Where it leads

Our final stop in Cincinnati was the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

It was last because it was inside on the rain day and because they are open until 5; the other places closed at 4. (All of this will be covered on the travel blog, over several posts.)

Starting with Taft and ending with the Freedom Center was not planned, but I think it worked well to give a frame to our trip.

On to the Freedom Center!

It is a very good museum, but it can be heavy. 

They recommend that you watch a brief introductory film, then start at the top and work your way down. At the top, the first exhibit I looked at was Witness to the Journey: Matt Herron and the Deep South, 1965.

The first picture you see is one Herron did not take, where he is being chased by a cop. Herron is white, but he was documenting things that the white power structure did not want shown. I was not familiar with him, but I did start thinking about Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, Viola Liuzzo, and James Reeb. (Many of the photos were from Selma.) What Herron did was dangerous and it was important.

Of course there were pictures of Martin and Coretta King, but there was also Ralph Abernathy and John Lewis, who hold places in my heart, and James Bevel who was an abuser but was there and is immediately recognizable. 

There is a lot of reading and watching that has embedded it into my memory; all of the memories were flowing there.

Then there were other exhibits on modern slavery and on the Underground Railroad and slavery of that time. 

There were thoughts and memories regarding the Underground Railroad, but there was less knowledge on my part of the modern slavery.

I want to say there is more urgency on it, with people needing help now. I hesitate to say that, because one problem with the current state of things is that so few people are willing to learn the lessons of the past. If there was more connection to not just the wrongness of American chattel slavery, but also connecting of how and why it happened, maybe we would have gotten better by now.

I will obviously be writing more about that. For now I will just reiterate that for all of the undercurrent of greed, with people who already have resources wanting to exploit the labor of others so they can have more, while all the time they will insist that they are doing the exploited a favor, and that when the exploited resist it is because they are lazy and the real hard workers are the exploiters... for all of that...

It only works because there are so many people who will be satisfied with feelings of superiority and hate.

They are being exploited too. Not as badly, but way more stupidly. 

Related posts: 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2012/02/black-history-month-2011.html  

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2022/02/black-history-month-sharing-week-3.html 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2015/02/selma-emotional-impact.html