“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
I left town mid-February, following the Mississippi as it twists and turns to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. A life-long Minnesotan, I have stepped across that river over worn stones at its source in Itasca State Park. A slip lands you in ankle deep water.
That simple beginning is hardly a preview of what is to come as the river collects water from its many tributaries along the way. Itasca’s pristine water turns murky as the river accumulates and holds in suspension silt from rich farmlands. The wide river that flows into the Gulf of Mexico is coffee brown.
As I see this change, I reflect on my own journey. We each collect tributaries along the way. Our parents, grandparents and ancestors brought us to the place where we were born, the community that held us, the traditions that formed us. We are held suspended in a network of family history and story.
I drive the north/south corridor of the Mississippi River, mindful of how large our country is. I chose this trip to remember our history and wonder about our future.
Never a student of history, I have always been more interested in what was to come than what had been. Now that my time past is longer than my time ahead, I find history engaging and even predictive.
This journey winds through time as well as place. I wanted to explore the Civil Rights Era of the 60s, a time from my youth when the power of peaceful protest brought changes we could only imagine—the end of the Vietnam war, the outlawing of Jim Crow practices, the challenge to voter suppression for Black citizens.
I tour the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. It explores our national story of enslavement, the human trafficking that brought millions of Africans to our young country to do physical, torturous work clearing thick, entangled growth in a hot mosquito infested land in order to build cotton plantations that fed mills in the north. Forced labor, cheap labor, Black labor feeding wealthy White elites.
As I listen to first person accounts, I share tears with strangers.The story takes us from enslavement to emancipation to failed reconstruction to battles for civil rights to mass incarceration. It’s a hard story to hear, to see, to remember. Yet bearing witness to what was helps us understand what it is.
I listen to energizing heroic stories of people standing up to power. Though not new, I hear these stories afresh. Like the familiar tales of childhood, we listen again for our favorite parts—the hero’s refusal to surrender, the heroine’s walk away from the cinders of low status, the child outsmarting the tyrannical adult with the stone of a slingshot. I look for today’s heroes.
I sat with Rosa Parks in Montgomery as she retold the story of how she refused to give up her seat. She was sitting in the front of the Colored Only section in the middle of the bus. More Whites boarded the bus. The driver told the four Black riders, 2 men and 2 women, to move to the back of the bus. All the seats were taken so they were to stand for the remainder of the ride. Three of the four moved. Rosa stayed in her seat. The driver told her again to move. She told him she would stay, even as he threatened to call the police. He left the bus to walk to a pay phone. The police came shortly, arrested Rosa and removed her from the bus. The White people took those seats, and the bus moved on. So did she.
Rosa’s act of courage energized the Black community. Their initial plan was to bypass the buses on a single Monday. That grew into an extended boycott which ended 381 days later, after the Supreme Court declared segregation on public buses unconstitutional.
I heard the story of Mamie Till Bradly who dared to have the mutilated body of her 14-year-old son, Emmitt, shown in an open casket. Tens of thousands attended his Chicago funeral. Emmett had been visiting relatives in Mississippi when he spoke to a White woman and proprietor of a local grocery store, violating an unwritten code of behavior in Jim Crow south. For this breach of conduct, he was abducted, beaten, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River, retrieved three days later.
I walked through the National Memorial for Peace and Justice which remembers more than 4400 Blacks killed in racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950. One of many brutal stories described the fate of a young man who registered to vote. He was kidnapped and lynched along with his mother and sister, a warning to other young men who might dare to claim their right to equality under the law.
I walked the New Orleans street where Ruby Bridges went each day to her first grade class, escorted by her mother and a US Marshal, to attend a previously all White school. She was the only child in her classroom, all the other children were pulled out by parents who would not let them be in a class with a Black student. A 6-year-old hero.
I walked the Edmund Pettus Bridge where a young John Lewis attempted to lead a peaceful 54 mile walk from Selma to Montgomery in support of voting rights for Black Alabama citizens. Lewis, along with 600 civil rights activists, was stopped by state troopers and armed White citizens. When ordered to turn around, Lewis told the marchers to pray rather than move. Troopers and sheriff deputies assaulted them. Lewis ended up with a broken skull and renewed energy for the path ahead, one that eventually brought him to the US Senate.
I walked through the Birmingham park where police with dogs and firehoses attempted to stop young students’ peaceful protests for equality. This same park has a statue of the four girls killed in the bombing of the 16th Avenue Baptist Church, the bombing motivated by fear of change.
All these stories are our stories. We hold them in our collective. As I listen to first person accounts, I share tears with strangers. We know we are connected through these horrific national narratives.
We are all story makers, story sharers, story people. May the stories told and retold by our children and grandchildren describe how we made this world a better place, living together as brothers and sisters.
Mary Lou Logsdon is a Spiritual Director in the Twin Cities. She is on the faculty at the Sacred Ground Spiritual Direction Formation Program. She can be reached at Logsdon.marylou@gmail.com.
Last Updated on March 15, 2025