Today in Birmingham we visited the 16th Street Baptist Church where 4 girls were killed by a hate crime, the park where the Children's March was met with dogs and hoses, spoke with Catherine Burks-Brooks of the original Freedom Rides, and Roscoe Jones of Freedom School work in Mississippi, but out of all these things one small moment really hit me. In all the places we've gone to I've felt like we were uncomfortably occupying a space between visiting historical sites and current exhibits of the continuing struggles in social justice movements. A moment like this that really hit me in Birmingham was that while we stood oggling over this church for its significance 50 years ago, a man sat on a ledge of the church wearing tattered clothes and shivering in the cold weather. I felt like we were overlooking the current state of things when it was just right in front of us, despite all of the talks we have where people say they are now realizing that the civil rights movement didn't get an ultimate ending and that there's still work to be done. I felt like we were all really hypocritical in that moment, and it showed to me a larger tendency to discuss good stuff in theory but not confront the work right in front of us. These sort of tendencies and a culture of contentment/inaction are major obstacles in the way of effecting change, and something we all need to figure out how to overcome, whatever factors may outweigh this on an individual basis.
Brooks Rubin, Baltimore City College
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