Two Days. Two very different Alabamas. Montgomery with its grand old homes fading behind chipped paint and a shiny new civil rights memorial guarded at each corner by a patrol car. Huntsville with its sparkling new housing developments and gleaming spaceships set behind the upper middleclass strip malls that are the hallmark of a bustling tech economy.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery has hung, in large oxidized blocks, a county by county encyclopedia for every state in the union where lynchings of African Americans occurred. While the South certainly had the lion's share, a mob of 10,000 even stained the Lake Superior city of Duluth, taking the lives of three Black citizens in 1920. Noticably absent was any county from Wisconsin. Its legacy is perhaps the largest racial gap in student achievement and incarceration in the country, a statistic that stubbornly persists today.
Four hours northward through pine, redbuds, and swamp, on the outskirts of Huntsville we passed from the Old South to the New. Gleaming housing developments, restaurants, and business parks were connected by streets with names like Tech Boulevard and Enterprise Way. Anchored in the middle by the rocket ships turned monuments that propelled the United States to the top of the international Space Race. Today, the citizens traversing its sidewalks are a variety of cultures. But, even here, where intellect reigns supreme, Black female mathematicians had to endure Jim Crow era segregation as they proved themselves by crunching the very equations that brought America's first astronauts safely back to Earth.
My mom has vivid stories about each of these versions of the South. As a teenager, she had soup splashed on her for entering a Tennessee diner with a Black friend. She also fondly remembers the day her brother answered their home phone to hear Dr. von Braun, director of NASA, announce himself and ask for my grandfather. Her dad, an engineer at Battelle, was working with NASA on perfecting rocket fuels. Von Braun was himself a legacy of Hitler's Third Reich, who bought he and his German team a shot at redemption by leading the United States to victory over the Soviets in their competition to master the heavens.
Alabama - you certainly revealed to us our nation's power - for incredible ill and frontier bending progress. I'm glad we began with a somber reflection on the former and an exciting immersion into the latter.
4/3/2021
