Day 7-Montgomery/Selma(William's Group)

Often it is easy to look at the past as just that: the past, a distant memory, a story passed down to generations who could care less. We, whether purposefully or subconsciously, block out any information that does not directly affect our environment, our reality. This is because history is not real to us as a generation, as humans. We browse through museums, looking at pictures, reading captions, old newspaper clippings, thinking to ourselves, "What a powerful story." A story. Can we really connect to a story? For us, blacks, whites, Native Americans, Asians, to really connect to our history, we must come to the realization that, at one point, this story was once someone's reality. Today, on the Footprints to Freedom Tour at the National Voting Rights Museum, I believe that we came closer to that realization. I am hesitant to say that we experienced life on a slave ship because frankly we did not. We caught a glimpse into a fraction of the suffering of those subject to the cruelties of the Middle Passage. We received a mild sampling of the verbal abuse that the slave drivers delivered to their bewildered captives. This was an experience not a display, one that could not merely be bypassed because we wanted to get to the gift shop. The wailing of a mother having her child torn from her arms echoed in the last room of our "voyage," moving many of us to tears. This was a staunch reminder that slavery was not just a crime against Africans committed by whites. It was a crime against humanity. This view was expressed in our discussion following our visit. We talked about how the experience impacted each of us and what we can do to forgive, but not forget. For if we forget, we are doomed to repeat our mistakes, doomed to classify another group of people as inferior to ourselves because of arbitrary, uncontrollable factors. To forgive, it is important to embrace history not as a story, but as the reality of those who truly experienced those trying times. They lived through slavery, through reconstruction, through the lynchings, the cross burnings, the Klan killings, the bus boycotts, the Civil Rights movement. And they can live today, so long as we do not forget.