Deep Reads: Public memories. Private struggles.
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 5 July 2024
⏱️ 43 minutes
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Summary
With the 60th anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery approaching next year, Philip Howard wants to ensure that visitors to Alabama receive a more robust truth, one that goes beyond a paragraph written on a historical marker.
Howard conceived an ambitious goal to tell a cohesive, robust story about the Selma-to-Montgomery march. The march was mostly known for its beginnings, when officers beat and bloodied protesters walking over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. But few delved into the details that made the third attempt to cross the bridge successful, including the families and organizations that helped along the way.
There were four “campsites” where protesters stayed overnight while completing their 54-mile sojourn. Persuading the families who owned these campsites to publicly preserve their history would be a journey of its own.
This story is part of our Deep Reads series, which showcases narrative journalism at The Washington Post. It was written and read by Robert Samuels. Audio production and original music composition by Bishop Sand.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Robert Samuels, a National Enterprise reporter for the Washington Post. |
| 0:07.0 | I wrote a story as part of our Deep Read series which showcases narrative journalism here at the post. |
| 0:13.6 | This story is about a person who is trying to preserve the history of civil rights in Alabama. |
| 0:19.6 | It's a story about memory, trauma, and what we might owe to our country and the larger society. |
| 0:27.6 | When I started this, I never really thought about the fact that the March from Selma to Montgomery wasn't done in a day. |
| 0:36.4 | Like and that these people went and they stopped at different people's farms and different people's houses, and people had to make a choice. |
| 0:46.7 | They had to risk a lot in a very violent place to say, yes, I am publicly going to host these people. I always thought boy it would be |
| 0:58.4 | really wonderful if I lived in a place or I had a legacy where someone in my family did something incredible for the civil rights movement. |
| 1:09.0 | What I didn't think about was if that's the case what do I owe to a larger society and what do I |
| 1:16.9 | owe for myself you know because it was their family farm for generations. |
| 1:25.0 | It was more than a single moment. |
| 1:28.0 | It was their entire family legacy. |
| 1:30.0 | And when you think about that, you begin to realize that to have a public history, that people have to compromise, that people have to compromise, that people have to be willing to talk about uncomfortable things, to be able to shed some stories and some feelings that were private feelings for a larger understanding of the truth. |
| 1:58.4 | And at the same time, it began to feel a lot more reasonable that maybe you're not ready for that larger public understanding despite what's going on. |
| 2:17.0 | Okay, here we go, this is the story. Stone Mountain Georgia. |
| 2:21.0 | Hank Thomas settled into the recliner in his living room, drifting in and out of sleep. |
| 2:27.6 | His wife Yvonne pulled a blanket over his chest. |
| 2:31.7 | It was decorated with colorful photos of friends and relatives and in the |
| 2:36.5 | center a black and white image of him standing outside a smoking grayhound bus. A white mob had bombed the vehicle because Thomas was on it. |
| 2:49.0 | In 1961, Thomas was one of the original 13 freedom riders, an interracial group who sat beside one another on greyhounds to enforce integration laws along the interstate. |
| 3:02.0 | After Thomas, who is black, slid out the window of the flaming bus in Aniston, Alabama, a white man struck |
| 3:10.2 | him with a baseball bat. |
... |
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