The Road to Freedom

I took the day off today and Tom and I went to the High Museum; the Louvre exhibit is about to close, and it was nice, but I wanted to see the exhibit about the Civil Rights movement, "Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1957-1968," on display through October 5.

Some of the photographers are famous, some are anonymous. But the events they captured - and shaped - are seered into the history of America in the 20th century like a scar. I didn't know the stories about the Freedom Riders, brave groups who rode buses into the South, to unmask the segregation that still existed in interstate travel, and how the first group was nearly killed by a mob outside Anniston, Alabama. There were other stories I did know - the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, in 1957; the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963; the murders of the civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964; the brutal attack of the demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the first Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965; the murder of Martin Luther King and the violence that followed, in 1968. Some of the pictures portrayed an Atlanta that Tom remembered from his childhood, and one portrayed an incident for which he was a near witness.

The photographers who captured these images - images of bravery, of dignity, and of struggle - were (intentionally or not) part of the history they were documenting. The images were so powerful that Kennedy and later Johnson could not ignore what was happening, nor could the rest of America. Two of the photographers are interviewed in a video that is on display as part of the exhibition; one of them explains that what was happening was just so wrong based everything he had learned from his father, growing up, that he just had to do something. Photographs are powerful. And some of the photographs in this exhibit changed history.

There is a picture of a young black girl who was part of the group that desegregated Central High School. A mob of young people - her peers, kids her age - screams at her. The faces of two white girls with their perfect upward flipped hair were contorted with what I can only describe as hatred. I pointed them out to Tom. Do they know that people like me look at these pictures? How do they remember what they did back then? Are they ashamed? Have they grown up into people who recognize that they were on the wrong side? How do they describe it to their children and grandchildren?  Tom (who is both more cynical and more Southern than I am) said he thought they were probably proud of what they did.

I don't think so. As humans, we have a nearly overwhelming need to think well of ourselves, and the things we remember and forget determine that internal image of ourselves. These girls are now women in their 60s, and I bet they don't remember being in that mob that day. For when memories are too painful, the road to freedom is forgetting.

This is a time in our history that we should not forget. The exhibit is there through October 5. Go see it.