She smiled. “Depends on how you mean that. Like I said, I’ve been here a whole lot of years.”
THREE HOURS AFTER WE’D ARRIVED AND CLEARED the security checkpoint, Miranda and I turned in our visitor badges, reclaimed our driver’s licenses, and stepped out into the Montgomery afternoon sun. My head still spun from our whirlwind climb up the family tree of hatemongers and violence.
I still didn’t know who our victim was or why he’d been killed. I also didn’t have any more clarity about who the killer was. But I had a far greater understanding of the vast, entwined network of racist hate groups that might have spawned or inspired that killer. If the first step toward knowledge is indeed to recognize your own ignorance—a maxim my fellow professors and I often quoted to our students—then Miranda and I had certainly taken that step, and more, in Montgomery, I reflected as I glanced up at the SPLC headquarters once more.
“Dr. B? Before we hit the road,” Miranda said, “could we look around a little? There’s so much history here, and I’d love to take in some of it.” I opened my mouth to protest, but she cut me off. “Please? Just the highest of the high spots?” With a shrug, I caved. “Thanks,” she beamed. “Here, let’s walk around the corner for a second.”
On the same block as the SPLC, downhill from the law center and literally in its shadow, stood a modest brick church: Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had served as a young pastor. Miranda led me up the stairs and into the simple sanctuary, its pale plaster walls and dark wooden pews splashed with yellow, red, and green from the stained-glass windows. “Look at that,” she whispered. “That’s the pulpit where he preached for four years. And downstairs, in the church basement? That’s where the Montgomery bus boycott was organized, after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give her seat to a white man and move to the ‘colored’ section at the back of the bus.”
Knowing how the bus boycott had spelled the end of segregation—and knowing how King’s life and death had galvanized so much of the civil rights movement—I couldn’t help but feel awed by the significance of the site. I was struck, too, by the contrast between King’s message of nonviolence and the bloodlust of the Christian Identity movement.
“Thank you,” said Miranda. “There are three more things I’d like to see, if that’s okay? We can drive to all of them in, like, five minutes.”
“You’re the boss,” I said.
We walked back up the hill to my truck, clambered in, and left the SPLC behind. A few blocks from the church, Miranda pointed to a small white house with a full-width front porch. “That’s the parsonage where King and his family lived,” she said. “It was bombed early in the bus boycott. He thought he should give up, but his wife—and a prayer—convinced him not to.”
A few blocks from the Kings’ modest home, we passed the “first White House of the Confederacy,” a grand mansion that served as the home of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Lost Cause. And two blocks from that was the Alabama state capitol, which briefly served as the Confederacy’s capitol . . . and which, a century later, served as the destination for the thousands of people who marched from Selma to Montgomery to demand equal voting rights for blacks and whites.
A half mile downhill from the capitol—where the train station and the riverboat landing stood side by side—we parked briefly and got out to read a historical marker describing Montgomery’s thriving slave trade in the decades before the war. Hundreds of slaves had arrived in Montgomery every day, by boat and train, for sale in the city’s four slave markets. A strong field hand could fetch $1,500 at auction, I read; a skilled artisan, $3,000. By the start of the Civil War, Montgomery had a larger slave population than Natchez or New Orleans, and the state as a whole contained almost half a million slaves. Many of them, in shackles and chains, had passed through the very place where Miranda and I now stood.
“Incredible,” said Miranda, reading the marker. “Montgomery is so small, but it played a huge role in the history of slavery, racism, and civil rights.” She looked away from the marker, surveying the train station and the landing, where an old-fashioned riverboat—white with a big red paddle wheel at the stern—bobbed gently in its moorings, as if it had somehow churned a century and a half down the river of time to get here. Miranda raised her hands to her face, and when she pulled them away, I saw moisture gleaming on her fingertips. “So,” she said quietly. “That crack I made the other day? Comparing myself to a slave? I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry. I’m ashamed to’ve made light of slavery.”
“Miranda,” I began, but she waved me off.