Travels of THB

Day 3 (finally!!): Nashville to Montgomery AL

Book Of the Day: Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

Weather: raining the entire 4 hour ride between Nashville and Montgomery, hard at times, with temps in the 50s (baseball set a record for postponements in a month this April, and it is easy to see why, there’s been “weather” everywhere across the US with snow, rain, cold, etc.), clearing in the afternoon.

Nashville graffiti

The Drug Store coffee bar

The decaf pour over was without a doubt the worse cup of coffee THB has ever had: weak, no flavor (looks more like tea)

Check out of the 21C: $700 for the suite (includes $90 of taxes and fees), plus $38 for valet parking. A great location if you plan to take in a Tennessee Titans (football) game in the fall; the stadium is a short walk away.

Four hour drive in the rain (did THB already tell you this?), listening to podcasts.

THB and DB are staying in the Hampton Inn across the street from the conference center where the symposium is being held in conjunction with the openings of Legacy Museum (around the corner from the hotel) and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (about ¾ of mile from the hotel), sometimes referred to as the Lynching Memorial.

Hampton Inn in the rain on the corner. And, just the left, the Hank Williams Museum.

And in sunshine

We could hear him coughing all night long in the tower of song.

The hotel is in an old building, the room is very traditional: a modular bathroom, a king size bed, a desk and chair, and a chaise longue (though common vernacular often refers to it as a chaise lounge).

EJI is right down the street from the Hampton Inn and across the street from the convention center, in a building that was a warehouse used in the slave trade (pretty ironic, no?)

We decided to spend the first 1.5 days at the symposium sessions and touring downtown and “saving” the Museum and Memorial for Saturday.

First, we opt for lunch at one of the food trucks (recommended by one of the EJI staff members who helped THB with the plan on attending). Two “berry” lemonade drinks and two cold noodle and chicken plates, $25.

The rain has just stopped, there aren't many people at the food trucks

And how do they handle the session attendance: when you register you are given hospital style bracelets, one per event, to wear and show to the security people as you go through a TSA like (fortunately you get to keep your shoes on). The reason why we ended up talking to an EJI staff member is that we thought we might end up in the “reserved” section of each session. Not so, and in truth the seats we’re just fine for each of the sessions. It just put us in our seats earlier than if we had reserved seats.

DB models our three "badges" for the upcoming sessions today

Okay, funny aside on how worlds can overlap: in the first hour, we see KC art collectors whose loft we've visited and a woman who was on the Berkeley Art Museum trip to the Venice Biennale last year. Art and lynching memorial are simpatico events? When we visit the memorial, we’ll see the connection, it looks like one terrific piece of art: emotional in a conceptual context.

Before each session, short videos are played with family members talking about the impact of a lynching in their family history

This Oakland woman is revisiting sites related to the lynching of her great grandfather, the grandfather of her mother and aunt

She came from a large family of sharecroppers

We have two sessions in the afternoon. The first one is a small panel of two dynamos: Gloria Steinem and Marian Wright Edelman (one of the giants in early childhood education), moderated by Michel Martin of NPR.

Gloria had laryngitis, she still made herself heard

While both Gloria and Marian have instructive and enlightened things to say, neither one of the ever seemed to answer Michel’s questions (and these were not hard-to-understand questions).

From the video before our second session

A descendant

Anthony Crawford, a successful land owner, lynched after complaining about not being paid enough for his cotton seed

The second session is Anna Devaere Smith (DB and THB saw her first one woman show, based on interviews where she re-enacted the interviewees dialogue, at Berkeley Rep many many years ago) and Ava CuVernay (acclaimed film director and a local with her family still living near Montgomery), moderated by Elizabeth Alexander, poet and newly named head president of the Mellon Foundation.

Anna and Ava

While Anna and Ava did a better job of responding to Elizabeth’s questions, the questions were a whole lot harder to understand and a lot longer than Michel’s.

There’s not really time for dinner so we cross the street, take our emergency snacks from the room, and head back to get inside the large ballroom, set up with chairs on the floor and bleachers on 3 sides. We in early and get pretty decent seats.

The set-up is to intertwine performances with speeches. Shockingly, many of the speeches are more impactful than the performing artists!