Sometime in 2025, God willing, I am going to do something that has been on my bucket list for decades. My wife, Kim, and I are going to make a pilgrimage, taking a tour of the Civil Rights trail from Memphis, Tennessee, to Washington, DC, visiting some of the most important sites in the Deep South along the way.
I have traveled through all the Lower 48 states and visited many national parks and historical monuments. But I have never been to some of the places on this bucket list and certainly have not been to these states for the purpose of understanding the historic significance of the struggle for racial equality in our nation.
A few months ago knowing it has been a goal of mine, Kim suggested we make this trip as we have more flexibility in our schedules and are still mentally and physically healthy enough to enjoy it. This will be a self-guided tour, just the two of us, as we explore and reflect on the usually tragic and often heroic saga of human trafficking, slavery, emancipation, Jim Crow, and gradually increased freedom of our Black sisters and brothers. We won’t have time to visit every place of significance, but we will enhance our trip with lots of reading and research, some of which I have been doing for the past 50 years.
Public Domain photo: Civil Rights Memorial, Montgomery, Alabama
I’d rather make this trip when the weather is more pleasant, but due to scheduling issues, we may be going during the South’s muggy season. All the more to experience what the slaves and civil rights protesters experienced, even as I sleep in the comfort of air-conditioned hotels. There is no way we can ever go through what they went through. I have the privilege of visiting these sites from a distance of ease and leisure they could not have imagined.
My lifelong research into our nation’s racism, especially from a faith standpoint, has often puzzled and occasionally rankled certain friends and acquaintances. If I stop and really think about it, I don’t fully understand it myself.
But I do believe it comes out of a deep-seated sense that a root of my calling is to stand with those who face spiritual and cultural oppression. Those who have not found a place at the table.
When my wife and I were involved in an international missions endeavor, there was an expression of communion occasionally used at special events that I loved. We would gather around the Lord’s Table to partake of the bread and juice. With nearly everyone present having been served the traditional elements, the leader would ask, “Has anyone not yet been served?”
First one then another in the gathering would call out, “I have not been served.” Then each of those calling out would explain what people group they represented, meaning who in this world had not yet been invited to share at the Lord’s Table. These communion services were based on the belief that God desires all nations, tribes, people groups to be represented at what believers speak of as the marriage supper of the Lamb – a gathering the book of Revelation refers to as happening at the end of the ages.
I think of this nearly every time I enter a worship service. Who does not feel invited here? Who is not represented here in the visible leadership? Who from the surrounding community is not present?
For centuries, churches in our nation had ways of excluding or ignoring their near neighbors and of neglecting their neighbors in the far corners of our world. Nothing has stirred me more than others not having access to God and the bountiful blessings of our Lord. I thrill at the keystone text of my fellow Pentecostals, who proclaim with the prophet Joel, that God’s Spirit will be poured out on all peoples.
In this trip, we hope to visit a couple of churches, especially Mason Temple Church of God in Christ, where Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke about having been to the mountaintop and having looked over into the promised land, the night before his life was taken at the way-too-young age of 39. While people of faith were on both sides of this tragic history, this trip is less about white churches and more about the story of Black Americans and their struggle for freedom. Certainly the Black church played a leading role, it could be argued THE leading role, in all that history, and so some of those churches, including ones that were bombed, will be on our itinerary.
Two appropriate holidays are bookending my thoughts in planning. Juneteenth is the commemoration of the emancipation of the enslaved. In recognition of the enslaved in Texas finally hearing the news two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Juneteenth is a reminder of how long it took for some of our Black brothers and sisters to know they had been set free. Two weeks later is Independence Day, reminding us that all peoples are created equal.
The actual independence day for these United States was July 2, two hundred and forty-eight years ago, for all those readers who love historical trivia. But either way, it was independence day for only some of those in the Black American community. Certainly, free Black people, especially in the North, rejoiced in the declaration of independence from England, and some of those went on to give their lives for the cause.
Far more Black people had nothing to rejoice about. If anything, our separation from England only prolonged their liberation. The sense that July 4 was not something for the enslaved to celebrate was starkly noted by the eloquent and passionate Frederick Douglass, who himself had once been enslaved. Escaping from slavery in Maryland before the Civil War, he went on to be the most significant prophet against the growing tide of apartheid in the last half of the nineteenth century.
On July 5, 1852, Douglass first gave his famous and soul-searching speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” It would be a full century before Brown v. Board of Education and even longer before the Civil Rights movement began to unpack the freedoms Lincoln and the Reconstruction Era had promised.
We hope to visit a plantation to see what we can of the experience of the enslaved. We hope to see a southern “Ellis Island” where trafficked Africans first encountered their fate on the American shore. There are other sites we will see that will give us a broad view of the landscape. But the crux of our visits will be to places that spell out in visual relief the twentieth century struggle for freedom, especially in the 1950s and 60s.
Obviously, we won’t see everything there is to see. There is only so much you can do in a couple of weeks on a limited budget. So, we will fill in gaps with reading, watching documentaries, as well as plowing through the resources available through the internet. And we will immerse ourselves in a few museums along the way, most notably the National Museum of African American History and Culture in our nation’s capital.
This year and next mark the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, critical high points in the very long struggle for freedom. I have written much over the years about racism and its impact on Black Americans as well as its debilitating effect on the American church. I will write even more as I prepare for this trip and continue to reflect afterward. There is so much this history can teach us, and I am looking forward to learning as much as I can.
This trip is reserved for just two, my wife and me. But if you wish to pick up the story lines vicariously, be sure to sign up as a free subscriber to this blog if you haven’t already. There will be additional materials for subscribers only. I’ll enhance what I write with other resources listed on my website, howardkenyon.com, and in updates in my monthly newsletters over the coming year. You can keep up with all of that just by subscribing here for free.