In December 2019, I
traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit The Legacy Museum and The National
Memorial for Peace and Justice. It was my first experience in the Deep South.
For the past 30 years I
have been preoccupied with, and driven to understand, racial injustice in
America. To me it’s the central American story, the great conundrum. The
writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Baldwin led me to W.E.B. Dubois,
and Dubois led to Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Langston
Hughes. Cornel West, Isabel Wilkerson, and Gerald Horne connected me to other
black writers and thinkers who have illuminated and laid bare the contradiction
lying at the heart of American history, the profound disconnect between the
soaring rhetoric of our founding documents and the hard reality experienced by
African Americans.
One cannot visit
Montgomery without paying a visit to the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church.
For me, it was something of a pilgrimage. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is one of
my personal heroes. We often forget he was a young man of only 39 years when he
was assassinated. What King accomplished during his brief life is astounding.
Everywhere I went in Montgomery I met friendly, kind people, but I got the full
treatment at Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church.