What a contrast today has been from last night. One part hangover, one part dreary, rainy day, one part sobering, emotional history lesson and one part morose, morbid exploration.
We met my parents for brunch around noon. We drove around the downtown area looking for a place to have an egg style meal, eventually finding an Irish pup that was well known to my iphone for a killer brunch. But then again not much else was open either. So over steak and eggs we listened to my parents talk about things in my past as well as things of an educational and historical nature (both my parents are educators so that’s par for the course.) Both my parents are now retired, my mother, a devoted K-12 teacher and my father a sociology professor turned administrator turned sociology professor. Most of my moving around prior to my college years was due to my dad making career-building moves through the educational system of higher education in order to make sure his kids could afford college. Partly because Jennida hasn’t heard some of these stories and partly because I suppose the older I get the more time my parents have had time to reflect and collect the memories of my childhood and witnessing how their decisions have affected their family’s life, they share them more freely.
After brunch we visited the International Civil Right’s Museum in Greensboro, which has just opened this past February. There have been signs around Greensboro to email bdemerson@sitinmovement.org for your nomination for class of 2011 inductees. So you should all do this now. I’ll start off with my complaint first so I can get over my high horse. It seems to stop so prematurely and only hints at how the civil rights struggle has paved the way for things like the Berlin wall, the fall of soviet Russia, Tiananmen Square, South Africa and others, but does not really go into them at all. So the Civil Rights Museum functions as a museum of dead things, not living peoples and culture- see the Native American Museum in DC for a good example of a living museum of culture.
On the positive side I was floored by the power of the presentation as soon as I walked through the door into the hall of shame. I must assume that my history on this planet as one who has experienced a certain many things in this life also carry a psychic thread back into time that made me so effected, but also the presentation and sound design was very compelling as you hear about how hoses were turned on people protesting and how the force of water is enough to rip flesh, you also hear the sound of water penetrating your ears. I saw images that I have not seen in many years, certainly larger than in any textbook or TV. We certainly received more civil rights history in our whirlwind tour actively passing though these walls than I had ever received passively sitting on my parents couch. In both cases I would have my parents commentary and side notes.
The Civil Rights Museum actually resides in the Woolworth’s building where the first lunch counter was sat in on and desegregated. The museum also still maintains a large majority of that lunch counter.
While we waited for the tour to start, my father asked one of the docents as to weather there were any materials or exhibits about the massacre of 1979 in Greensboro. The woman replied no, and that she was not sure if the city was ready for it. Not ready for it? Not ready for it! What could be so awful that could not be broached thirty some years later? Now this is where the living museum thing comes into play. How many of us can honestly say that they have witnessed personally “history?” History being the thing that gets written about and recorded of all to learn about? Not very many of us. We all have lived though certain times and we can say we were able to watch the Berlin Wall fall and what that must have felt like to watch, or the day Kurt Cobain died, but not the people involved. Not many of us.
In 1979 members of the Nazi party killed five protest marchers and the Ku Klux Klan, caught on live TV doing it, and walked away. Tried in court three times with out consequence. Look it up. OMD made a song about it. I’ll provide links but I’ll let you do the legwork. Needless to say I spent the rest of the day and night in a fluster scowering the internet for information, documentation, footage and interviews trying to uncover the events and circumstances surrounding this tragedy. What I learned, and what I watched was frighteningly…current.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_massacre
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV07Z5C2kHg
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/151.html
http://allacesmedia.com/greensboroschild/
So yesterday Carnival. Today Funk!
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