This blog has been a photojournalistic record of interesting places along the Great Loop to share with family and friends. Politics certainly has not been a focus. And, it is a topic that is often avoided in group conversation, more so now than in the past. We came face-to-face with the topic of equal rights on display at multiple stops on the summer 2018 journey, at museums along the waterway and at automobile museums on the drive south. Those experiences call to be shared.
In the Gilmore Auto Museum, the cars are displayed with reference to the social times with fashion, important events, and period music playing. Above, the display has a Buick, but the theme is the difficulty of travel by automobile in the United States during the Jim Crow era.
Throughout the US, the vast majority of gas stations, restaurants, and hotels would only serve white customers. Often, the only opportunity that Black travelers had to get a meal or have a place to spend the night was in the home of another Black person.
To aide Black people traveling by car, Victor Green, a New York City mailman, began publishing a book that listed the few establishments serving Blacks. When first published in 1936, it was titled as the Negro Motorist Green Book. The Esso Corporation became a sponsor and sold it at some of their gas stations. The main distribution was by mail order.
The places listed as a Tourist Home were not what a Bed and Breakfast is today. It was a person's home where the owner would rent a couple of rooms to travelers, with no other option for overnight housing.
With Liberty and Justice for All
The Henry Ford Museum has an exhibit that focuses on the search for freedom for all. The Revolutionary Era, the Antislavery Movement and Civil War Era, the Woman's Suffrage Movement, and the Civil Rights Movement each have an area with high-quality displays depicting important events including artifacts such as the chair in which President Lincoln was sitting when he was assassinated and the bus in which Rosa Parks was sitting when she was ordered to stand and let a white man take her seat.
The exhibit creates a feel for the struggles and difficulties people have endured to obtain basic human rights in the United States.
Lynching, the killing of a Black man or woman by hanging from the neck, was not considered a crime in America. It was just a method to keep the "Negros in their
place." The practice of lynching occurred into the 1950's with no consequences for the perpetrators. Lynching is just now (2018) getting discussion in Congress to become a Federal Crime.
The Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A. details the extent of the laws and customs that kept the non-white races subservient.
The Women's Rights displays documented the struggle, which began by women in Seneca Falls, NY, in 1848, as well as the Suffrage Movement and Equal Pay Issue.
For more information on the Freedom exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum, click on the link below.
Seneca Falls Women's Rights National Park
Tucked away in a small upstate New York village, the park celebrating the beginning of the Women's Rights Movement is rarely seen. Thus, it holds a story that is little known among Americans.
click here for National Park site
Interesting that a small village, an antique automobile museum, and a museum on American innovation all have exhibits on Americans struggling for basic human rights, a principle that is often lauded as the underpinning of the US Constitution. It seems that the fight is still continuing for every American to truly have equal treatment under the law and from their community.
Reading List
Reading List
The Jim Crow Guide, by Stetson Kennedy, was part of the display at the Henry Ford Museum. Stetson lived in St. Augustine and the Last Dance crew was fortunate to know him as a friend. The book is a satirical guide to Jim Crow laws and practices. Kennedy wrote the book in the early 1950's, but no publisher in the United States would take on this topic. It was published in France in 1956. In 1990, the University of Florida Press finally published the book in the U.S. Not long afterward, shots were fired through Stetson Kennedy's home, killing his dog. The Sheriff Deputy who wrote the report on the shooting told Kennedy: "Sir, they weren't aiming for your dog."
Kennedy is best known for his efforts to expose the Klu Klux Klan. One of his strategies was to share the Klan's secret passwords publicly through the scripts on the Superman radio show. Materials he removed from a Klan waste basket provided the basis for the IRS to levy a large tax bill on the Klan. His book, The Klan Unmasked, details his activities with the Klan.
A more recent book (published 2012) details the story of the racial injustices perpetrated on Blacks in Florida in the case knows as the Groveland Boys - Devil in the Grove. Four young Black men were falsely accused of rape in the central Florida town, Groveland, in 1949. Gilbert King began research on Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall for the basis of a book on the career of Marshall. In his research, he found some letters written to Marshall when he was an NAACP lawyer. The letters told of the terrible conditions for Blacks in Florida and of the injustices of law enforcement and the courts. He found more than enough materials for a book on this one aspect of Marshall's career. This book became the basis of a movement to pardon the Groveland Four, which was successful. In January 2019, the young men finally received some amount of justice by being pardoned.`
