Our tour of the capitol building in Montgomery was guided by a middle-aged woman who bore all the characteristics of a traditional Southern lady, from her lovable accent to her not-so-innocent-but-thoroughly-obvious loyalties toward the plantation regime. She began the tour with a simple admonition: that we ought not judge the politicians of their past because these men were only the product of their times. In continuing the tour, she discussed the history of Alabama territory, explaining that "the Indians were hostile" (mural depiction highlighted above) and so they "sent Andrew Jackson . . . to handle it." Throughout, she repeated a few more times than was necessary that Montgomery was the cradle of the Confederacy, and generally praised former governors George Wallace and his wife (all while failing to mention his sidestepping of term limits, the political puppetry of having his wife run for office, that he left said wife to remarry while she was dying of cancer, and that he was blatantly responsible for the atrocities committed by law enforcement during civil rights marches). All in all, though, my favorite quote was when she told us that "what [we, the Yanks] consider slavery really only lasted for twenty years on Alabama plantations."
On the opposite side of the coin, we had the pleasure of meeting a wonderfully sassy museum owner and civil activist named Joanne Bland, who was the youngest to be jailed on Bloody Sunday. Joanne joined our bus and escorted us to what she aptly called "da Hood", her childhood neighborhood and the site of Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church (as well as dozens of subsidized multiplex houses stricken by poverty, shown above). Joanne unabashedly recounted the trials of her youth, including that her pregnant mother died in the hallway of a white hospital that refused her treatment, all while bringing the history and modern reality of black Selma to us more tangibly than we could ever have imagined.
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