Theme Thursday: Shadow (Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama)

I walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama last month. The bridge, which stretches across the Alabama River, is named for a Confederate brigadier general. But the bridge gained notoriety in 1965, when it became the scene of a bloody attack by local and state police on peaceful civil rights demonstrators attempting to march to the state capital of Montgomery. My walk filled me with sadness.

That day, March 7, became known as Bloody Sunday.  The police - who also deputized all white males in Dallas County over the age of 21 - used horses and cattle prods and billy clubs to attack the marchers and chased them all the way back into Selma and even to the churches where they sought refuge.

I had the grace last month to encounter a woman who participate in this historic event as an 11-year-old girl. My friend Meredith, her daughter, Anna, and I spoke with Mrs. Bland for nearly an hour before I walked across the bridge. As I walked, I was haunted by her words, how she said she thought the blood dripping from her sister's head were tears.

Linking up with Cari today!

Preparing to Teach: To Enter Into A Yearly Journey

First, a disclaimer: I didn't invent that phrase "to enter into a yearly journey" to describe teaching high school. I swiped it from a woman named Anglica Q., on the website Ignatian Spirituality.  You see, "Ignatian spirituality,sees God as actively involved in the world and intimately involved with us in every moment and place." Yup!

Angelica Q.  tweeted:

"I find God in my service as an educator--in the eyes of my students with whom I 
enter into a yearly journey.

I stole her description it because it perfectly encapsulates how I feel about teaching high school, and about the learning communities I try to cultivate each year in my classes. 

August looms. I am closing my summer reading books, finishing two graduate school classes, and preparing to teach two new courses: American Literature and American History. This book is in my purse.

This Moment: Monroe County Courthouse, Monroeville, Alabama

Last week I attended a teachers' workshop in Monroeville, Alabama, Harper Lee's hometown, on how to teach her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. That book has found its way deep into my heart. Lee based her fictional town, Maycomb, on Monroeville, the town where she grew up next door to writer Truman Capote, after whom she modeled the character Dill Harris.

Much of Monroeville has changed since Lee and Capote were children. Both their homes are gone; her family's lot now houses Mel's Dairy Dream; the site of his summer home now is just the stone foundation. The jail on the courthouse square has been remodeled beyond recognition and now houses the Monroe County Human Resources department.

But the courthouse is unchanged. Universal Studios came to Monroeville when it was filming the Academy-Award winning movie based on Lee's book. They recreated every last detail on a Hollywood set. I've watched the movie nearly as often as I have read the book - perhaps a dozen times. As readers of the book know, the dramatic height of the novel is the trial of a black man falsely accused - and convicted - of raping a white woman.

So you understand why, when I walked into the courtroom, I nearly burst into tears. Tears of joy that a writer could create such a world from the confines of her imagination. Tears of joy that the world she invented a half century ago  still makes its readers laugh, and cry, and rail for justice that still eludes us.

Linking with Amanda.

Theme Thursday: Bright

This is a goofy photo of a bright young lady named Anna, 13, in front of the Monroe County (Ala.) Courthouse yesterday morning.  My friend Meredith and I, along with her daughter Annaleigh, traveled to Monroeville, Alabama to attend a teachers' workshop on "To Kill a Mockingbird." Monroeville was the model for Harper Lee's Maycomb in that classic novel.

Meredith and I are both writers and teachers. Anna is a ravenous reader: she has read "To Kill a Mockingbird" at least four times, but she reads whatever she can get her hands on.


Anna is bright, very bright. On the long car rides we took all over Alabama, she sat in the back of the van, reading, reading, reading. She also read in our hotel rooms, in restaurants, anywhere she could.

If you ask Anna what kinds of books she likes to read, she will tell you "every kind."

Linking up with Cari on this one!

When History Comes Alive: Listening to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., In His Kitchen

Montgomery, Alabama is a remarkable place: the Confederate States of American was founded here and, less than a block away in the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the American Civil Rights Movement began. Today, with my friend Meredith and her daughter, Anna, I toured the church and its parsonage, which is at 309 Jackson Street. In 1956, local segregationists had bombed that home, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. , pastor of the church, was living with his wife and children.


A highlight of our tour was the kitchen, a place where Dr. King said he had a religious epiphany, where he felt Christ's presence, which gave him  the strength to soldier on. He learned that night   to never fear death.

Our docent, Rev. John Wesley Summers, (pictured at left with one of his grandsons) played an audiotape of  King's writing to us as we stood in that kitchen. We were permitted to take pictures in the kitchen, but not in any other room of the house.Listening to Dr. King's words in that kitchen gave me goosebumps; they reminded me that we all belong to Another, that our strength and hope comes from the One who called each of us into being.

Missing Treyvon Martin and Rallying for Civil Rights in Birmingham, Alabama

In downtown Birmingham today, I had hoped to visit the Civil Rights Institute, which documents the struggles of the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. I discovered it is closed on Mondays, as is the Sixteenth Avenue Baptist Church, which the Ku Klux Klan bombed 50 years ago this September 15, killing four young girls.

So instead, I walked through Kelly Ingram Park, across from the institute and encountered some modern-day civil rights activists and had the privilege of talking to a woman who lived in the city when the church was bombed.

On the Road to Jericho, "Every Living Being Is Our Neighbor"

Yesterday, as I continued my travels through Alabama, I attended Mass at St. Peter the Apostle Church in Hoover with dear friends who once were fellow parishioners in New Jersey.  As good homilists do,  Rev. Joy Nellissery told a familiar Gospel story so that I thought about it in a new way.

We all know the parable of the Good Samaritan, the man who stopped to help a stranger on the road to Jericho. I didn't realize this dangerous 17-mile steep and winding road was known as the "Way of Blood," a remote road well known to robbers. The Samaritan, an enemy to Jews, stopped to help an injured, half-dead man, after  both a priest and a Levite pass him by. How powerful and timely  Father Joy's words are.

At the End of A Difficult Day, Love Endures

 

I had a tumultuous traveling day, flying from Newark to Birmingham, Alabama, with a layover in Detroit. I forgot some important items at home, which will make my travels difficult. Tonight I find myself visiting with old parish friends before I tour civil-rights sites in Alabama and attend a teachers' conference in author Harper Lee's hometown. How ironic to find myself here, in a state that has endured so much violence and racial strife, on the day a Florida jury found an unarmed black teen's killer guilty of absolutely nothing. It can be so discouraging, this search for justice.