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
Development
War & peace
3 min read

South Sudan is on the brink, but it can pull back

The UK can join local peacemakers in preventing a new civil war.

James Wani is Christian Aid’s South Sudan’s Country Director.

A Sudanese woman walks across the ashes of a burnt out street market.
A burnt-out market place in South Sudan.
Christian Aid.

It’s been two years since Sudan slid into a brutal power struggle between the army and its former ally, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Despite its size and savagery, blink and you might miss it as the world media remains mesmerised by the White House tariffs.  

Sudan’s people have suffered on a scale that’s almost impossible to take in. It is the world's biggest humanitarian crisis. More than 12.5 million people have been forced from their homes. Some estimates suggest up to 150,000 people had been killed so far in the conflict.  

The ensuing chaos has spilled into neighbouring countries like South Sudan where I live. Over the last year almost a million refugees and returnees have crossed the border to escape horrific war crimes, violence and rape. 

Neither are they escaping into a land of peace and stability. Resources are stretched as South Sudan grapples with long-standing challenges like floods and droughts from climate change and our own fragile peace process.  

Those crossing from the north have added a crisis on top of the existing crises. Nine million people here need humanitarian assistance - three quarters of South Sudan’s population.  

Christian Aid and its local partners are doing what they can to support this huge influx from Sudan by providing cash, emergency supplies and access to water and sanitation to more than 100,000 people.   

But even these attempts at relief might be short-lived. Fears are growing that South Sudan may follow Sudan and topple into civil war. 400,000 people died over five years in the last one. Ominous signs are there for a renewed conflict.  

Late last year in Juba there was an outbreak of violence between the President’s military forces and armed groups connected to the former head of the National Security Agency. The country’s first ever elections keep on being postponed. Tensions escalated in February. An unelected Reconstituted Transitional National Assembly was not called back from recess to discuss this.  

Now the country's First Vice-President Riek Machar is under house arrest. South Sudan's President Salva Kiir accused Machar of stirring up a new revolt. Last month, the US ordered all its non-emergency staff in South Sudan to leave as fighting broke out in one part of the country.  

Just this month, the UN mission’s plane was shot down, killing staff and a wounded armed forces general, allegedly by groups allied to the Vice-President. Uganda has sent its army to support the President and airstrikes on civilian areas and opposition compounds in four states are now nearing the capital.   

South Sudan might be on the brink, but this isn’t a doctrine of despair. The country can pull back.  

Christian Aid doesn’t just provide humanitarian support - we are in the business of hope. by working hand in hand with local activists, like the South Sudan Council of Churches (SSCC), to help the country’s government establish and implement the 2018 peace agreement.   

Respected church leaders have, and are, playing a key role in building trust and confidence:  brokering peace deals at local level, undertaking shuttle diplomacy in South Sudan’s states, talking to armed groups to urge them to get behind the peace agreement and to the President and Vice-President to return to honouring their agreement. The new elected head of SSCC, Rev. Tut Kony Nyang Kon, said their role was to bring the country around a unity of purpose.   

He said South Sudan’s leaders need to present a reinvigorated plan for free and fair elections in two years to reassure people, rally the peacemakers and deter those who may see an opportunity to undermine the peace gains made so far.  

But they need diplomatic support too.   

The UK, along with the USA and Norway, is part of the influential “Troika” that must make a serious diplomatic investment in the national and international peace processes to ensure that the existing peace agreement holds and deter other states from providing financial or military support that can fuel conflict and violence.  

The UK government needs to show it means what it says when it promised the UN Security Council last November that it would champion the protection of civilians and double aid for those fleeing the conflict in Sudan.  

2025 should be a leadership moment for the UK and the international community to increase support for the region and get behind South Sudan’s peacemakers to avoid another catastrophic conflict in Africa.