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Published: July 24th 2010
The journey to Montgomery from Mobile was fairly uneventful. It took about four or five hours as we got off the interstate and explored the Alabama countryside. Most of the towns we passed through were small and similar to each other, they had shops which were mostly shut down and modest houses.
One building of note was the Greek Orthodox Church in Malbis near Mobile. A Greek man named Jason Malbis founded the town and the villagers built this church in his honour after his death. After taking a few photos we were on our way again and eventually stopped off in a town called Evergreen where we unpacked the fold away chairs for lunch at the side of the railway tracks which passed through the town. We were out of the car for no more than half an hour but the heat was very oppressive so we soon packed up and got on our way! The humidity seemed to push the temperature up past the 95 Fahrenheit the car's thermometer told us it was.
We arrived at out motel on the outskirts of Montgomery, far from idyllic settings, but we weren't bothered because the sun was shining and
the motel had a pool. (Most of the motels here have a small outdoor pool, so we weren't overly surprised.) It was at this motel that we started to use the vouchers from a magazine called Roomsaver. The mags are aimed primarily at truck drivers and we picked ours up from a petrol station. They include vouchers for a lot of the chain motels in the state and offer anywhere from 10% to 75% off the prices normally charged. Anyway, I digress, we spent the evening relaxing by the pool, as my neck and Rachel's back were hurting a lot.
The following morning we booked ourselves in for a massage after speaking to our chiropractor on the phone about our ailments! We were on the receiving end of the ominous sounding Myofascial Release and Neuromuscular Therapy, and were told that various things including not stretching enough, the time in the car and posture were causing our aches and pains. After the treatment we drove along the highway to a town called Selma and began to learn about the Civil Rights movement and struggles of the middle of 20th century.
Both Rachel and I had a very limited knowledge
of the Civil Rights Movement and the work of Martin Luther King Jnr, so were both on a steep learning curve as we visited museums and sights of interest. Selma, amongst other places in Alabama was a hotbed of activity during the segregation era due to its high population of African Americans. In March 1965, after violent clashes and the death of a few prominent activists, Martin Luther King Jnr (MLK) led a group of 300 people on the 50 mile walk from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery (now known as the Selma to Montgomery trail). By the end of the journey, there were thousands of people in the group and it was seen as the defining moment of the movement. What better way for us to truly learn about this movement then to follow the trail for ourselves (although we chose to drive it rather thanwalk the 50 miles). We saw various sites in Selma and along the route, including the Brown AME Church where the march began, the Edmund Pettus Bridge (which saw the marchers attacked by police on what became known as Bloody Sunday during an earlier attempt at the march), and the campsites which
the marchers stayed at during the four day walk. We also visited the Voting Rights Museum which documented the struggle for the black vote.
When we arrived back in Montgomery we visited the State Capitol, which is where MLK led the protest march to. It is a very imposing building and stands at the top of a hill looking down the street on downtown Montgomery and you could imagine the scene with thousands of peaceful demonstrators lining the wide street leading to the steps. We also managed to see the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, which is where MLK was a pastor before being chosen as the leader of the growing movement for civil equality.
Now, I don't want this to sound like a narrative of every day and every night of our journey, but this night was possibly the most annoying of our trip (although we had a similar experience in New Orleans)! After dinner and traipsing round Walmart for supplies, we spent half an hour looking for my debit card, which had fallen down the side of the drivers seat in the car. That problem solved, and after a nice conversation with my Dad on
Skype, we drifted off to sleep only to wake at 1am to the very loud voices coming from an adjoining room. We thought they would soon quieten down but at 2am, they decided to put their tv on full blast and take a shower. Rachel lost her patience and rang reception to ask them to do something about it, which they did because the noise lowered slightly until about 3am when there was blissful silence. 4 hours later the tv was back on and they decided to get ready for their day ahead, very loudly...much to our annoyance! We were both like bears with sore heads when we got up, but we did manage to get the room for half price (after we already had it for a mere $40 dollars with a voucher), so we only paid $20 plus taxes for a crappy night's sleep!
We spent the morning at another important museum in the history of the Civil Rights Movement, the Rosa Parks Museum. It was situated on the very same site that Rosa refused to move from her seat on the bus. The museum was basically a chronological timeline through the events of the Montgomery Bus
Boycott in the 1950's and included a very good reconstruction film of the fateful day in December 1955 when Rosa Parks was arrested after refusing to move out of her seat and let a white lady sit down. We weren't allowed to take photos, so I will have to describe the film. The museum used holograms and moving images on the windows of a replica of the bus in question to make it look and seem like we were actually there. It was a very novel way of showing what happened, and helped explain the sheer frustration of black people at the time. The exhibits also showed just how restrained and patient the protesters had to be in following MLK's doctrine of non violent protest. All in all, a very interesting morning.
Another notable site in the history of Black Americans, which we managed to visit, was the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site at Moton Airfield. This was the scene for a group of young black men, training, against the odds, to become members of the American Army Air Corps. Some were pilots, some were navigators and other bombadiers, but more importantly they proved that black men could hold
positions of skill and bravery in the services. There was a small museum and film on the Tuskegee Airmen as well as a quick visit to the nearby university, the Tuskegee Institute.
We pressed on into Georgia as the day wore on and were looking forward to visiting Pine Mountain and the town of Warm Springs where Franklin D. Roosevelt had built a home which became known as the Little White House. He built it here because of the famed healing powers of the warm water springs, which were known to help people who suffered from Polio as FDR did. He actually died at the house in 1945 and it is now a state park. What us two had managed to overlook was that as we crossed the Alabama Georgia stateline, we had also passed from Central Time to Eastern Time and lost an hour in the process! So the Little White House and the healing springs were closed for the day! Still, it was a nice, scenic drive up and down the mountain and through a town called Manchester. The sign said (and I am sure many Chelsea fans will disagree) Manchester - Home of Champions. We didn't
manage to get a photo of this, much to the disappointment of my father in law!
We spent the night at a little motel in Macon (rhymes with bacon), a town very much in the style of the Old South and the birthplace of, amongst other musical luminaries, Otis Redding. On Friday, we drove north to Atlanta to finish our civil rights odyssey at MLK's tomb and birth house. But before those culturally and historically important sites, we spent the morning in another culturally important place.... The New World of Coca Cola!
Despite the self congratulatory nature of the place and the overbearing swathes of red and white adorning the walls, floors, ceilings and staff, we actually had quite a good time! There were a lot of old memorabilia, such as soda fountains, posters and promotional items from throughout the years which made for interesting browsing. We watched a tongue in cheek documentary film on the characters involved in the famous Happiness Factory advert
Click here to remind yourselves what we mean! and Rachel even managed to kiss one of the characters! There was a very strange and cheesy 4D film about the secret recipe for making coke. More nauseating than informative unfortunately, but the
moving chairs, water sprays and "dragonfly bite" kept it fun. We also toured a working bottling plant inside the museum and a theatre showing all the iconic Coca Cola adverts from television over the last few decades. At the end of the tour, there was a chance to sample over 60 different Coke products from around the world. They split this into continents and the conclusion we drew was that we will be fine in Asia because the Kiwi and Apple Fanta from Thailand was delicious, and we are very glad that we aren't going to Africa because some of the concoctions from there were foul!!
One thing that Rachel and I talked about on the journey back to Macon from Atlanta (where we spent the night as the motels were cheaper!) was how we had noticed at most, if not all, the Civil Rights museums and places of interest we were pretty much the only white people. It was disconcerting and almost embarassing to feel that as recently as 50 years ago, white people were treating blacks as second class citizens. Its hard to explain the feeling, knowing that maybe the parents (or certainly the grandparents) of the
people we were surrounded by had probably suffered at the hands of the unjust and sometimes brutal laws in place at the time. Despite all the serious talk and pondering over the rights and wrongs of people back in the middle of the 20th century, one thing did lighten the mood on the journey. A very random petting farm right next to the highway and a petrol station. The petting farm was home to a large bull amongst other things, which had the largest set of goolies I have ever seen!
Our next stop was Southern Georgia and Northern Florida before we arrived on Tuesday, in Orlando and the fun of Harry Potter and his Wizarding World!
Bye for now x
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Jody
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Impressive balls....
Stuart... were they really the largest goolies you have ever seen? Could that beast balance furniture, milk recepticles and so on in his nads? I suspect not x