On one corner in Downtown Montgomery is the world renown Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and right next door is the little known museum of the equally world renown and Montgomery native Hank Williams. Like all museums, both have a clear narrative and leave a lot out. On Wednesday, I took a new protege to see both and discuss politics and organizing.
Rufus “Tee Tot” Payne. That’s who was left out of the Hank Williams museum, the Black man who taught ole Hank everything he new. I don’t think this was intentional, but it does speak to how white Southerners remember our history. We tend to forget about how Black people (and others) helped us. I guess this is the politics of forgetting.
EJI forgot some stuff too. They forgot the populist movement. They forgot Myles Horton and Highlander and they forgot that it was Black Democrats who led the charge against removing racist language from the Constitution. Savvy Black Democrats wanted the embarrassment on the books as long as more material transformation did not occur. Unfortunately, the narrative woven by EJI is more a Yankee perspective on race in the South and it leaves a long history of Black/white solidarity out, much like the Hank Williams museum.
If you come to Montgomery, Alabama, go to both, learn and enjoy our struggles, but recognize the stories we’re not telling too.
When I visited Montgomery, AL, just passing through, I found the Pecan "plant" the most interesting, and finding out about people that harvest pecans in the city and go there to sell them or for them to be cracked, maybe? I've never really liked museums, because they don't tell the whole story, and the stories they tell always feel reified, frozen. In any case, these stories are always told by "small elites," even though nowadays we have some "tiny elites" who try to "speak for those without voice," the silent majority. Still elites though. The pecan plant was alive. I have a bioarchaeologist daughter, and when she was "casing joints" to go to College, we went to Stanford University. There we meet Dr. Ian Hodder, who still is the Director of the Archaeology Program and of the Stanford Archaeology Center. In sum, an eminence in the field. He wrote the intro to the Archaeology section of the Stanford Bulletin, which starts with these words:
"Human beings and their ancestors have roamed the earth for at least five million years, but only invented writing five thousand years ago. And for most of the period since its invention, writing only tells us about small elite groups. Archaeology is the only discipline that gives direct access to the experiences of all members of all cultures, everywhere in the world. "