Field Trip to Memphis: Diocesan group makes pilgrimage to civil rights museum and Beale Street
by Kurt Greenbaum
April 16, 2024
Thirty-four hearty souls from the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri gathered recently in the predawn hours for a bus ride to Memphis and a tour of the National Civil Rights Museum, housed at the location of the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968.
Three others joined the group in Memphis on April 13, 2024, for the pilgrimage to the civil rights mecca, which included a side trip to Beale Street and the chance to also tour the Withers Collection Museum and Gallery—home to a vast display of photographs by noted civil rights-era photographer Dr. Ernest C. Withers.
“The trip to the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis was an amazing, educational and enjoyable opportunity,” said Machelle West. “The children and youth on the bus trip to the Civil Rights Museum were a wonderful blessing.”
The National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel guides visitors through the story of Black Americans’ ongoing march toward equity and civil rights. It starts in the era of slavery and moves through the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era and into the civil rights era—culminating in the events that brought King to Memphis.
King came to the city to support the sanitation workers’ strike in the late winter and early spring of 1968. The night before his assassination on April 4, 1968, he delivered his famous “mountaintop” speech: “I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”
“Growing up in an all white, small southern Missouri town, I never witnessed the real estate agents who denied showing homes, or the employers who denied jobs, or restaurant owners who refused service,” said traveler Betty Bowman, The Church of St. Michael and St. George. “I never witnessed the Ku Klux Klan burning peoples’ houses, but later learned, as an adult, that it happened in our perfect little town. Social injustice was as systemic there as anywhere in this country.”
The Diocesan Commission on Dismantling Racism sponsored the trip, with visitors leaving from St. Peter’s Episcopal Church by bus at 6 a.m. and returning at 9 p.m. Alice Stanley, a longtime member of the Dismantling Racism Commission, organized the trip, from the bus to the snacks and the itinerary. An anonymous donor covered a significant portion of the bus, along with the Dismantling Racism Commission. Travelers represented eight churches in the Diocese and ranged in age from elementary school through high school and above.
Additional reactions:
Machelle West: “The Civil Rights Museum was a chance to experience United States history, which has become so controversial in recent years. Certain events in the ‘60s, I remember as a child and youth from television news and the conversations from the adults. There was so much to see and some things triggered certain emotions. This experience reminds us to know the facts about our history and to learn from it. We can improve both the present and the future. As people of faith, it helps us to live out (Micah 6:8) ...What is good and what does the LORD requires of you but to do justice and to love kindness, and walk humbly with our God?"
Lisa Meeks: “What an incredibly powerful exhibit. I learned a lot of information that I didn’t know about and reminders of things from the past. Our trip was very powerful and moving. I enjoyed talking and laughing with new friends.”
Rudy Walz: “It was a great trip. For as many of these trips as I have been on, I did learn a few more things I did not know. The weather was perfect and the ride was nice.”
Betty Bowman: “Going to the Civil Rights Museum was another in a series of awakenings for me. The reality of what I saw and heard and felt hit home. The hatred, the violence, the senseless cruelty, horrifying brutality, pain and suffering that I personally saw on TV, but didn’t question, was shattering.”
Tony Corey: “I saw a breadth and depth of courage that I had not nearly imagined or appreciated. The day has turned me to prayer for more courage for my own moving into the work of dismantling structural racism .... to show up, to stand up, to speak up.”
Dismantling Racism Commission's Trip to Memphis: April 13, 2024
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