The Presence of Justice

“True peace is not merely the absence of tension. It is the presence of justice.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Back from a four day trip to a place I’d never set foot in before, the Deep South, Montgomery, Alabama. My wife, 23-year-old son, and me. Our purpose was to visit the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. I was supposed to interview Bryan Stevenson on behalf of the Santa Barbara Independent, but his availability didn’t match our travel schedule. Still, I wanted to see the work of the man who wrote Just Mercy, was the subject of the HBO documentary, True Justice, and is soon to be portrayed by Michael B. Jordan in a feature film. Jamie Foxx is also in the cast. Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, spearheaded the building in Montgomery of a museum and a place of remembrance to the victims of racial violence. Makes sense, since the modern civil rights movement started in Montgomery, when Rosa B. Parks refused to relinquish her seat to a white man. The City of Montgomery recently unveiled a new Rosa Parks statue. 

Montgomery is also home to the Dexter Avenue Memorial Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. presided as pastor in the 1950’s, and from whose basement King and others organized the Montgomery bus boycott. We visited the church on a Saturday and got pulled inside by a woman who insisted we join a tour in progress. She wasn’t a woman one could say no thanks to. We toured the basement and then climbed 16 steps to the church itself. The next day we returned for the 10:30 a.m. service, which also happened to mark the 142nd anniversary of the church. The congregation, almost all African-American, was gracious and welcoming, many people approached us and asked where we were from and why we had come to Montgomery. There was a group from South Africa and a couple from Australia. The choir wore red robes and when they sang my wife cried. Because it was Dexter’s anniversary a guest pastor delivered the sermon. His name was James Nuckles. He started slow but once he built up a head of rhetorical steam I understood what a Baptist church in the Deep South was all about. 

We spent a morning at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. I didn’t feel a sense of guilt as a white person, instead I felt a sense of great sadness. EJI has identified more than 4,000 cases of lynching, though the actual number is probably higher. From Reconstruction well into the 1950’s, African-Americans suffered wave after wave of racial terror, a campaign designed to maintain a rigid social hierarchy, whites on top, blacks subordinate. Lynchings were often advertised in the newspaper and sometimes thousands of white people would gather to watch, the atmosphere almost that of a county fair or carnival. It wasn’t uncommon for spectators to fire pistols at the hanging body.  

Much of downtown Montgomery appeared blighted to me but a woman I spoke to at the Visitors Center said a lot of progress had been made to revitalize the area, particularly on Commerce Street. New hotels, a performing arts center, restaurants, bars, and the Legacy Museum were bringing more people downtown. Still, when we walked up Dexter Avenue to the state capital on Monday morning we saw very few people out and about. The huge state government buildings, white, with columns and porticos, were impressive.

We returned to Santa Barbara and the regular routine of our lives, work and household chores, paying bills, taking out the trash, turning the compost, laundry. I came down with a cold and felt lousy for a couple of days.