Commentary: Walking in the footsteps of MLK, relevant now, more than ever

By Kristin Elliott

If seven days in the Deep South —- Atlanta, Montgomery, Selma and Birmingham —- immersing oneself in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s sounds somber, you wouldn’t be all wrong.

It’s also eye-opening, jaw-dropping and humbling. Much like a great song, play, painting, poem or book, walking in the steps of Martin Luther King Jr. engaged all my senses.

During the civil rights era, I was a young adult. Today, I’m amazed at how much I never learned from history books or the news about slavery, the greatest stain on our country’s history.

How relevant the learnings are now, in light of the political injustices of the Trump administration. As the poet George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

In late March, my oldest sister Susan, who lives in California, met me and 22 other Road Scholar travelers to begin our journey in Atlanta.

She’d read the 2024 John Lewis biography, John Lewis: A Life, by David Greenberg; I was wrapping up the 2023 book King: A Life, by Jonathan Eig.

Even so, we weren’t prepared for the visceral reaction to walking over the Edmund Pettus Bridge (named for a Ku Klux Klan person) in Selma, Ala., as we imagined a young John Lewis attacked by vicious dogs, tear gas and billy clubs.

Or later, walking the sidewalks where the Birmingham Children’s Crusade marched peacefully, yet faced snarling German Shepherds and powerful water hoses aimed at their faces, before being arrested and jailed. Children as young as 6. Why, we asked? Parents feared loss of employment if they participated in protesting segregation.

If there was a most remarkable stop, it was the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a complex of sites opened in 2018 in Montgomery, a city that played a prominent role in the domestic slave trade due to its location on the Alabama River and as the capital of the Confederacy.

These buildings and parks are the brainchild of author/lecturer/human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson. His 2014 best-selling book, Just Mercy, documented cases of Black men unjustly serving on Death Row for murders they did not commit.

A year later, the book was made into a popular movie. The center includes a Legacy Museum that documents the kidnapping of Black tribes from Africa, the horrific Middle Passage to America, where 15 percent perished, and the final blow, selling them into chattel slavery upon arrival in port.

‘SERIOUS REVENUES’

There’s also a Lynching Museum, where rust-colored slabs hang down almost touching the earth, and an Art and Sculpture Park. Soon, a hotel and cultural center will be added to what is now the second most popular tourist stop in the state.

(I asked the driver of the small bus that takes you around the compound how the locals liked it. “A whole lot more,” he said, “now that we’re generating serious revenues.”).

The trip supercharges one’s emotions; I’m still absorbing what I experienced. All of MLK’s followers practiced his pacifism, inspired by Ghandi.

Even so, the horror of being a Freedom Rider stopped on a deserted highway in a Greyhound bus by the KKK, tear-gassed and then burned, is sobering.

Young college students, primarily, Black and white, were riding the bus to register Black voters.

Or how about the shock of being in the front row of those marching over the bridge, beaten unconscious and left for dead?

And the sorrow of the congregation, and eventually, the indignation of a nation, for the four Black girls killed by a bomb in the basement of the 16th Street Ebenezer Baptist Church in Birmingham.

There is a happier imagining:

MLK, preaching: “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, or popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”

Or this: “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people but the appalling silence of the good people.”

Imagine the thrill of walking 10 abreast, led by MLK, over miles of Alabama highway, feet aching, blisters burning, singing in harmony, We Shall Overcome.

Feel, imagine, immerse. This trip into the Deep South filled many gaps in my understanding of the history of our inhumanity toward Black men, women and children.

Going forward? Find some “good trouble.” Or make some, as John Lewis advised.

Kristin Elliott of Morris Township is retired from advertising and marketing. She is a founding volunteer of the Morristown Festival of Books, and author of You All Look Alike, A Family Memoir, about growing up as namesake for a greeting card company.

Opinions expressed in commentaries are the authors’, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication.