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
Comment
Mental Health
Politics
4 min read

Rachel Reeves’ tears: public life still mocks those who show anything but the positive

‘Mental health awareness’ is failing, our words are not matched by our actions

Rachael is an author and theology of mental health specialist. 

 

 

A woman sits and holds back a tear.
Rachel Reeves on the front bench.
Parliament TV.

It’s a bad day at work. Everyone is on high alert, and tempers are frayed. You have your own reasons for being extra ‘on edge’, but now isn’t the time to get into it because it’s the big weekly meeting and everyone is going to be there - worse still, the cameras are going to be there. Despite this, you take a deep breath and take your seat (which, although an honour, is regrettably in the front row).  

But as the fractious meeting begins, you feel the ache of impending tears at the back of your throat, and to your horror, your eyes fill. You do your best to wick them away, but you know they’ve been spotted when someone opposite announces how miserable you look. 

Many of us will have been in a similar, if probably less public, situation at some point in our careers when the emotions we stuff down in the name of professionalism spill out - but I doubt any of us will have done so in the House of Commons with cameras trained on every movement and a less than friendly crowd opposite.  

There have been countless articles already speculating about the reason for the tears of the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, during Prime Minister’s Questions - but most seem devoid of sympathy or empathy, concerned only with the political implications, but not the person at the centre of this story.  

Our reaction to Rachel’s tears is an echo of the sentiment behind the Welfare Reform Bill, which seems to say that need is unacceptable and we should all be able to don that famously British ‘stiff upper lip’ and just get on with life.  

Regardless of what you think of the Welfare Reform Bill, the way it has been briefed and communicated has raised anxiety and fear amongst the disabled community (me included).  

The main message has been that too many people are receiving Personal Independence Payments (PIP) for mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression, with even the former Prime Minister Tony Blair telling people to ‘stop diagnosing themselves’ to combat out rising welfare bill - despite the fact that accessing PIP requires rigorous assessments and support from medical professionals. (It also has a 0.01% fraud rate and was designed to compensate people for the extra cost of being disabled which is estimated to be up to £1000 a month.) 

This tableau is emblematic of how ‘mental health awareness’ is failing in this country; our words are not matched by our actions. 

We know, 27 years after the first ‘Mental Health Awareness Week’, that mental health is important, that emotions are natural and valid - and yet we mock any leader who shows anything but positive emotions.  

We know that people suffer, are disabled by and killed by mental illnesses, and yet we seek to strip support from those who need it most, claiming that they are diagnosing themselves. 

We need a different approach, both to how we handle emotions in public life and the way we talk about those who need extra support due to their mental illnesses.  

Emotions aren’t bad - they help us connect, keep us away from danger and allow our bodies to release unbearable tension, as in the case of crying, whereby tears of pain are intricately designed to help us cope. The tears we shed when faced with chopping a pile of onions are chemically different to those that fall when we are grieving, angry or in pain. Tears of pain should inspire us to reach out to the one in pain with compassion not contempt.  

The way Jesus led 2,000 years ago shows us another way, both of leading and emoting.  

Jesus consistently welcomed those most in need; from healing the woman who had bled for twelve years, considered unclean and rejected by her community, to healing a paralysed man lowered through his roof by friends.  

And yet his ministry was not just one characterised by miracles and might, but demonstrated humility and humanity as he wept over the death of his friend Lazarus and allowed himself to be stripped of all strength as he hung on a cross made for criminals.  

The night before he died, he gathered his friends and through tears and blood-soaked sweat submitted to the Father in the most painful way, and I, like many others, draw comfort and strength from Jesus’ willingness to cry.  

As preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon said, "A Jesus who never wept could never wipe away my tears."  

So perhaps rather than mock Rachel’s tears, they should cause us to rethink how we approach need and recognise none of us are immune.  

Perhaps, we may even join with Paul’s words in his letter to the Corinthians: “For when I am weak, then I am strong.” 

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