Social Stratification in the Deep South

Wow. There really are no words to describe our night out at Po’ Monkey’s last night. William “Po’ Monkey” Seeberry’s home, which is better known to blues enthusiasts as Po’ Monkey’s Lounge, seriously looks like it could fall down if you looked at it the wrong way. It’s decor on the outside includes the expectations of dress and conduct for the group that joins in for the cramped evening of good music and a great atmosphere. Many of our participants took to the dance floor with new friends we met at Po’ Monkeys as well as our roommates and professors, shot pool and played cards.

As sketchy as Po’ Monkey’s looks on the outside, it is the home of some amazing views. As we went into Po’ Monkey’s, a beautiful Mississippi sunset reminded us that we needed to be on our best behavior.

Our day began with a slow start as we all crawled out to the bus for what we had been warned would be a very long, and we were all dreading it for the simple fact that we’re totally exhausted. The staff at Delta State University greeted us with warm smiles and were excited for a busy day of sightseeing throughout the Mississippi Delta. I was really concerned that it was going to be a long, boring day of lectures that I really didn’t care about hearing because my brain is on overload from everything that we’ve been trying to get through this past week and the sleep deprivation is really starting to take a toll on me. The tour that Luther from Delta State gave us was absolutely amazing and we were SO LUCKY to have a tour with someone who knew so much about the history of the area and the stops on the new Blues Heritage Trail were really amazing.

The tour that Viking gave us of their really nice hotel was amazing and I really think that the plans that the company has for the Mississippi Delta are absolutely amazing.

Now, to explain the title of this post in 2 pictures:

Monkey by day

Monkey by night

Ballin’…enough said.

Before our departure from New Orleans, we attended what has been explained to us as a “Mega Church”. While this was a much different experience than what we had at the 16^th Street Baptist Church last week in Birmingham, I was too distracted from the commercialization of the church to really involve myself in the service (that, and for those of us on the trip, the insane amount of Benadryl in my system did not help my attention span).

Emphasis was continually put on the programs offered by the church and training of new members to be able to go out into the community and attend multiple trips to Atlanta to convene with other members of the church. The commercialization of the Bishop and Co-Pastor’s pictures on everything in the church–from the CD/DVD that was handed out to the visitors to envelopes that were passed out to give money for the Co-Pastor’s birthday—was very disconcerting. I really felt like I was in a business instead of a church because of the over emphasis that was placed on the process of monetary giving during the service. This may just be a personal issue that I have, but I feel that my monetary contributions to a church are my own business, and not something I should feel that I have to flaunt in front of a massive congregation as if I was being judged for not walking to the front of the sanctuary to place a tithe in the plate. I know that I’m probably reading entirely to far into this, but this is definitely something that has been bothering me, as well as every person in power in this particular church having the same last name.

Our brief introductions to what we’re going to be looking at during our VERY long day tomorrow really have me pumped up and ready to discuss our visit to Parchman on Tuesday (Katie, PLEASE call me tomorrow evening so I can talk to you before I go in there on Tuesday). I’ve taken several IDS classes at ASU pertaining to prisons with my dear friend and professor Katie Adams and when I found out that we were going to be going into Parchman, I called her almost immediately to talk to her about it and she was totally ecstatic for me. Katie has worked with many people such as Spoon Jackson and Elmo, and has also spent countless hours working in arts programs in prisons working to rehabilitate inmates instead of institutionalize them. Due to this interest she has sparked in me through these classes (as well as my liberal-ness), I’m really interested for our next discussion of the status of the inmates at Parchman.

The time we have had to relax/enjoy being tourists has been a blast with the total extreme of horror that we have observed with the state of the city almost two years after Hurricane Katrina. Today we had the chance to talk to an amazing woman from ACORN in the lower 9th ward of New Orleans, which was said to be one of the most devastated areas from the levees breaking after the storm. Her explanation of the groups of people that the agency has served as well as everything that they have been working to do to restore basic rights to the people of this area was astonishing. Our meeting was in a meeting room/office where we were cramped to have enough room for our entire group to be able to hear what she had to say while one of their staff members was sitting at his desk in the same room working on paperwork because there is a deadline for funding for the people of the lower 9th ward to be able to return home. After we left the ACORN office, we took a driving tour of the area that ACORN has really been working to put back together and we met a North Carolina native who has been working here in New Orleans since the storm to help take care of the devastation in the area. His testimony of what all they have had to work through and the devastation of the area was incredibly humbling.

Today has been a very large amount of information and psychological processing to deal with through the information in the session with the ACORN staff and also the first hand experience of the devastation, so our responses to everything that we heard about today, while they may have seemed to be uninterested, I really feel that it was just an overload of what we had expected to be exposed to while in New Orleans.

There was a sign at the ACORN office that I really feel summed up the thoughts and opinions of the people of New Orleans: No Whining. While many of the people of New Orleans have had so much taken from them…their homes, their rights as voters, their rights as people–they do not whine, they’re just working as hard as they can to get back to the way they were before Katrina, and this was a huge inspiration to me.

Our last night in New Orleans was a great adventure into the heart of the French Quarter after a long evening of completing homework and getting mentally prepared for a long day on the road on Sunday.

I was very excited to find a group of Phi Mu sisters to be staying at our hotel from a university in Louisiana, with whom I did a t-shirt exchange with as well as a contact information exchange so that they could let me know if they were interested in coming to visit ASU one weekend for skiing in the winter, which was very exciting.

I feel absolutely amazing about the remainder of our trip together because after yesterday, I really feel that I have clicked with the group. Being a student from another university on this trip was something that I had been struggling with until our time in New Orleans and I’m really grateful for this.

Lauren, Arlyn and myself went to a local diner called “Mother’s” to get a traditional New Orleans PoBoy, which was big enough for lunch and dinner on Saturday, so that was a nice dinner as well as a nice chance for us to see an area of New Orleans outside of the French Quarter.

While the time that we spent in Bay Saint Louis was the longest stay for the duration of our trip, I feel that it really was not long enough for our group to be able to fully understand everything that had happened to the citizens of this area.  While in the beginning, I really felt that scanning postcards for this group was a really strange thing to be doing, but as I sat at the scanner and looked at all of the places that were pictured in the postcards, I realized “This is their history and this is the only way they still have a connection with these places” because most of the pictures were of homes, marinas, camps and other places that were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

I really began to understand the significance of this town and the way that one of our hostesses explained the meaning of community and just everything that this town had held dear but was attempting to rebuild.

On a lighter note, I think that Dr. Sutton should petition the university to get a cat like Wheezy.

Words cannot describe the people and the stories that I have heard from the people that I have met on this trip about their experiences in Hurricane Katrina, and more importantly, the aftermath. I cannot comprehend the pain and devastation that these people must have felt. I mean, I know how frustrated I get when I cannot get in touch with friends when I feel that I have something “important” to share with them, so I cannot even imagine what the residents here in Bay Saint Louis went through when they were unable to get information to their relatives about whether or not they were alive, how difficult it was to obtain medications that people needed to get in order to go from day to day.

There was one picture that the people in the library showed us that had the side of a house spray painted with their names and that they were okay in hopes that the house would be on a TV broadcast so that their relatives would know that they were alive because everything: landline telephones, cell phone towers…everything, was out and there was no way for these people to contact their loved ones.  One thing that gripped me about this photograph is that the people also had a note with their names that they were looking for their mother’s urn, which contained her ashes.  I mean, losing your home and everything that you have worked your entire life for is devastating, but then losing the remains of a loved one…that would be totally unbearable to me.

I guess this trip has made me begin to put my life into perspective about how it’s the little things that we take for granted and how lucky we are that we haven’t had to go through anything this terrible in our lifetimes first hand.

Our first day in Montgomery was a nice chance for our group to get to relax and get to know each other better, as well as reflect on our experiences in Birmingham before we began to immerse ourselves in the feeling of Montgomery with all of its historical places. I was especially taken aback by the beautiful train station behind the hotel.

The historical aura of Montgomery seems to have taken over the ability for movement to the future. The way that downtown looked on our walk from the hotel to the state capital building was very disconcerting to me and this was something that I was discussing with another guest in our hotel during our stay in Montgomery. We were discussing the fact that there wasn’t a night life in the state capital of Alabama and this was something that was very shocking to me. The thought of this step back in time was something that Andrew, our tour guide from the Southern Poverty Law Center, addressed when he was discussing the advancements, or lack thereof, in Montgomery Alabama since the 1960’s.

In our time with Andrew at the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Civil Rights Memorial, our group seemed to be stricken with multiple emotions as a reaction to the memorial. I was amazed by the beautiful tribute to the many people who lost their lives in the struggle to obtain equal rights for not only African Americans in the south, but the people who have died as a result of hatred for what is not known or understood. I was seriously brought to tears when I was reading the stories of the people who have been murdered in cold blood since the Civil Rights movement because they were different from their killers and that was the only reason that these people were murdered.

The attention that was drawn to groups not only in the United States, such as the victims of the Darfur genocide and the Holocaust, is something that we all know about, but that many of us tend to overlook in the question of equal rights for all people. America is known as the land of the free and home of the brave, but if we, as a nation, are unable to secure what we consider to be basic freedoms forty years after the civil rights movement and after we have had so much legislation to go through to secure these rights, then what hope do we have to show the rest of the world?

The walk across the bridge in Selma was very surreal to me to know the pain and suffering that took place at the foot of the bridge where so many people were just trying to get to their right to vote. Something that Dr. Hattery brought up that I have continued to think about was the fact that the people that organized in Selma were not just wanting the right to vote, but that these were impoverished people who needed to have a voice because there were no politicians standing up for their rights.

During our second day in Montgomery, our visit to the Selma to Montgomery Interpretive center was incredibly moving to me through the film that we watched as well as the way that our group met the gentleman whose picture was in the museum from where he participated in the march to Montgomery was another moment in our trip that really touched me emotionally through his testimony about what he personally risked his life to obtain.

While the museum was incredibly moving, I found myself incredibly distracted by Dr. Smith’s testimony about his experience in the Vietnam War, where he and his comrades were fighting for their country, but denied the right to vote. There is a Langston Hughes poem entitled “Will V-Day Be Me-Day Too?”, which kept running through my mind as I listened to what Dr. Smith had to say about this experience. I’m going to attach a copy of this when we get to where I can post it with my post.

The walking tour downtown to the original slave market from Montgomery’s early days as well as to the Dexter Street Baptist Church, which Dr. Martin Luther King was the pastor at and the Alabama state capital building was an amazing experience, which brought many controversial items, such as the Confederate memorial and the statue of
Jefferson Davis, to the attention of our group, as well as many interesting conversations, which I will allow my peers to bring up if they wish to because I do not feel comfortable discussing some of their discussions.

Will V-Day be Me Day too? written by Langston Hughes

Over There,
World War II.

Dear Fellow Americans,
I write this letter
Hoping times will be better
When this war
Is through.
I’m a Tan-skinned Yank
Driving a tank.
I ask, WILL V-DAY
BE ME-DAY, TOO?

I wear a U. S. uniform.
I’ve done the enemy much harm,
I’ve driven back
The Germans and the Japs,
From Burma to the Rhine.
On every battle line,
I’ve dropped defeat
Into the Fascists’ laps.

I am a Negro American
Out to defend my land
Army, Navy, Air Corps–
I am there.
I take munitions through,
I fight–or stevedore, too.
I face death the same as you do
Everywhere.

I’ve seen my buddy lying
Where he fell.
I’ve watched him dying
I promised him that I would try
To make our land a land
Where his son could be a man–
And there’d be no Jim Crow birds
Left in our sky.

So this is what I want to know:
When we see Victory’s glow,
Will you still let old Jim Crow
Hold me back?
When all those foreign folks who’ve waited–
Italians, Chinese, Danes–are liberated.
Will I still be ill-fated
Because I’m black?

Here in my own, my native land,
Will the Jim Crow laws still stand?
Will Dixie lynch me still
When I return?
Or will you comrades in arms
From the factories and the farms,
Have learned what this war
Was fought for us to learn?

When I take off my uniform,
Will I be safe from harm–
Or will you do me
As the Germans did the Jews?
When I’ve helped this world to save,
Shall I still be color’s slave?
Or will Victory change
Your antiquated views?

You can’t say I didn’t fight
To smash the Fascists’ might.
You can’t say I wasn’t with you
in each battle.
As a soldier, and a friend.
When this war comes to an end,
Will you herd me in a Jim Crow car
Like cattle?

Or will you stand up like a man
At home and take your stand
For Democracy?
That’s all I ask of you.
When we lay the guns away
To celebrate
Our Victory Day
WILL V-DAY BE ME-DAY, TOO?
That’s what I want to know.

Sincerely,
GI Joe.

The time we spent in the 16th Street Baptist Church on Sunday was a very powerful experience.  The inside of the church and the stained glass windows were absolutely beautiful, but I feel that I was distracted from the content of the worship service because of the historical aura (for lack of a better word) of the church.  The people who we met at the church were very friendly and seemed very open to our group’s presence in Birmingham.

(there will be more added to this later today, I’m just beyond ADD right now with trying to gather my thoughts)

If yesterday’s experience with Mrs. Heidi, Judge Shores-Lee and Ms. Shores was just a glimpse of what we’re going to be in for during the remainder of this trip, I’m going to be completely blown away by the end of this experience. Everyone on this trip has heard about the conditions in the south and what people had to go through in terms of the blatant racism, but hearing the first hand testimonies of these women about how it actually happened, I was totally taken aback and engaged on a completely different level from what I had been earlier on this trip.

Again, we had some absolutely amazing food at Mrs. B’s for lunch and at Dreamland BBQ for dinner, despite the messy nature of the food. I’m going to have to agree with Susan Smith about the banana pudding…I kinda wanted to steal it and take it all for myself!

During our time in Kelly Ingram Park, there was an anti-violence/save our streets type of rally going on with information from difference civic groups. While I’m very excited that the people of Birmingham are engaging in this type of activity, I feel that I was distracted by the speakers when I was attempting to fully engage in the historic aura of the park.

Last night after our reflections, I was sitting outside speaking with two women from Kent, England and we were discussing what had brought all of us to Birmingham and I was sharing some pictures from our day in Kelly Ingram Park and a little bit of background about why we were here for this class. They were very kind and interested in the trip as well as to know what I had to tell them about the history of this area.

I’m very excited to be going to the 16th Street Baptist Church this morning for their religious service as well as to get a feel for the church as the four young women did the day that they were martyred.