Montgomery Day 1 of 2
Vivian:
Hello friends! (And fam!) today is Saturday and it involved a lot of walking. When we woke up we ate breakfast and left the RV. We got an Uber and the driver drove us to the civil rights museum, I got a little mad but only because they had a list of a fraction of Black people killed by white people.
Photo by Stephanie. They also had this temporary exhibit outside the museum, which was meant to be a monument to counter the typical Confederate war hero monuments and as a “tribute to African American history in the face of the Confederacy.” https://blankslatemonument.com/
Anyway next we went to the Rosa Parks museum and walked around and learned a lot of interesting things about Rosa and what she did after the whole bus thing died down, like how she was awarded a medal for honor and bravery from Bill Clinton.
Photo by Vivian.
After that we walked to this 100-year-old hotdog restaurant. It was very small, but the food was good. I had a cheeseburger with fries, Dory had chicken tenders, and Mom had a cheeseburger with fries as well. Notice none of us got the famous hotdogs. Soon after lunch we went to the old greyhound bus stop, it had been converted into a freedom rider’s museum. I didn’t know what a freedom rider was, so I learned. A freedom rider was a Black or White person who wanted to change the bus segregation law by sitting in the wrong places.
Photo by Stephanie. They didn’t allow photos inside, so this is the only one we have.
After that museum we walked to the Mothers Of Gynecology art installation. The Mothers Of Gynecology are three statues of Black enslaved women that had complications with childbirth.
Photo by Stephanie.
They were basically experimented on by J. Marion Simms, the so-called “father of gynecology” which, when you learned of what he did was called “father butcher”.
Photo by Stephanie.
The artist’s name is Michelle Browder and she was nice enough to show us around. After she showed us all there was to see it started raining hard. We managed to somehow call an Uber to take us back to the RV park and spent the rest of the day chilling.
Dory:
We went to the Civil Rights museum where I watched a movie about the Black Lives Matter and I liked the water feature outside.
Photo by Stephanie. This is not the water feature he liked best, but it was close.
Then we went to the Rosa Parks Museum where I got a stylus and I was disappointed with the video reenactment of the bus encounter because I could not go inside the bus.
Photo by Vivian. Dory had seen a video in which Henry Louis Gates, Jr. toured the actual bus in a museum, and so he had it in his head that he would be able to do that, too. But it turns out that the actual bus is in the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan.
Then we went to the Freedom Riders museum that used to be the Greyhound station. It used to be segregated and you could see where there was a Black only door. The Freedom Riders were activists who rode on buses through the deep South to go and protest segregation on Greyhound buses. I enjoyed the Freedom Riders because they campaigned on and on and never lost hope.
Photo by Stephanie. We don’t have another photo of the Freedom RIders museum, so here’s a photo of Dory examining a grate with the Alabama state house in the distance.
Then we went to the Mothers of Gynecology where it rained. One of them had a hole in her middle because it symbolized a fistula. That made it so they couldn’t hold their pee.
Photo by Stephanie.