I started writing this editor’s note sitting in a wooden church pew watching a video of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral on a screen in the National Civil and Human Rights Museum in Atlanta, Georgia. Black and white images of his family and friends passing his casket flashed across the screen while his voice boomed in the background. King’s wife had a recording of one of his speeches played during the service, allowing King to eulogize himself.
“I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others,” King said in his speech. “I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to love somebody.”
My husband and I are museum lovers. We travel a lot and we always find a museum or historical attraction to tour in each city. We are especially intentional about visiting museums, markers and landmarks from the Civil Rights Movement.
Carrying the Weight of History and Legacy
As we walked through the museum, we tried our best to impart to our young sons the importance of the images they were seeing. My husband explained the significance of Brown vs. Board of Education in one room. I pointed out “Jackson, Miss.” on the booking placards at a bus covered with the Freedom Riders’ mugshots. We stood with them under the stained glass windows depicting the children killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing and reminded our sons that they’d visited that church during a trip to Birmingham, Alabama.
We walked through a room explaining the importance of figures like Baynard Ruston, Jesse Jackson, Dorothy Height and Mahalia Jackson in the March on Washington. We recounted how close in age they are to Ruby Bridges and Emmitt Till while explaining to them why they were “dressed up” for going to school. We spent hours carrying the heavy weight of not only the history of our country but also the responsibility to ensure that history is not forgotten.
The most poignant of the exhibits was the lunch counter reenactment. Visitors sit at the counter, place headphones on their ear and are immediately transported back to the Woolworth Sit-ins. An attendant explains that the goal is to sit just as the young protestors sat for one minute and 30 seconds. Sitting at the lunch counter with my palms flat on the surface listening to insults in my ear invoked feelings that I cannot put into words. I hesitated to let my sons experience that fear, anger and disgust, but there was something about the gravity of that moment that I believed they needed. My youngest only lasted 21 seconds.
“Why were people so mean?” he asked. I struggled to explain hatred and racism to an 8-year-old in a manner that wouldn’t make him jaded. He followed with question after question, his understanding deepening with each inquiry. My 10-year-old hung up his phone with tears in his eyes. He then turned to his brother with wisdom that I didn’t know he had and explained that some people just don’t like us because we are Black.
The former English teacher in me honed in on the present tense in his sentence. We were standing in a museum, a place that curates history. Yet, these experiences are still just as present as they were when segregated schools littered towns. It’s more veiled now, but it still holds court in the minds and homes of many. It’s still easily embedded into policies and procedures. It is more gray now than Black and white. We find it now in digital spaces, in disparities in discipline and access, in book bans and curriculum debates and in policies that appear neutral but land heavily on marginalized communities.
The funeral video was at the end of our tour. The seriousness of the visit had made me physically exhausted so I sat on the available pew to watch. As I sat there, I wondered if I had exposed my children to too much too soon. King’s final words reassured me that I had not and that every history lesson that I offer them is necessary. It is our job to ensure that every member of their generation knows their life should have meaning and purpose. It is our responsibility to be sure they know our history so they can help us avoid reliving it.
Movements Can’t Die. They Must Adapt.
Nearly two months after our museum visit, I sat in a Black History program on Zoom. Children sang Negro spirituals and read speeches just like the old days when my elementary school would file us into the gymnasium for the annual February program. Their bright and hopeful faces filled little squares on the screen reciting words written long before they were born.
As I listened, I realized that for this world to be the better place we desire, our children have to do more than memorize speeches or dress up as heroes from our past. It is not enough for them to look at photos and descriptions hung on museum walls. They must understand the ways that segregation and discrimination have evolved.
The signs no longer hang above doors. The hatred is rarely as open as a burning cross. It is more coded now and more easily denied. Our children need language for what they are seeing. They need to know that injustice does not disappear; it adapts. They must understand that racism is not just a chapter torn out of their textbook but a system that requires constant vigilance. If we shield them from that truth, we risk raising a generation that can recognize the past but miss the present.
We have to teach our children to ask hard questions, to vote, to organize, to read critically, to build community across differences and to refuse to accept inequity.
As I think back to my time sitting on that wooden pew, I understand that the exhaustion I felt was not just emotional. It was the realization that legacy is work and every generation must decide whether it will commemorate the movement or continue it.
King ends his own eulogy with these words, “I won’t have any money to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that is all I want to say. If I can help somebody as I pass along, if I can cheer somebody with a well song, if I can show somebody he’s traveling wrong, then my living will not be in vain.”
If we can ensure that our children understand both the history and its modern echoes, equip them to recognize injustice and give them the courage to confront it — then maybe our living, too, will not be in vain.
This MFP Voices opinion essay reflects the personal opinion of its author(s). The column does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.