Recently, 52 people boarded a bus in Brevard for a social justice pilgrimage to Montgomery, Alabama.
The Rev. Bill Livingston, group organizer, retired to Brevard following a career as an Episcopal priest with his wife, the Rev. Diane Livingston, an ordained deacon who retired from serving Brevard’s St. Philip’s Episcopal Church.
In 2019 after visiting historic sites in Montgomery detailing the country’s history of slavery, lynching and systemic intergenerational racism, Livingston was deeply moved and felt his neighbors needed to experience what he had.
On the early morning of March 13, people of all colors, ages and backgrounds started on their three-day journey south. A goal of the planning committee was to be able to provide the experience for those who wanted to attend but could not afford it. Individual, church and community donations totaled $11,825 in scholarships.
SLAVERY
The first stop was at the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park which opened last year.
The park honors the lives and memories of the 10 million enslaved people in the United States.
Participants walked along art and original artifacts depicting the life of the first Indigenous people in the area, followed by the many years Africans and their ancestors were enslaved.
The 17-acre site is located along the Alabama River where tens of thousands of enslaved people were trafficked. The sounds of trains echoed through the park, providing a modern day soundtrack to the historic narratives of enslaved people transported by railways from Montgomery throughout the South.
The final monument is the National Monument to Freedom, which honors the 4 million enslaved people who won freedom following the Civil War. More than 100,000 names representing Black families are engraved on the monument.
A common practice was to pass down slave owner surnames to the enslaved. Both white and Black participants on the trip located their family names on the monument.
Luis Salcedo, 30, is a Blue Ridge Service Corp member currently working at Interfaith Assistance Ministries in Hendersonville. A handful of his peers and his organization’s director participated on the trip.
“I wanted to learn about the different communities in the United States and the history of the African Americans, what they have to go through,” said Salcedo, who is originally from Peru and his family currently lives in Pennsylvania. “I feel like we should learn from history and not ignore it instead of having to repeat it.”
Salcedo made parallels to his Latino culture, citing current fears about Immigration and Customs Enforcement being in schools and churches.
“It feels like division and hate is still happening in our country,” he said. “We see the police targeting people of color. We need to change this. Learn from the past and change for the better.”
LYNCHING
The second day started at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice which opened in 2018. According to its website, it is the nation’s first comprehensive memorial dedicated to Americans who were enslaved, lynched and racially segregated.
The more than 4,400 Black people who were lynched between 1877 and 1950 are remembered throughout the 6-acre site. Their names, birthdays and death dates are engraved on more than 800 corten steel monuments — one for each county where lynchings took place.
The monuments were designed to hang placed on top of a hill, symbolically depicting dead bodies.
The Rev. Gwen Jones, 65, said the trip was very enlightening. Jones grew up in Brevard and currently serves at the pastor of St. John Baptist Church in Arden.
“It’s really hard being one who is a person of color, Black, to see how degrading I believe it is and it’s very hard to swallow,” she said. “The parallel of then and now.”
“You think about incarceration — it’s another way of lynching,” she said. “They went from hanging to the electric chair, which is still the same as modern day lynching…we’re just calling it a different name now.”
Jones grew up in the Rosenwald community of Brevard in the 1960s.
“We had to walk to school. There were no buses that came into the Black community,” she said. “We walked through the fields to get to the schools and we did that until high school.”
Some parts of the county were unsafe for Black people, she said.
“Mom and dad had a couple of friends that lived in Lake Toxaway,” she said. “We would go see them, but we had to cover up the covers over us as we drove through Rosman.”
Her three children also grew up in Brevard, ages 46, 42 and 32 years old. She said in some ways it is different for them but in other ways not.
“It seems like we’ve gone backwards,” Jones reflected. “The heart doesn’t see color, but remember the eyes do. So when you say ‘color blind,’ that’s not true. I do see color, but my heart doesn’t.”
LEGACY
Back on the bus, participants were driven to The Legacy Museum. Situated in downtown Montgomery it was built in 2018 on the site of a cotton warehouse where enslaved people were forced to labor in bondage.
The museum narrates four centuries of African American history from slavery and its legacy to mass incarceration.
Interactive exhibits, multimedia presentations, holograms and more filled multiple exhibit rooms.
Told from the narrative of the oppressed, rather than the oppressor, Black history spanned from the first slave ships out of Africa, through the Reconstruction era following the Civil War, Jim Crow laws, the Civil Rights Movement to the 2020 death of George Floyd.
“Initially coming I didn’t really know what to expect,” said Glenda Pulley, 51, of Buncombe County when asked what she thought of the trip. “I guess I was defensive.”
“I’m different from a lot of my older folks because I grew up in Fairview and I was the only Black kid in the whole school,” she said. “I was treated very good. I would go home with all the other white kids and their families loved me and they treated me no differently than they would treat their own children. I spent the night at their houses. They fed me.”
Pulley said she raised her family not to see color. She has three biracial grandchildren and is about to have a white son-in-law.
“I listen to the stories of everyone else and I can’t really relate to what they went through,” she said. “I’ve experienced racism on my job, of course, but all in all I’ve not really had bad feelings toward any color and I’ve always thought that color was just what it was. It’s just a color and you’re a person first before you’re a color.”
IMPRESSIONS
Participants gathered for a group discussion following the two days of historic sites and museum tours.
“We formed a circle with no beginning and no end,” said DeBorah Reid, 69. “Through the evolution of our conversations there were joyful and tortured tears, contemplated compassions, trustworthy truths from people Black and white flowing from all walks of life. Reflecting most of all a humanity of love that this pilgrimage journey was not by accident but by God’s design.”
“We stand on the shoulders of many who did so much more with so much less,” said Brevard’s Nancy Stoutamire. “We resolved to honor that legacy and continue to struggle.”
Before becoming a priest, Livingston worked in community mental health and facilitated group therapy. He later assisted in emotional and spiritual recovery following Hurricane Katrina and facilitated trauma debriefing groups.
Livingston moderated the discussion at Montgomery’s Saint John’s Episcopal Church, located just one block from the museum.
“I knew emotions would include anger, sadness, guilt, confusion, emotional suffering, wanting to blame, wanting answers to unanswerable questions and wondering, ‘What do I do with what I’m thinking and feeling?’” he said. “Because all these emotions and thoughts occur after a disaster, I thought approaching this as a trauma debriefing was the only way to approach it. This requires creating a safe space, encouraging everyone, as best as they can, to identify their thoughts and emotions, giving everyone a chance to share those thoughts and emotions, listening to them attentively and non-judgmentally, and, as much as possible, to empathize with what others have shared.”
Livingston said he was “blown away” by how it went. “I had to hold back tears by how vulnerable each person made themselves, by the connections developing, by the spirit in the room, how our original vision was taking place right before me,” he said.
FUTURE STEPS
The group will meet next month to talk about next steps.
Some have asked if a handful of individuals will offer public presentations about their experience.
“I hope we will have pilgrims wanting to take leadership in guiding other pilgrims in finding ways to participate in anti-racism and justice work already occurring in Transylvania County,” said Livingston. “If we allow it, long after the pilgrimage is over, it will continue to reveal things to us we learned on the pilgrimage, unaware of that occurring. I hope we can assist pilgrims in that process.”
Betsy Burrows, professor of English and teacher education at Brevard College, was inspired to start planning a trip for her students next spring.
“I teach an African American literature course and also work with future teachers,” she said. “Visiting this Legacy Museum and National Memorial of Peace and Justice is transformative to an understanding of slavery and its impact on our country. All of our young people need to know and understand this important history.”
Burrows cited journalist, Civil Rights Movement leader and one of the NAACP founders, Ida B. Wells: “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
“More than ever, our history and literature teachers need to courageously keep holding up this light to help our country eliminate racial injustice in our collective future,” said Burrows.
EQUAL JUSTICE
INITIATIVE
All three sites visited on the trip are part of the nonprofit organization Equal Justice Initiative, which was founded in 1989 by Bryan Stevenson, a public interest lawyer and bestselling author of “Just Mercy.”
EJI provides legal representation to people who have been illegally convicted, unfairly sentenced or abused in state jails and prisons, according to its website. Staff challenge the death penalty and excessive punishment and provide re-entry assistance to formerly incarcerated people.
Staff work with communities which have been marginalized by poverty and discouraged by unequal treatment and the organization is committed to changing the narrative about race in the United States.
EJI also produces reports, films, educational materials, tours and presentations.
The museum and memorial were opened as part of its national effort to create new spaces, markers and memorials which address the legacy of slavery, lynching and racial segregation, which shapes many issues today.
To visit all three sites it costs $5 and a bus is available to transport visitors linking all three sites. For more information, visit legacysites.eji.org.
