Day 4 from Peter

 Laura pretty much said it all but I’ll riff off her a bit.  The Legacy Museum is more than a museum, it’s an incredibly and professionally designed multi-media experience.  It’s truly gut wrenching.  I didn’t realize it until we got to the last space called “The Reflection Room” with a whole wall of names and faces of people who influenced the movement over the years.  As I sat there trying to absorb the previous two hours I was overwhelmed and sobbed uncontrollably for about 10 minutes.  The staff was nice enough to bring me Kleenex.  I’m sure I wasn’t the first.  When I ask myself the “why” of all this and our trip, answers come from different places.  

I truly believe this.  Just as we need to embrace ourselves and those of our friends including our flaws and failures in order to really love each other, we need know and embrace the whole of our history to really know and love this country.  The pain lives in all of us whether we acknowledge it or not and we can’t get beyond it without going through it.  

There are two sites … the Legacy Museum where you cannot take pictures (thankfully) and the memorial where you can discretely do that.  The memorial contains a hanging stone for every county in the US with a documented lynching and they contain the names (some unknown) of all the victims of lynching … some 4,400.  The stones are at ground level and are slowly raised above head height as you walk though.  They symbolism is not lost as you look up at them toward the end.  Here is one county of Mississippi, the state with the most lynchings by some margin.  These stones will be etched in my memory.  Well done EJI … 

Laura and I also had the chance to poach off a school tour of the Rosa Parks Museum and hear the lecture from their tour guide.  It’s really well done there too.  Finally, we went to the More Up Sculpture Park on the site where in 1845, Dr. Marion Sims, known as the “father of modern gynecological surgery, developed the techniques to close vesicles-vaginal fistulas, a problem in the slave breeding business.  I suspect the common history of his remarkable achievements doesn’t mention the enslaved women on whom he experimented (without anesthesia) to perfect his technique.  The sculptures my Michell Browder work to rectify that oversight.  This is another example of telling the whole history.