Article
America
Comment
Politics
Race
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 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
Assisted dying
Care
Comment
Easter
5 min read

I know who will be most affected by legalising assisted dying

Contemplating lent revives hard memories and raises fresh fears.

Ryan is an ordained Priest in the Church of England, currently serving in south London. 

A close up of a forehead bearing an ash cross marked on it.
Ahna Ziegler on Unsplash.

“What’s that - a face tattoo?” 

These were the words of one person as I walked past them on the streets on a recent Wednesday, with the ashes of last year’s burnt palm-branches placed across my forehead in the shape of the cross.  

The cross has been a symbol of hope for over two millennia; that even in the most painful of circumstances, darkness does not have the final say, including in death.  

As a society, we don’t really talk about death that much. Margot Robbie’s Barbie was the quintessential party-pooper when she pondered: 

 “do you guys ever think about dying?”. 

It’s no fun to dwell on death and dying, and for many of us, we put it off as long as we can. That all changed last year with the introduction of the assisted dying bill into the Houses of Parliament. Our national attention was, for a rare moment, captured by death.  

As a parish priest, I’ve seen the finality of burying someone into the ground. I’ve seen the sadness in the eyes of those trying to grieve. 

The words of Ash Wednesday, which remind us that we are ‘but dust, and to dust we shall return’ are echoed in the famous words that the priest recites in those last moments of burial, ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. In that moment, amongst the bereaved, there is no escaping the inevitability of death. It is the ultimate statistic, 1 in 1 die. 

Whilst death is of course universal and will affect us all, the impact of this assisted dying bill could have consequences for some of the most vulnerable in society.  

As I reflect on my time as a Priest in East London, this is not abstract theory, but something I lived with each day. I served amongst a hugely diverse, vibrant, community in one of the poorest parts of the city. As I try to picture some the people I’ve walked alongside, I know it is these lives that will be most affected.  

One of the reasons I have concerns about the bill is the prospect of these people being coerced into ending their own lives prematurely, by a world that has already told them their lives are of little value. There are already huge disparities in access to the current provision of palliative care at the end of life, particularly amongst people of colour, the disabled and the poor.  

Of the 500,000 people who die each year, 100,000 do not access the care they need. This number is skewed towards ethnic minorities and those who come from poorer backgrounds.  

There is much confusion and misinformation about what end-of-life care even is. Research conducted by Marie Curie shows that 1 in 5 people from an ethnic minority background believe Palliative Care is actually Euthanasia.  

We only need to look at what has happened around the world when the ‘right to die’ becomes a duty to die. Even with the best of intentions, other jurisdictions show us that safeguards rapidly deteriorate and those who are already vulnerable become even more so.  

I worry that the way in which this bill is being handled - rushed through, little time being given to properly chew over the profound consequences it may have - reflects the wider way we view death. 

By trying to provide a ‘choice’ for a certain group of people, the consequence will be taking away real choice from those who already have little. 

Yet we know that for those who do access it, palliative care can be hugely effective in improving their quality of life, and for some, they can even outlive their prognosis. During Ash Wednesday’s service, I met an elderly gentleman who was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer in 2019. He was told he had five months to live. He described every day of his six-year survival since as a ‘miracle’, his eyes filled with evident joy.  

Such a blessing stands in stark contrast to the lonely final days of my 96-year-old great grandmother. She was suddenly taken ill during the Covid-19 pandemic and was frantically rushed to a hospital. Amidst the chaos, exasperated by the restrictions against seeing family that were in place at the time, I distinctly remember confused conversations about placing her in a care home for her final days. It was clear she needed a lot of specialist attention, more than our family could provide ourselves.  As she was discharged to stay with our aunt, she never did reach that care home, as she died at home. She was buried in our local cemetery, with our family watching on Zoom.  

My final memory of my great-grandmother will be the FaceTime call we shared when she was taken to hospital, with the poor data connection and shaky picture. I am so grateful for the few family members who were able to be by her side when she died, but I’ve often wondered whether she fully received the care she actually needed during those final days, in the way she needed it.  

What my great-grandmother didn’t have a lot of at the end of her life was time.  

That’s also true for this bill. Concerns have been raised that only five hours of debate were given to this Bill in the chamber, comparatively short for a change in the law of this magnitude.  

I worry that the way in which this bill is being handled- rushed through, little time being given to properly chew over the profound consequences it may have- reflects the wider way we view death.  

Do we view death - and indeed the dying- as something to be shoved to one side, not spoken about in the hopes we can avoid its impact? Or do we view death as an important moment to review who and what matters most in life?  

Perhaps for some, the fact that Christians devote a period of 40 days to dwell on death may be one of the mysteries of faith. However, perhaps it’s not such a bad idea after all.  Death may bring with it fear, grief and pain and so we tend to avoid it. But do we risk missing out on much more? As we head into Easter, the cross still serves as a powerful reminder that, especially in death, Hope can be found, that Good has triumphed over evil, and Light shines even in the darkest of places.  

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