are, fated to be great in a way that we are not. But I don’t think that’s true. I’m pretty sure every saint and hero was a young person once, afraid, wondering about their life. Whatever our age, I think this question lives in us. Who will we be? Will we stay safe, or say yes? He said yes, and that initial yes ended up resounding through the whole world, and the rest of his life, and his death.
On our tour of the parsonage where the Kings had lived, we heard many stories from our guide, until we got to the kitchen. In the middle of kitchen was a classic 1950s formica topped kitchen table. She turned on a tape recorder. In a moment you will hear the words I heard, and you’ll know why we listened to it in that kitchen.
It is an extraordinary thing, to stand in a place where the world changed on its axis. That’s how that humble kitchen felt.
Benediction
This is Labor Day weekend. Though we imagine slavery is over, tens of thousands of incarcerated people are labor without pay right now, and millions of people in our country are working for wages that do not pay enough for their survival. I dedicate this service to them, and I pray that one day all forms of slavery and oppression are truly over.
The song you are about to hear as our postlude was performed by the Freedom Singers in the Obama White House. Please feel free to join in!