Article

America

Comment

Politics

Race

8 November 2023

6 min read

Remembering well: journeying through America’s memorials

Ian Hamlin recalls the Civil Rights landmarks and memorials, as he continues his journey in the footsteps of his hero Martin Luther King.

Ian Hamlin

Ian Hamlin has been the minister of a Baptist church since 1994. He previously worked in financial services.

An imposing stone statue of Martin Luther King standing with his arms crossed.

Martin Luther King Memorial at night, Washington DC.

Bernd Dittrich on Unsplash.

Pilgrimage, according to Pete Grieg’s definition at least, is simply ‘a journey with God, in search of God’. In other words, it’s not going from somewhere God isn’t, to where he is, but does recognise the real power of place, that the presence of God, experienced in a specific location, is significant, and worthy of seeking out.

I’ve been reluctant to call this sabbatical trip of mine, to the sites of a variety of events significant in the American journey towards civil rights in the 1950s and 60s, a pilgrimage. It sounds overly grand and to give too strong an emphasis to the geography, rather than either the history, or the biography, of Martin Luther King himself, the inspiration of the whole journey.

Yet, as I’ve been travelling; by plane, train, car and foot, I’ve been powerfully moved, as I’ve stood in places that have carried the weight of real pain, and extreme significance. There is genuine emotion attached to being somewhere where something happened, barely a generation ago, it leaves a legacy hanging in the air which is somehow palpable. That’s true regardless, but it’s often helped, although sometimes hindered, by some sort of maker. Something to let you know that this is where it was. Beyond the purely informational, memorialising has, or can, play a potent part in demanding that attention be continually paid to the past’s relevance to the here and now.

Selma, Alabama

A historic marker at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Tony Webster, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A history interpration sign stands by the highway approach to a arched bridge.

Those responsible for keeping this particular story alive, across the United States have, it seems to me, done an exceptional job in providing markers and memorials that both focus and amplify the meaning of the events they commemorate. Allow me to take you with me, briefly, to some of the places where I have stood, that you might sense something of what I have felt.

The USA, of course, has some experience of memorialising significant, yet relatively recent events. Coming from the UK, where I’m used to public monuments largely celebrating victory, glorifying generals and affirming a pretty static sense of solid certainty, it’s refreshing to witness commemorations that provoke as many questions as they provide answers, that promote reflection and challenge, as well as inform.

Washington DC is, of course, a city of memorials. Some of the most well known are, strictly speaking, outside of the remit of my trip, but it seems wasteful not to visit nonetheless.

The monuments to Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington himself are famously huge, grand and imposing, yet, to my mind at least, the most moving Presidential memorials are those to Roosevelt and Mason, the forgotten founder. Relatively small, humble even, thoughtful, the small wheelchair bound figure of Roosevelt, almost lost within his own expansive legacy, generously populated with the images of others, especially the poor, they put aside prestige for the sake of the personal.

When it comes to war, there’s a welcome note of ambiguity, whether you are scarred by the gash in the landscape that is the Vietnam memorial or haunted by the staring eyes of the Unnamed soldiers of the Korean war, catching you accusingly with their glance, there’s no place for mere glorification here.

Of course, the one non president remembered on the National Mall, takes me to the heart of my journey. Martin Luther King stands, tall and majestic, emerging, literally, out of the rock face behind him. ‘Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.’ Powerful, in every respect, but I would have to go elsewhere to find his humanity.

Like to his birth home, in Atanta, beside the very dining table where he was told by his father that the reason the inseparable friend of his pre-school years dropped him as soon as school began, was because of the colour of his skin, and that it would happen over and over again. Or, later, at the kitchen table of the parsonage of his first church in Montgomery, where, having cleared up the wreckage from his bombed porch, he wondered, in the middle of the night, if the burden he was carrying was too great to carry, and yet, right there, experienced an encounter with God that fuelled his every succeeding day.

Maybe to Boston, the most recent, abstract yet tender monument to the ‘Embrace’ between him and his wife, a marriage far from perfect, yet powerfully enabling.

Or perhaps standing in his very footsteps, marked for posterity, at the Lincoln memorial for the March on Washington, the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, perhaps the most searingly evocative place of all that I visited, or behind his own beloved pulpit from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery. In each and every place, recalling all the different stories, you get a feel for the man, his pain, and yet his faith.

Then there were the larger museums, interpretive centres and institutes, designed to show the bigger picture still.

Like the enormously impressive National African American Museum of Art and History (NAAMAH), part of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, where, I joined, in quick succession, a weeping line of black American visitors, filling past Emmett Till’s open casket, then, the same crowd, cheering the recorded promise of a Dream.

The Civil Rights Museum of Birmingham, charged with overseeing the 16th Street Baptist Church, and the place, just outside the ladies’ rest room, where a bomb exploded. killing 4 young girls, just as a service was about to begin, as well as the pretty little park opposite, with its startling sculptures of snarling police dogs and water cannons.

There was the Legacy Museum, from Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, in Montgomery, where you’re immediately overwhelmed by storm force waves crashing all around the walls and ceiling, enveloping you in the immersive experience of the transatlantic slave trade. Before peering into a tiny cell and seeing a holographic figure come to life before you, a slave waiting their auction, telling you their story. Then, much more up to date, being ushered into a prison visiting room, picking up the telephone to hear the convict’s take on contemporary racial injustice.

Birmingham, Alabama

Freedom Walk, Kelly Ingram Park.

Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

a path passes between two monoliths from which sculpted aggressive dogs emerge.

Or, just down the road, in the Rosa Parks Museum, standing at a bus stop, watching a small, tired lady being hauled off to be arrested for falling to give up her seat, before you move on, another half mile or so, to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and feel the weight of the multitude of great steel blocks, 800 of them, each representing a county in America, bearing the names of the victims of summary lynching.

Finally, there’s the gentle water flowing over Maya Lin’s follow up piece to her Vietnam memorial, the civil rights memorial, also in Montgomery. All of these places, and others; bitter with anger, drenched in tears, seared with hope. Remembered, celebrated, with all their ongoing awkwardness as benchmarks in history and faith.

In an age when the role of statues and memorials is much debated, when history, it’s said, should know its place, and yet be allowed to stand and speak its truth … these places, images, powerful exhibits and presentations, demand that the whole, painful truth shout out its reality, often in the name of the victims and the vanquished. In doing so, they bear good witness to the events that they’re designed to speak of. They inform, but, much more than that, they move and they challenge, they create new and ongoing stories so that history is not only recalled but re-enabled in a needy present, and offered up in hope.

Article

Comment

Community

Sustainability

Wildness

12 June 2025

5 min read

What my noisy, messy crow neighbours have taught me about how to live

We can’t control nature; we just need to become more porous to it

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

Meet the neighbours.

Townsend Walton on Unsplash.

Our neighbours hate our crows. I can’t blame them. The hundreds of crows that occupy the tops of the ancient pines which surround our rural manse are the noisiest and messiest residents I have ever lived near. They greet each sunrise with a din of caws and counter-caws, as if they are deeply concerned that anyone might miss this momentous daily event or the fact that it’s now happening before 5:30a.m. In nesting season, which lasts most of April and May, our car is easily identifiable in any carpark by the crusted grey spots with which the crows see fit to adorn it. Within a week of moving in, we gave up on the washing line so invitingly strung between two of the pines. Our pristine whites were too tempting a target for our crows.

I do not attend the meetings of our local community council, but I hear whispers of what transpires there. Our crows, evidently, have been a regular topic of conversation. Multiple solutions have been proffered for driving them away. All have been tried and all have failed. Our crows cling fiercely to their homes and their determination is more than a match for any human efforts. If I have the vibe of my community right, at least some of its members feel that there’s something perverse, obscene even, about a flock of birds being allowed to upset our human right to create a serene, comfortable, and convenient habitation. Our clump of houses is surrounded by a visually stunning landscape; shouldn’t the aural landscape be equally beautiful?

If my family does not mind our crows, it is because the treetop drama is just one more example of many natural encroachments on the house, some more welcome than others.

Every year we celebrate the miraculous return to our eaves of house martins, home from their intercontinental peregrinations. We look forward to another summer spent watching their acrobatics and listening to their chicks in the nests an arm’s length from our windows.

Clearing up the mess of our attic’s bats is an annual chore, one thankfully performed stoically by our church’s property convener, but there are compensations - such as the twilight shows they put on outside our living room window, performing impossible turns and reversals midair in their search for prey.

Less welcome are the massive spiders, which are a perennial presence; the slugs, which seemed to apparate onto the hall carpet all through winter, the mice, two of whom sacrificed themselves to knock our dishwasher out of action by chewing through its hose; and the wasps who built a nest the size of a telephone box in the roof space above our back bathroom.

Least fun of all has been what we call the Great Earwig Migrations, which have happened twice in our half-decade in the manse and which involve weeks of finding the little bugs under, seemingly, every object and on every surface.

When we moved into the manse, we expected challenges, the high heating bills, the leaking roof, and the isolation of the countryside. What we did not expect was the experience of porousness; the shock of realising that we had so little control over what other forms of life saw fit to share our habitation with us.

At first it felt to me perverse, obscene even, that a house, even a 120-year-old house, should be so vulnerable to incursions by animal creation. Shouldn’t our home, our space, be a haven where we can control who or what enters, who or what we feel comfortable with, and who or what we can exclude?

If I had to give a name to this expectation, maybe it would be that of the buffered home, a play on philosopher Charles Taylor’s description of the modern self as buffered. Taylor contrasts the selves we aspire to be in modernity, ones able to control and order our bodies, our space, our lives, and our relationships so that they accord with our autonomous desires and actions, with those of our premodern ancestors. Medievals and ancients assumed porosity. Bodies were subject not just to biological infection, but spiritual infections too. Projects and plans were frustrated not just by mistakes or personal failings, but by the ever-fickle whims of the goddess Fortuna. Their lives, their bodies, their homes, existed in a perpetual state of vulnerability. The threat of everything falling apart was always on the horizon.

We want nature to survive, flourish even, but not at the cost of our comforts or our sense of autonomy and security.

Modern technology has helped us tame the more unwelcome of these forces, but it has also given us an overly naive expectation that all that is inconvenient about nature can and should be gradually eliminated. This expectation frames the way we respond to worries about climate change and other creeping environmental crises. We want nature to survive, flourish even, but not at the cost of our comforts or our sense of autonomy and security. But as our ancestors might remind us, we are part of nature too, and, just as in any relationship, mutual vulnerability and sacrifice are needed if we are all going to survive. This is scary, but there are resources within Christianity - within other faiths too - to help us understand that there are benefits to affirming our vulnerability, our porosity.

My daughters love our crows. They point in wonder as the crows flood into the sky at dusk, hundreds of them making a giant circle once, then twice round the garden, before settling down for the night. When, in late May, grounded fledgings appear, bundles of feathers shocked at the sudden inhospitality of the nest, too stunned to realise they can fly home, my daughters watch over them, anxious lest the local cats take advantage of their bewilderment.

A few Sundays ago, my youngest, who struggles to stay quiet and well-behaved in Sunday School, pulled me out of church early. We sat on the church lawn staring up at the crows and soon were adapting the andante melodies of that Sunday’s hymns into imagined songs of praise that crows might sing. “No,” my youngest said, simpatico with the crows as she is, “I think they’d want something more upbeat.” And so we tried setting our own corvid-themed praise lyrics to Rosé and Bruno Mars’ song APT, while listening to the caw and counter-caw above. “Dad, how do you think God sees the world?” she asked me when we finished. I stumbled through my best theologically informed explanation of how God could be in every part of creation without being of it, before she stopped me. “I think it’s like a giant snow globe that he holds in his hands.” Watching the birds swirl around us, two stationary figures caught by the same currents of air that were sweeping them aloft, what could I do but agree?

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