One of the best parts of the trip was that we met with people who lived, shaped and experienced history and we stood with them where history happened. I am a big reader and I love historical fiction – I love delving into a world that existed long before I did and being swept away by the narrative, but there is nothing that compares to talking to someone who was there – and actually being “there” with them.
We met with three pastors – two black and one white – the black preachers where both close associates of Martin Luther King Jr. and the white preacher was a friend of Rosa Parks.
We met Reverend Williams in Atlanta, GA where he is a park ranger at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site. He marched with Dr. King and had close associations with many Civil Rights workers who were murdered. We met with Reverend Graetz in Montgomery, AL at the Rosa Parks Library and Museum that is located on the corner where Ms. Parks made her historic stand by staying seated. We met with Reverend Woods who led us through Freedom Park/Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, AL on land just outside the 16th Street Baptist Church, famous for a bombing in which four young girls were murdered in a Klan bombing in 1963.
We heard stories we had all heard before, but this time we heard them from people who were there. I cannot overstate how important this distinction is. One of our students likened it to meeting with Holocaust survivors and went on to say that he was aware that he and his classmates were the last generation that would be able to have this kind of one-on-one live contact with these people. While it is truer of Holocaust survivors than it is for Civil Rights Activists (many were young when they were active in the 50s and 60s and will most likely live to speak to another generation of high school students or two) it was an eye-opening experience for our kids to meet with people who were routinely called the N word, were shot with water hoses by police, whose children were the first to integrate schools and who were jailed countless times for exercising their right to free speech.
The fact that two weeks prior to the journey our nation had elected our first African American president was not lost anyone. At the end of each preacher’s speech one of our students asked each man the same question: “When you were fighting for equality, did you think you would live to see the day when a black man would become President of the United States?” And they all answered in a relatively similar manner: No. They all believed it would happen some time, but the pace of the movement that they saw, the horror of what they experienced and the setbacks they witnessed time and time again led them to believe that change would be too slow to show this kind of progress in their lifetimes. They were all happy to be wrong, but they also shared in common just a tiny bit of skepticism, or maybe it was realism: they told us being black wasn’t enough. They felt like they didn’t know Barack OBama well enough and they said they were reserving judgment to see what kind of policies he enacted. I think those dialogues were very important for our students to hear.
But the trip wasn’t just about African Americans and their struggles; we visited the headquarters of The AIDS Memorial Quilt and met with a gay man living with AIDS. He was a fascinating speaker who shared openly and frankly with our students. We talked about the politics of AIDS and what it means to be a disenfranchised group in today’s society. The fact that California Proposition 8 had passed two weeks prior to our trip was not lost on our students either, or our guest speaker.
I don’t know anyone personally who has died of AIDS – this doesn’t lessen its impact on my life. While my father was alive during the Holocaust and both my parents lived through the Civil Rights Movement and my brother was born in the shadow of the Vietnam War, I have a clear memory of the AIDS crises. I’m not sure I would remember the start of it so distinctly if it weren’t for the appetite suppressant AYDS, which my father used to go through by the case. I remember the jokes that were made relating to the unfortunate coincidence in names between the disease and the diet pills and I remember my dad stocking up on the stuff for fear that they would take it off the market (eventually they did).
Later, when I became sexually active, AIDS was never far from my mind and I have memories of nervous visit to free testing facilities and the stress of waiting a week for the results. My friends and I used to remind ourselves as we walked in to get our results: “Negative is Good; Negative is Good.” But of course, our students don’t know a time before AIDS, and they also don’t know of a time when the syndrome was a certain and quick death sentence. The man who spoke to us talked about what it was like to have sex before anyone knew anything about it and he spoke to us about his choice to remain celibate since his diagnosis. He shared that his first ever test was positive so he has no idea when or from whom he caught it. He shared with us the various illnesses he has been miraculously able to fight off and he told us of the friends he lost to those same disorders. He told us what it was like to be told you had 18-months to live and then to outlive that prognosis by 14+ years. There’s no telling what impact his talk had on our students, but I know they won’t forget it anytime soon.
We also took a tour of the quilt’s headquarters and learned about its history. Our wonderful tour guide, Janece, the project’s communication director, walked the students through the warehouse and talked about how the project was started. She told the group about the need many people had to mourn the loss of their gay loved ones because often parents of those who died of AIDS were embarrassed and ashamed and didn’t allow their child’s community to visit them in the hospital or attend their funerals. I thought of all the people I had lost and shudder at the thought of not being able to say a proper goodbye. I also thought about my brother’s old roommate. The roommate had already been diagnosed with AIDS when they lived together in LA in the late 90s. This was prior to things like free long distance on cell phones and constant contact via email and Facebook. When my brother moved to San Francisco they lost touch and it was years later, through a mutual acquaintance, that my brother found out his former roommate had died. The roommate's parents had swept him away, wouldn’t let anyone see him in the hospital and did not tell his friends about the funeral. I have rarely seen my brother shaken, but when he called me to share this news it was clear he was beyond upset. Although it was only the first day of the trip and I didn’t know any of the students in the small group I was with, I felt compelled to share this story – I didn’t want them to think that AIDS and the bigotry that was associated with it was history – I wanted them to know that what they were learning about things that directly impacted my life – a living breathing soul that they knew. My voice quivered as I shared and I’m not sure I made my point but by bearing witness I felt I had done an important thing. (To read more about gay rights and my brother's roommate from his perspective, click here.)
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