Montgomery: Civil Rights by Day, Shakespeare by Night

I’ve been fortunate to have traveled extensively internationally, but I actually haven’t spent much time traveling within the US. When I discovered that OHS, my online high school, was offering field trip to Montgomery, Alabama during Spring Break 2019, I thought it would be a fantastic opportunity to learn “on the road” with my classmates. I’ve only heard about life in the South from Dad, who briefly attended college in Alabama, so I’ve always been curious to see for myself.
 
Our group convened at the Montgomery Airport on Wednesday around noon. After a quick stop for lunch at a Mexican restaurant, we headed to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art to view historical impressionistic portraits and landscapes but also contemporary sculptures and installations. Next, we toured the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, ranked among the ten largest Shakespeare festivals in the world. Our tour guide showed us around backstage, pointed out the ropes, and also the costume room. We even got to see the stage as it would be set for the play we would watch the following day. After a dinner of pizza and popsicles, we enjoyed a Shakespeare Performance Orchestra, where we discussed Shakespeare’s life and tried fun exercises with the first lines of Romeo and Juliet. We created a mini 5-line play, practiced intoning in the right places, and pausing at the right times.
 
Thursday began with a breakfast of grits and waffles. Then, we headed to the Civil Rights Museum, where we learned about all the horrific acts against African Americans and those who supported the Civil Rights movement. So many innocent people, bystanders, and just people with kind hearts were brutally murdered by Ku Klux Klan. I was shaken by the sheer millions supporting Klan members. We viewed portraits of forty lynching victims and paid respects at a black fountain memorial built in their honor. After lunch at a Jamaican restaurant, we toured the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church. Our guide, Wanda, was a wonderfully kind and inspirational woman who told us all about the building’s background and how Martin Luther King influenced their lives and history. Later, we took a walking and bus tour of Montgomery with a reconciliation artist named Michelle Browder. She showed us passageways where slaves were illegally smuggled in as well as Rosa Parks’ house. After dinner, we returned to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and watched Steel Magnolias. The play, which took place in a salon, was heartwarmingly sad yet also hilarious.
 
On Friday morning, we made an early start to the Legacy Museum for Peace and Justice. Visitors were immediately struck with holograms of slaves retelling their tragic tales of suffering and separation. Some sang songs to raise their spirits. This set the tone for the rest of the museum, a space devoted to the story of injustice against African Americans from the time they were first kidnapped into slavery. They were lynched by mobs, who considered them less than human. We watched documentaries explaining how even today, Black men are over-represented in jails and unfairly tried for crimes they didn’t commit simply due to their skin color. Since this museum was such an emotional experience, we took some time in the bookstore to reflect upon what we just saw.
 
After a quick boxed lunch together, we walked to the Freedom Riders where the guide shared with us about the peaceful protests held on the Greyhound buses. Young people of different races would board at an integrated stop, then ride down to the segregated stops in Alabama. They met no resistance until then, where huge numbers of protected Klan members attacked them, throwing a bomb in the bus. The attackers didn’t bother to cover their faces because the police and authorities were on their side. However, when four hundred people from all over the country joined the protest and were all placed in a Mississippi prison, the government was forced to intervene. Finally, the entire bus system was successfully integrated.
 
Next, we visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a memorial for all the thousands lynching victims in hundreds of counties throughout the country. It was a somber place, built of metal blocks hanging from the ceiling, marked simply with the names of those murdered and the counties where the atrocities took place. We spent quite some time here, pondering the events that had unfolded. Outside the memorial, a complete set of identical blocks were made for each county to bring to their city centers as a reminder to its proud citizen of the lynching history and reality of what happened. Later, we listened to a speaker discuss the modern day effects of racial prejudice to children, to adults, to those accused and arrested. After dinner in the hotel, we watched Our Town at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. This play dealt with the lives within a town, the interrelationships between young people, and advanced into a more existential view of life and death and what really matters.
 
On Saturday morning, we visited the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum, located in the house they spent about a year together in. Zelda was an underrated artist and writer who struggled with mental illness and improper treatment methods later in life. Scott was the famous author who wrote classic novels including The Great Gatsby. The two had interesting lives, though they had interpersonal conflicts, leading to them living separately even though they were still married.
 
After a delicious Alabaman buffet lunch, we spent afternoon at the grounds of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. We attended a discussion about community theatre and how they interact with the communities they serve. For the next few hours, we lounged around the grassy park area around the theatre, where my friends and I had some fun photoshoots and mucked around. The next activity was quite interesting; it was a narrated changeover between the set of the previous night’s play, Our Town, and tonight’s play, Romeo and Juliet. We enjoyed a picnic dinner in the Shakespeare Gardens, then returned inside to watch the play. This amazing play exceeded all my expectations, for it was executed with superb emotion. All the actors were phenomenal and the directing choice to set the play in a 1900’s school warehouse in modern apparel coupled with swords was really awesome.
 
On Sunday, our final morning together, we closed with a group reflection upon the incredible trip as a whole. Despite a lack of sleep, I am grateful for this brief but intensely memorable experience. We delved into the Civil Rights movement and also Shakespearean dramas, two topics which may seem tangential but are truly interwoven within this jewel of a city, Montgomery in Alabama.