Gunter Hill Campground

We travelled to Montgomery Alabama, camping at Gunter Hill Campground. The Legacy Museum is built on the site of a former slave warehouse. It tells the story of blacks from enslavement to mass incarceration. It is quite an emotional experience as numerous stories are told via film, holograms, and placards.

Legacy Museum

Interesting findings:

·       In 1730 half the population of New York city had slaves.

·       Savannah, Georgia was the arrival port to half the transatlantic slave traffic.

·       Two million people died crossing the Atlantic to become slaves.

·       Congress abolished the Atlantic slave trade in 1808.

·       The domestic slave trade separated nearly half of all black families.

·       The Reconstruction period after the civil war offered a brief hope of equality for blacks.

·       Over eighty percent of black males registered to vote during reconstruction in Alabama.

·       But a series of supreme court decisions allowed state laws to ensure racial superiority for whites. 

·       Blacks could be arrested for vagrancy if they weren’t employed.

·       By 1898, 73 percent of Alabama’s state revenue came from convict leasing.

·       From 1877 to 1950 over 4400 lynchings of African Americans have been documented.

·       We read a newspaper headline about out a lynching to be held the next day. Ten thousand whites showed up to hang the man and shoot him with bullets until it ended when a bullet hit the rope.

·       In the 1960s through the nineties the Drug War and “tough on crime” bills built many new prisons that were filled by predominately black inmates.

·       The projection for the 21^st century is that 1/3 of black baby boys will go to jail or prison.

Of course, the story of Segregation was also told. It was here that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man and was arrested. The Montgomery bus boycott led by the young new pastor, Dr. Martin Luther Jr, lasted for 11 months, one of the early civil rights protests. A sampling of the videos is available on youtube. 

Suspended tombstones - one for each county

We then went to the Peace and Justice Memorial with its suspended tombstones, one for every county where there is a documented lynching.

Each lynching

We finished our day with some Alabama barbecue at Dreamland BBQ to have some ribs.