Why am I doing this trip?
This was a trip conceived by my Dad many years ago over our shared love of history and the daunting first book of the epic Civil Rights anthology that sat on his shelf for years titled “Parting the Waters.” You see my Dad was in my early childhood the primary parent in my life. He stepped back from his career for a spell, running a consulting business from the basement to be more around when we were young. He taught me many things in those years, but always inspired me with his love of history and especially in the realm of the quest for justice and racial equality in the Civil Rights era. We listened to the MLK speeches on the first online encyclopedia that came with our ancient Mac computer. During my second-grade year, he volunteered to help lead a self-created Underground Railroad history tour with another parent of different places in Seattle. I followed his lead and became a history major in college as he had done. The years passed and that anthology sitting on his shelf became a challenge between us: who would finish it first?
But it wasn’t just an interest in history that we shared. He also introduced me to the freedom and joy that comes from moving your body in the world. He coached my soccer teams in elementary school. In high school, we ran and hiked and later cycled. We ended many Summer days during my college years joining him and his friends for a ride down around Seward Park in Seattle, training for local long-distance rides. And as I followed his lead in other areas, when he rode his bike solo from Seattle to Boston in 2001, the seed was planted for me. Before starting medical school in 2008, I rode my bike from Seattle to San Francisco. I learned important lessons from physical exertion: I learned I was strong and that I could push through pain and discomfort. During my own solo adventures, I learned that I could rely on myself to navigate unexpected obstacles.
Sometime in 2015 or 2016 we began to think about how amazing it would be do the trip we had always talked about in that far-flung fantastical way: what if we did a self-guided tour of the South, visiting some of the landmarks of the Civil Rights. For several years we read and dreamed and casually researched, and then took the plunge to pick a date. But it wasn’t our time yet. Our trip, set to depart in March 2020, never happened.
And then many other things happened, to the world, to us personally. In 2020, the US was devastated by the double traumas of a COVID pandemic and then in May 2020, the death of George Floyd, and a more collective white awakening to the realities of persistent racism and racial inequity in our country, or at least in pockets of the Northwest. And I was learning too. Though I had reveled in the perceived completed wins of the Civil Rights era, I think like many white people I was under the misconception that this was a battle for equality that history had wrapped up. We had conquered this. I had many things to learn, and things to unlearn.
While there are many times in the past 3 years that this trip seemed to be slipping from our grasp, here we are poised to try again in March 2023. And for me, I believe this has happened for a reason. Or perhaps what I mean is, I believe this trip will mean more to me in 2023 than it did in 2020. I am beginning to view history, and consequently the present, through a different lens. I am also 39 years old, the same age as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were when they were brutally assassinated. Medgar Evers was 37. To think of what these 3 men had accomplished and scarified by my age still floors me. I want to pay homage to their life’s work, and the work of many other incredible leaders that my high school history books never informed me of, but whom I now know were all legends of this movement. Names like Ella Baker, Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, Fred Shuttlesworth, Diane Nash, James Bevel, Ralph Abernathy, Medgar Evers and many more. I will never know what it is like to be a black person in the 60’s let alone a black person in this country in 2023, but I want to go and see for myself a part of the country that is foreign to me. I want to deepen my understanding and challenge my own misconceptions. And I want to experience it up close and personal, as only walking and biking through a place can make you appreciate.
This writing is intended for you, the people on this list who are known to my Dad and I. It is not intended for mass distribution. I’m hoping to share with you both what we see as well as snippets of this history through readings and podcasts, for those that are interested. I’m a white person talking about history, and thus I’m bound to trip and stumble in doing so. I welcome you to share your own learnings with me. If you see that I’ve misspoken, I welcome you to correct me.
And in case you’re wondering, I finished “Parting the Waters” first. For the record.
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