Lynn Wheeler, a public relations consultant and former Charlotte city council member and mayor pro tem, is on a seven-day Southern civil rights tour organized by the University of Virginia. She describes herself as being obsessed with the Civil Rights Movement. She is documenting each day of the tour for Qcitymetro.com. Link to her introductory story here.

Day 6
Birmingham, Ala.

Nothing we have seen or done so far on our civil rights tour prepared me for the emotions I would feel this day.

We got up early and gathered in a hotel meeting room to hear a lecture by Julian Bond titled “Birmingham Protests: Children and Testaments to Courage.” We then took a bus to the Sixteenth Avenue Baptist church.

Birmingham in the 1950s and ‘60s was considered the most segregated city in the South. Every aspect of life was divided by race. The segregationist laws were harsh and comprehensive, leading Martin Luther King Jr. to once describe this city as “the symbol of segregation.”

Between 1955 and 1965, 100 bombs were detonated in Birmingham, the majority by members of the Ku Klux Klan, giving the city its macabre nickname among civil right activists -- “Bombingham.”

On the morning of Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963, a bomb exploded outside the Sixteenth Avenue Baptist Church. Four girls -- Addie Mae Collins (14), Denise McNair (11), Carole Robertson (14) and Cynthia Wesley (14) -- were killed as they prepared for worship. Twenty-two people were injured.

We were given a tour of the church by one of the children (now grown up) who participated in Birmingham protests that proceeded the bombing.

We next walked across the street to Kelly Ingram Park. This was the site where Bull Connor, Birmingham’s infamous public safety commissioner, ordered firefighters to turn powerful water hoses on protesting students. The images made headlines around the world.

In the spring of ‘63, King and other civil rights leaders had agreed to allow Birmingham students to join protests in the city because some adults feared losing their jobs. The students met at the church and marched in waves of 50 toward downtown. So many were arrested that the Birmingham jail filled to capacity.

To stop others from leaving the church, Connor set loose K-9 units and fire hoses. Pressure of the hoses was so intense that firefighters had to mount them on tripod to keep control of them. The protesting children where swept off their feet by the force of the water.

As a memorial, the park now displays life-size statues of the dogs and hoses. Looking at them caused my chest to tighten. I can’t imagine the kind of hatred that would lead to such violence against others, simply because of skin color. I found it emotionally and intellectually incomprehensible.

After leaving the park we took a two-hour tour of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. We had a closing dinner there and heard from a special guest, Camille Morgan. Her husband Charles was a white Birmingham lawyer in 1963.

On Sept. 16,  the day after the church bombing, he addressed the city’s Young Business Men’s Club. He lambasted the Birmingham community, laying the blame for the murders at the feet of every citizen. His speech was angry and specific and was later published in the New York Times.

He was flooded with so much hate mail that he and his family left the city for Atlanta. There he opened an American Civil Liberties Union regional office. The couple retired to Destin, Fla., where Charles Morgan died in January at age 78.

Camille Morgan still lives there but came to Birmingham to give us her acount. She sat at my dinner table, and I found her to be one of the most gracious and humble women I have ever met.

Of all the stops we made, Birmingham is the place I will remember most. I had read about the violence, bigotry and hate in many civil rights books and seen the images in documentaries, but nothing prepared me for the raw emotions I felt as we visited the Birmingham sites.

Disgust, outrage, even shock, stirred inside me as I thought of the hatred and violence directed toward King and the hundreds of children who marched for nothing more -- and nothing less - than equality and freedom.

Tomorrow we board our bus back to Atlanta, then home.

Day 5.   
This is a day I have long anticipated. Our tour group would march across the infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., led by our host, Julian Bond.

It was near that bridge on March 7, 1965, that state and local police attacked several hundred civil rights protesters as they tried to march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery as part of a voting rights demonstration.

The event became known as Bloody Sunday.

Alabama long had had a history of denying blacks their right to vote, and under then-Gov. George Wallace, little had changed.

Blacks wanting to register were forced to pay poll taxes or pass literacy tests. Questions included: How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?  How many feathers are on a chicken?  How many jelly beans are in a gallon jug?

Because of such obstacles, only 2 percent of Alabama’s voting-age blacks were registered.

In 1963, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began conducting monthly voting clinics. Local officials responded by closing voter registration offices at will, if they opened at all.

The march was organized after a state trooper shot a black civil rights protestor during a February 1965 demonstration. The victim died eight days later. Organizers had hoped the march would peacefully defuse anger over the shooting while also drawing national attention to the state’s voting rights record.

The first attempt to reach Montgomery got no farther than the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where 500 to 600 demonstrators were attacked by state and local police wielding billy clubs, tear gas and bull whips. The violence inflicted on the marchers was brutal and much blood was shed. Weeks passed before a much larger group, led by Martin Luther King Jr., would finish the march under the protection of federal troops.

The events of Bloody Sunday were seen by millions on televisions around the world and helped galvanize support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Our tour group got its first glimpse of the bridge as we entered Selma by bus. Bond pointed out as we crossed that the bridge has a large apex in the middle, which made it impossible for the ’65 protestors to see the police and state troopers who lay in wait for them on the other side.

Once in the city of Selma our driver parked and we all got off the bus. Bond told us we should march across the bridge double-file, just as the marchers had done in 1965. Bond and his wife, Pamela Horowitz, took the lead.  My son Gray Wheeler, who also has an interest in the Civil Rights Movement, had driven to Selma to join the march with me. Gray and I positioned ourselves in the second group, directly behind Bond and his wife.

With Bond in the lead, we began our walk. My heart stirred when I thought of the undying passion of the brave people who cared so deeply about justice, equality and freedom.  No one spoke -- we were so caught up in the moment reenacting this critical piece of civil rights history.

The road over the bridge goes up to the apex, and once there it is a downhill walk to the end.  It is at the apex, and not until, that one can see the end of the bridge. I understood at that point why the marchers on Bloody Sunday did not know their march was blocked by a wall of state troopers until it was too late.

To have placed my feet and walked on the actual pavement these courageous men and women followed on their way to Montgomery and to retrace this part of history was very emotional. Tears filled my eyes and, yes, I even felt fear as I visualized what the marchers encountered at the other side. Had I been in Selma that fateful day in 1965, I am certain I would have marched as well.

One member of our tour group, a white Methodist minister named George McCain, said he was in the large group that later finished the five-day trek to Montgomery. He had responded to a nationwide call by King for ministers to converge on Alabama to participate in the march.

“The walk into Montgomery, with federal patrolmen and against thugs and demonstrators with confederate flags in the cradle of the confederacy and the heart of the resistance to justice, felt like the start of the kingdom of God,” he told me. “This transformed my life.”

After our march we had lunch at Brown Chapel AME Zion Church, the site where organizer planned and staged the march.

Tomorrow it’s on to Birmingham, or, as it became known to civil rights activists, Bombingham.

(Photo below: Civil Rights legend Julian Bond leads our group across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. Photo: Lynn Wheeler)

Day 4
Another day in Montgomery.

Our first stop was the former home of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. Martin, at the time, was pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

Our guide regaled us with stories of their courtship. When they met, he said, Coretta was not smitten with the young Martin. She thought he was too short.

She eventually allowed him to call and later told a friend he was “growing in stature” as she got to know him. Still, she said, she did not want to be a preacher’s wife. They were married after her sister convinced her that “this was not going to be an ordinary preacher.” Unable to find a hotel that would admit blacks, the couple spent their wedding night in a funeral parlor.

We saw King’s huge study and the dining room table where the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was born. I couldn’t help but touch the table. It was like touching a small piece of history.

We were shown the spot where Coretta King and a friend were watching TV when a bomb exploded on the evening of Jan. 30, 1956. The King’s 10-week-old baby was asleep in the next room.

We saw the kitchen where, according to King’s own account, God fully equipped him for the difficult mission that lay ahead.

It was midnight the day the bomb exploded. An exhausted King was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee when the phone rang. “We’re sick and tired of your mess,” a voice on the other end said. “If you are not out of town in three days we’ll blow your house up and blow your brains out.”

King slumped, put his head in his hands and began to pray; “I’m at the end of my courage and at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”

As King would later recall, he felt a stirring in his chest and he received a word from God:  “Martin, stand up for truth, stand up for righteousness, and I will be with you always.”

At that point, King later said, all fear abandoned him. He was 27 years old.

We also visited:

• Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where King and others organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott in December 1955, a protest that propelled King into national prominence.
  
• The old Trailways bus station where black and white Freedom Riders were beaten and bloodied while trying to enter whites-only waiting areas. They had come to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision that declared segregated facilities for interstate bus travel illegal.
  
• The Southern Poverty Law Center founded in 1971 by Morris Dees. The center has won major civil suits against the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups. We saw a map showing the shocking proliferation of hate groups in America -- a 50 percent increase since 2000.
  

For me, however, the highlight of our day was the King house. I was again touched by the essence of this gentle man who was close to God and prayed about every step he took. Here was a man who believed in achieving his Godly inspired goals, not by any means necessary, but only through the methods he found taught in the Bible -- through love and nonviolence.

I found myself wondering, however, why God, after protecting King so many times, did not protect him that fateful night in Memphis.

I doubt I will ever know the answer.

Tomorrow we head to Selma and walk the Edmund Pettus Bridge with civil rights legend and our guide, Julian Bond.

(Photo below: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formed around this table in the former Montgomery, Ala., home of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. Photo: Lynn Wheeler)

 

Day 3
We woke to a beautiful Atlanta morning -- chilly and cold -- no evidence of the snow that fell the day before.

We boarded our bus for Tuskegee, Ala., where we toured the George Washington Carver Museum and heard a  lecture on Booker T. Washington and the impact he had on black America in the late 1800s.

Washington was 25 years old when he was named principal of a school that, at the time, existed only on paper. By the time he died in 1915, this man who was born a slave and the school he built had become world famous.

That school today is called Tuskegee University, a private, historically black college famous for science and engineering.

At the Tuskegee Human & Civil Rights Multicultural Center, we sat spellbound as Fred Gray, Rosa Parks’ attorney and leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, recalled the events of 1955 and ’56  -- events that would give momentum to the Civil Rights Movement and lead to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling declaring segregated buses unconstitutional.

After law school, Gray said, he returned to Alabama determined to “destroy everything segregated.” He had been encouraged to take up law by E.D. Nixon, a civil rights leader who helped organize the boycott.

Gray got his first big chance when Parks, a Montgomery seamstress, was arrested after refusing to relinquish her seat to a white passenger as Montgomery and Alabama laws required.

We asked Gray whether Parks had been coached by him or the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to conduct her  sit-in. He deftly evaded the question. Based on his reaction, or non-reaction, I came away believing she had been coached.

What some thought would be a short boycott lasted 381 days. Gray became the movement’s lawyer, King its spokesman. Gray said of the young Baptist preacher: “He could move people sheerly with his words.”

In Montgomery we toured the National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African American Culture. It was there that we heard the recollections of the Rev. Robert Graetz and his wife, Jeannie. Graetz, who pastored an all-black church, was the only white minister in Montgomery to support the boycott.

For that support the couple’s home was bombed by members of the Ku Klux Klan. The boycott, Graetz said, was a mass movement by people of faith, each convinced that their righteous protests could change what all knew was wrong in America. King had cautioned the group to be “nonviolent in fist, tongue and action,” he said.

When Jeannie Graetz spoke, I was moved to tears. She told of the night that Klan members threw a bomb containing 11 sticks of dynamite and a container of TNT at their home. The couple in their 20s had five children in the house, all under age five. The youngest was nine days.

The bomb didn’t explode. Had it gone off, she said, everyone inside surely would have died. The couple had falsely assumed the Klan wouldn’t attack their home because of the children. She credits God’s grace for saving their lives.

A second bomb that night did explode. It blew out windows and the roof, but no one was injured.

This day left me convinced more than ever that the Civil Rights Movement was divinely inspired. How else can one explain a group of people, all in their 20s, leading a grassroots movement that would change the most powerful nation on earth?

Who can imagine today's 20-some-year-olds leading such a movement?

No,  these leaders were special -- very young and very wise.

More important, this was God’s movement, and I have come to appreciate anew just how much He was in control.

That is what I am learning.

Tomorrow we visit King’s Montgomery home, the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church he pastored and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

(Photo below: Fred Gray, Rosa Parks' attorney during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, talk to our group. Photo: Lynn Wheeler)

(Photo below: Words of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee University, which he helped establish at age 25. Photo: Lynn Wheeler)

Day 2: Atlanta
Today was all about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., this city’s most famous son and the unquestioned leader of the modern Civil Rights Movement.

After a 9 a.m. lecture on the Tuskegee legacy by Julian Bond, we boarded our bus and headed to New Ebenezer Baptist Church. This is the congregation King co-pastored alongside his father, though it’s not the same building.

King’s original church sits about a block away and is part of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site. It is being renovated, so unfortunately we could not visit.

Inside New Ebenezer we were ushered to front-row seats. We could see a beautiful snow falling in Atlanta through the large church windows.

The music was stirring and the message was outstanding.

The Rev. Raphael Warnock, senior pastor, preached a sermon titled “Who have you talked to lately?” His central theme was this: We talk to our friends and others and let what they say influence how we feel about ourselves. But we are all God’s children, so what matters most is what He says to us.

After the sermon we shared communion and sang. I held hands with the man beside me, who was deaf. The church has an entire ministry devoted to the hearing impaired.

King's older sister was there, and I got to shake her hand.

This church just spoke to me. It was one of the most beautiful services I have ever attended. God speaks to us in many ways. I felt I was supposed to be at New Ebenezer at that time on that day. If I lived in Atlanta I definitely would join.

Two inches of snow covered the ground by the time we let out, and our tour guide informed us that the subsequent sites we were to visit, including the King Center Freedom Hall, were closed. But the National Park Service kept open King’s boyhood home just for our small group.

The King home is large and beautiful, nestled in what was then the city’s most affluent black area, the Sweet Auburn district. Some of the furnishings are original. We saw the room King shared with his younger brother.

Our guide told some humorous stories about a youthful Martin.

He was born the second of three children, between an older sister and his brother.

The King children were required to take piano lessons, but Martin and his brother hated the routine and the ritual of practicing. One day before their teacher arrived, they sawed off a leg from the three-legged stool that their teacher used as a seat. When the teacher sat down he, of course, hit the floor. At that point, Martin’s parents decided piano lessons no longer were required.

Every night the family ate dinner together -- no matter what. If Martin’s father was kept at his church until 10 at night, the family waited to eat.  A requirement for each of the King children was a daily reading of the Atlanta newspaper with a report at dinner on the most important story each found.

They also were required to read the Bible daily and recite a scripture at dinner. Martin was known to often recite the shortest verse: “Jesus wept.” It was evident that he had a sense of humor, even as a child.

I left the King home feeling I had a better understanding of the man about whom volumes are written. It’s hard to enter that house without feeling the love, peace and sense of family that nurtured one of history’s greatest nonviolent leaders.

Tomorrow we board the bus to Tuskegee, Ala., then on to Montgomery for two nights.

Day 1: Atlanta
Powerful. Emotional. Compelling.

That’s how I would describe Day 1 of the Civil Rights Tour South, an annual trip sponsored by the University of Virginia and led by civil rights pioneer and UVA professor Julian Bond.

There are 17 of us. Some are academics. Some are ministers. Some are studying for college degrees. Two men on the trip are from New Zealand. I am the only Southerner. There is one African American. All are here because we have a consuming passion about the Civil Rights Movement.

We began Day 1 listening to Bond explain how the movement began. It was in 1909 when W.E.B. DuBois convened a group of influential blacks in Niagra Falls, N.Y., in the aftermath of a Springfield, Ill., race riot that left scores of blacks dead or run out of town.

That gathering became the forerunner of today’s NAACP, which on Feb. 12 marked its 100th anniversary. DuBois outlined a process for that early organization, called the Niagra Movement, that became a blueprint for the civil rights struggle.

“We must complain,” Bond quoted DuBois as saying,  “yes, plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong -- this is the ancient unerring way to liberty, and we must follow it.”

Bond is a calm, deliberate man. He recounted the many ways black Southerners were denied the right to vote and were dehumanized. This was not new information, of course, but to hear the man who the Library of Congress last year named a “Living Legend” calmly relate these facts was stirring.

The day’s highlight came later, at the city’s famous Paschal’s restaurant. We were met there by John Lewis, a former Freedom Rider, a former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and today a U.S. Congressman representing an Atlanta district.

He shared with us that he was arrested 39 times during various nonviolent demonstrations.  During a voting rights demonstration in Selma, Ala., when the violence against them was unceasing, John Lewis said he almost yelled: “I don’t understand how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam but can’t send troops to protect a person’s right to vote!”

He talked about the Ku Klux Klansman from Rock Hill who beat him during a freedom ride on May 9, 1961. Forty-eight years later, Lewis’ recollection of that day remains vivid.

Edwin Wilson last month apologized to Lewis when the men were brought together on national television. Lewis described how each cried, flinging their arms around each other.

What amazed me most about Lewis was his apparent ability to forgive. I sensed no anger or bitterness. I found myself wondering if I, having found myself beaten to a pulp for wanting nothing more than equality, could react in a similar manner.

In a private room at Paschal’s, Bond and Lewis sat before us and talked about the struggle -- two civil rights lions now in their waning years. They rated the presidents who governed during the struggle, from Theodore Roosevelt through Richard Nixon. Each agreed that only Lyndon Johnson distinguished himself on race. The others, including John Kennedy, they said, used race only to attract white voters.

Tomorrow we are up early -- off to a worship service at Ebeneezer Baptist Church, to tour Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth home and the King Center. Then it’s off to Tuskegee, Ala., on Monday.

I am excited about what I will see and who we will meet -- those men and women who risked everything to make a difference.

 (Photo below: U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia and Julian Bond discuss the Civil Rights Movement after dinner. Photo: Lynn Wheeler) 

(Photo below: We were joined at dinner by Julian Bond's brother, James. Photo: Lynn Wheeler)

 

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