Public memories. Private struggles. (2024)

STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. — Hank Thomas settled into the recliner in his living room, drifting in and out of sleep. His wife, Yvonne, pulled a blanket over his chest. It was decorated with colorful photos of friends and relatives, and, in the center, a black-and-white image of him, standing outside a smoking Greyhound bus.

A White mob had bombed the vehicle because Thomas was on it. 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. After Thomas, who is Black, slid out the window of the flaming bus in Anniston, Ala., a White man struck him with a baseball bat. “I’ll never forget that experience,” he told Yvonne. He was 19 years old then.

He is 82 years old now. Deep voice. Good humor. Fading memory. Sometimes, though, when he sits and looks at the blanket, recollections he once suppressed come back to him. He wants those memories to come back, because so few people who are living today experienced them. Only two of the original Freedom Riders are still alive.

“Me, and Charles Person,” he said. “And Charles, he was from Alabama.”

“Atlanta,” Yvonne corrected him gently.

A man named Phillip Howard sat in a chair nearby, hoping to hear a revelation. When he first met Thomas a few years back, Howard was so moved by his bravery that he quit his state government job. Instead, he joined an organization attempting to preserve the history of the civil rights movement. Sifting through the memories of elders such as Thomas helps him identify places that his organization can acquire, secure and restore in Howard’s home state of Alabama.

It’s a precarious time for civil rights conservation in America, and Howard, 47, feels an urgency to discover forgotten places as fast as he can. In courtrooms and in classrooms, in state legislatures and corporate offices, people are reconsidering how the country’s most tortured moments should be presented. With the 60th anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery approaching next year, Howard wants to ensure that visitors to his state receive a more robust truth, one that goes beyond a paragraph written on a historical marker.

So he spends his days traveling through the South, speaking with elders and their descendants about the importance of shaking free tightly held stories. He looks for buildings that had been long abandoned, researching whether something significant had happened in those places. And he offers to help families turn over properties for historic preservation, trading in their private ownership for public memory.

For those who meet with Howard, a lean, handsome Black man with a soft voice and focused eyes, the opportunity can be so freeing. And yet, it can also be so burdensome. American history is heavy. Over the course of Howard’s journeys, he has realized that the most consequential decisions about historical preservation do not come from White lawmakers in distant statehouses. They come from families whose forebears so often carried the load during the country’s toughest moments; Black families who once tilled the soil Howard considers sacred.

Howard’s drive for conservation sparks a parallel journey for many who must wrestle with the impact of generational turmoil, measuring what they might owe to a country that had so often devalued them.

The mission is delicate and existential, but Thomas understood its importance.

“I’m 82 years old, so I know my time is limited,” Thomas said as Howard sat nearby. “… It’s not what I want for my life; it’s what I want for my grandchildren.”

His wife tried to trigger other memories about her husband’s time in Alabama. “Do you remember being sent to Birmingham to organize [and] Bull Connor gave you to 5 o’clock to get out of town?”

“Do you remember what happened in Huntsville?”

“Do you remember who took you in and hid you … in Talladega?”

“Hank, do you remember?”

Thomas, beset by a stroke and kidney failure and living in home hospice, furrowed his brow. “I don’t remember,” he admitted.

His eyes began to get heavy. The sun had set. Rain began to fall, and Howard decided it was time to head home.

“Do you have a Black mayor in Birmingham?” Thomas asked him.

“Yes, sir,” Howard said.

“That’s good,” Thomas said with a half-smile. Then, another memory: “We used to call that place Bombingham.”

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Howard spends most of his days driving his white pickup truck along Alabama’s winding roads, his dad’s old World War II veteran hat dangling from his rearview mirror. He rolls past the brown-green rivers that once transported his people in shackles; on highways that decimated Black neighborhoods; past trees where Black bodies once hanged.

They are also the roads on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, where Freedom Riders continued to board buses after people tried to kill them, where protesters crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and marched to Montgomery to demand their right to vote.

These roads feel different from when Howard was growing up in rural Eutaw, Ala., population 2,900. He returned to the state in 1997 after serving in the Marines, got an MBA and gravitated toward jobs that helped people reconcile with their past: first, as a probation officer and, ultimately, assisting formerly incarcerated men reenter society. He and his wife built a stable middle-class life in Birmingham for themselves and their three children, enjoying freedoms Howard’s parents never fully had.

James Howard, his father, always told his son he was a proud American. He was so eager to join the Army that he fabricated his age to join early, and then pastored a local Baptist church when he came home. It was only toward the end of his life that he began to discuss his dehumanizing return to the Jim Crow South, where he was forced to sit in the back of trains and banned from eating inside certain restaurants.

“And he was in uniform,” Howard recalled as he drove on a spring day through Montgomery. “I’m thinking, my mom and dad are two of the most beautiful people in the world. Who could mistreat them? Who couldn’t see the value in them?”

When Howard’s father died in 2019, those questions became more than rhetorical. To reconcile his feelings about his father and his country, Howard felt he needed to find answers. So he began looking on eBay for old Time and Life magazines with the first interviews of civil rights leaders and then devoured first-edition narratives of the post-Reconstruction South.

In the midst of the pandemic, Howard volunteered to moderate conversations with the last two living original Freedom Riders at Zoom events commemorating the 60th anniversary of their actions.

The men were proud that their efforts helped “Whites Only” signs come down across the country.

Even so, neither man felt his work was over. Person was offering suggestions to young activists about how to successfully organize across racial lines, which he does to this day.

Person’s continued efforts compelled Howard to accept a job in early 2021 at the Conservation Fund, a nonprofit environmental group that also purchases historic property to keep it off the commercial market. The group then turns those sites over to a local, state or federal agency, or a historical group, if they agree to do programming and restoration. Howard became the Alabama manager of the Forgotten Civil Rights Places and People program.

In his first weeks, 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 with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. But few delved into the details that made King’s 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.

He worked with the fund to acquire one of them — the City of St. Jude, an old hospital campus with a church and school — and to transfer the property to the city of Montgomery. Howard hoped to help the city construct affordable housing, a park and maybe even a long-desired grocery store across the street.

He also learned the status of the other three campsites, all of them Black-owned farms in rural towns along Highway 80. He called local civil rights organizations, who told him that the original families still owned the land. But it was unlikely that they had ever met.

Howard’s conservation dream would hinge on persuading each family that publicly preserving their history was worth it.

“And I knew I had to bring them together,” Howard recalled. “Without these three specific families, this entire march that changed the world might not have happened. And if they were all on the same page, it would make preservation easier.”

He found phone numbers for a relative from each campsite. One evening in January 2021, Howard picked up his phone, took a deep breath and started dialing.

Cheryl Gardner Davis was sitting at her home in Montgomery when the phone rang. Yes, she told Howard, she was the daughter of Robert Gardner, who had welcomed marchers at a campsite about seven miles away from St. Jude.

“I’m honored to speak with you,” Howard said. He talked about how he admired her father’s efforts, and spoke to her about the importance of wanting future generations to understand his contributions. Howard asked if she was willing to participate in a presentation about the campsite.

Davis was reluctant. For most of her life, speaking about what her parents had done seemed audacious. Her parents kept their efforts quiet, worried that a racist might retaliate against them.

But then, Howard asked her to take a smaller step. He told Davis that he had been in touch with the other families, with whom she might find some comity.

“Would you be interested in meeting them?” Howard asked.

She figured there was little to lose in having a conversation. If another campsite family called, she’d be courteous but brief.

Fifteen minutes after Howard hung up, Davis’s phone rang again. It was DaVine Hall-McGuire, the granddaughter of David and Channie Hall, whose farm had hosted the marchers on the first night after they crossed the bridge.

The two women at first seemed to have little in common.

Hall-McGuire, now 50, had grown up outside Los Angeles and worked as a hairdresser. She was loquacious and warm, like her mother.

Davis, now 63, had never lived outside Alabama and spent most of her life in academia: earning two bachelor’s degrees, two master’s degrees and a doctorate, then teaching. She was cautious and precise, like her mother.

Davis expected the conversation to last 10 minutes. They talked for nearly four hours.

She shared the story of learning about the march when she was in sixth grade. Her mother, Mary Gardner, pulled out a copy of the April 8, 1965, edition of Jet magazine. On Page 48 was a picture of her husband, Robert, outside their home, describing the scene of campers occupying the porch and the fields.

The photo added context to an odd memory Davis has of coming home from her grandmother’s house one day when she was 4 and seeing soldiers with big guns. They were members of the National Guard sent to protect her family’s guests. “I remember two huge tents in the field going into the house, and I just remember people singing and talking,” Gardner recalled. “I remember a helicopter flying over, shining lights. I remember people coming in the house to use the telephone.”

Their house sat on a vast 140-acre property in Lowndes County, which was first purchased from the Freedmen’s Bureau by Robert Gardner’s grandfather. After the Civil War, his relatives had voted and were voted into office — Davis’s great-grandfather Hugh Carson served in the state legislature — until voter intimidation, poll taxes and literacy tests disenfranchised Black voters throughout the South. Mary and Robert Gardner had wanted to continue their family’s legacy of service.

“We had not been involved in civil rights at the time,” Mary Gardner explained to her daughter on the day she showed her the magazine. “This would be our contribution.”

Hall-McGuire told Davis her parents had a different approach. When she was growing up, her mother continually talked about the bravery exhibited by her grandfather.

David Hall was remembered for his easy manner and speaking with a voice like Snoop Dogg. He worked as a maintenance man at a housing project in downtown Selma and paid in cash for his 80-acre property, seven miles away. When he agreed to host marchers, he did not mention it to Hall-McGuire’s mother, Mary, or his other adult children.

Hall-McGuire’s mother was 23 and living in California when she saw her father’s picture in the Los Angeles Times. She called him and asked why he would risk invoking the ire of White people. It was dangerous; in their community, it was not unusual for outspoken Black people to end up lynched. In response, he delivered an adage that has special resonance to his family. “I put it in God’s hands,” he said.

David Hall died before DaVine was born, but she felt his legacy deeply. She cherished spending summers back at his farm, chasing butterflies and running until dark. She listened to stories about King walking through trailers set up there, as some relatives said he did. Sometimes, she’d sit on a porch and imagine what it must have been like to have seen hundreds and hundreds of people around that very spot, American flags everywhere. They had slept in tents and in barns, with the chickens.

It all felt so special, so when Hall-McGuire was in sixth grade, she wrote an essay for class about her family legacy. The teacher thought she was making it up. One generation removed from the actual march, Hall-McGuire realized that the memory of her family’s contribution was already beginning to wane.

In a single phone call, the two women began to form a special kinship that they did not realize they needed.

Weeks later, Howard had an idea. He suggested they meet at the base of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Then, they could walk over it together.

By then, he had also contacted relatives of Rosie Steele, who hosted the marchers on the second night at a property between the Hall and Gardner farms. Steele had told people she was not afraid to host marchers, according to reports. She was 78 and had lived longer than the “three score and ten” that the Good Book had prescribed. But her family believed she ultimately paid a price for her actions. After hosting marchers, Steele’s house and her store mysteriously burned down.

Relatives did not respond to interview requests from The Washington Post, but they were willing to join the other two families at the end of the journey. On a cloudy Sunday, exactly 56 years after King and protesters walked those steps, Hall-McGuire and Davis shared old stories and held each other’s hands as they made their way across, reflecting on how fear and recrimination had kept them apart for so long.

“No more,” Hall-McGuire said.

“I have a new family,” Davis recalled.

Howard had been walking behind them, and he was thrilled that the families told him they wanted to move forward with his project. He asked to take a picture to commemorate the moment. Hall-McGuire carried a small banner inside a photo frame for them to hold. It read: “Our Story Begins Here.”

To Howard, the meeting was another important step in piecing together a historical puzzle. In fact, it would reveal a different kind.

As summer 2021 came, Howard dreamed of museums and tours at the four sites. He reached out to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which listed the campsites atop the year’s most endangered historic places. The designation triggered the trust to offer funding to maintain historic homes.

Steele’s old campsite home was already lost to the fire, but the grant could help Hall-McGuire’s family. David Hall’s old residence had rusty sloped roofs, and Hall-McGuire had taken it upon herself to wrap a tarp around the home to protect it. Inside, the paint on the ceiling and walls was peeling, and the wooden flooring in the kitchen had fallen out.

The money could help Davis’s family, too — the roof was sinking in Robert Gardner’s old home, its shingles were chipped and the glass windows were busted open. Davis was afraid to even walk inside, fearful that critters might have taken up residence.

Despite the obvious need for repairs, the offer was not easy to accept. The property had been passed down to 15 children and their descendants — at least five dozen people. All had to consent to the rehab, and there had long been varying opinions on how best to preserve the property. It would take time to get them all aligned.

Hall-McGuire’s family had already subdivided their patriarch’s 80 acres. But Hall-McGuire, whose mother received the patch of land that included David Hall’s home, felt that the family story did not belong to them alone, and she wanted a chance to gather more input from her cousins and the nearby community. Neither family could accept the money.

The 60th anniversary of the march was still more than three years away, but Howard already felt time was escaping him. He promised the families, and himself, that he would be patient. There was meaning in following them across the bridge, he said. “I will walk with you, and alongside you,” Howard told them. “But I will not walk ahead of you.”

Howard tried to find other ways to help. He offered to set them up with an attorney who specializes in heir disputes over properties — but neither family felt they were ready to involve lawyers. He sent out a questionnaire so families could do a survey about what to do next. He found another grant that could help pay architects to draw up blueprints and make digital renderings, so there could be at least some record of the properties in case they were destroyed by some act of God.

“I’m very leery of that, because if you do this, what does that mean?” Davis recalled thinking. “Who owns it? Who has rights to it? I need to know all of that. We are not turning over anything to anybody.”

The idea unearthed a deeper anxiety, one that had been embedded in each of Howard’s pitches. This was the South, and those seeking to partner with the families were White-led institutions, and there had been a long legacy of finding ways to exploit and strip Black farmers of their property. Between 1910 and 2007, the federal Agriculture Department estimated Black farmers had lost 80 percent of their land. The farms were not special simply because of who had once camped there; they were unique because Black families still owned them.

Hall-McGuire originally agreed to the renderings, and then decided the idea left her cold. Hall-McGuire’s grandfather, until the day he died, told his family never to sell his land because it belonged to them. “His family was everything,” she said. “Black ownership meant everything. Self-sufficiency meant everything.”

As she considered the options to preserve the campsite, she worried about “glitz and glam” compromising its tranquil nature. She worried about traffic. She, too, worried about safety.

The concerns continued to unfurl, and Howard reminded himself to put these things in the proper context. He told himself he did not have a right to be upset, or pushy, or frustrated.

“I am not a part of this story, and this is not my family history,” Howard said. “You just kind of have to understand that there is no way to know what they are going through.”

No matter how long it might take for families to decide on how to best use their old land, Howard reminded himself that his job was about “protecting the story,” using the tools they had.

On another cloudy day, in March of this year, Howard opened the doors of the church on the St. Jude campus for an event commemorating the 59th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march.

Dressed in a bow tie and gray suit, Howard escorted the campsite families to a pew in the third row as the choir performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

A park ranger asked the descendants to come to the front of the church. She handed each a commemorative plaque, and Hall-McGuire dotted her teary eyes.

Howard instructed the crowd to thank them boisterously.

“There are other parts of the story that have to be told, have to be celebrated,” Howard said. “We are going to work diligently for the rest of this year to make sure that next year we honor as much history as we can.”

Next year would be six decades since Davis’s family made a risky decision about that land. She was feeling more pressure for her family to make one of their own.

Tourist groups had offered her a share of their profits if they could include the property on civil rights trips, but she resolved she wouldn’t charge a fee to allow people to step foot there — it felt exploitative. And she also wanted to maintain the property as a working farm.

But did she really need to hang on to her childhood house, a place in such disarray that even she would not enter? Maybe she could wrap her mind around opening the farm up occasionally for preplanned tours. Maybe she could even allow someone to redo the home.

“Maybe I’m being shortsighted,” she said. But then again, was she not allowed to be shortsighted? After Robert and Mary Gardner hosted the protesters, Davis’s family was never the same. There was a movement, though unsuccessful, to fire Mary from her teaching job. An unmarked FBI vehicle hung outside their property for weeks, as a precautionary measure. On one occasion, agents stopped a White man holding a high-powered rifle in the distance from shooting at Robert.

And also, was it right to calcify a single night as the defining experience on the farm? Their farm. The land was also where Davis made peanut brittle and picked up pecans to sell to drivers-by, where she would catch bream in the lake.

She glowed whenever she thought about her parents, walking around the tranquil secluded space. Those lonely fields could feel like a refuge from the turmoil of being Black in Alabama. And now, Davis’s 35-year-old son, B.J., found a purpose maintaining the land, wearing a pair of cowboy boots and tending to Angus. When dusk hit, and he was out there in his cowboy hat, he looked just like her dad.

“I’ve been listening to other people tell me what we should do, saying, ‘Let’s preserve it for the next generation,’” Davis said. “But who are we preserving it for? That’s what I got to get my head around.”

A few weeks after the church event, Davis walked into her home office and found her mother’s old Jet magazine. The pages were brittle now. She noticed her mother had used a pen and white-out to correct errors in the article, which included misspelling Robert Gardner’s name. Over a line suggesting Robert had doubts about hosting, her mother wrote, “Not true.” The public account was wrong. The family heirloom held the truth.

“I owe it to them to leave this place better than when I found it,” Davis said. “I owe it to them to be a good citizen, a good role model, a good steward of the legacy that I have inherited. That’s what I owe them.”

Days later, Hall-McGuire found her inspiration by the water. She had come with her parents to the Montgomery Riverfront to board a ferry that would transport them to the entrance of a new sculpture park, the latest effort from the privately funded Equal Justice Initiative to foster a public understanding of the continued legacy of slavery.

“Do you have life vests on this boat?” her mother, Mary Hall-McGuire, asked the captain. “I’ll protect you,” said her father, Johnnie McGuire, trying to calm her mother down. He held his wife’s hand as the boat sailed off.

They stopped at a loading dock and walked uphill to the park’s entrance. Nearly 60 sculptures were spread along a 1/3-mile-long circle bordered by forest and overlooking the river.

Hall-McGuire stared at a 13-foot-tall sculpture by Kehinde Wiley depicting a shirtless young Black man with cornrows who is lifelessly slumped over a horse. From one angle, he appears to be a man from a different time, but as it turns out, the past is not the past. “Look at his shoes,” she said, pointing to his high-tops. “This is about today.”

Dozens of other visitors walked among them, none speaking louder than a whisper. Birds chirped above. The wind rustled the trees, and occasionally they could hear a rev of an engine along the river.

“You feel how nice and quiet it is?” Hall-McGuire said to her mother. “You see how they tell the story on a trail? Maybe we could do something like this?”

Her mother looked around and nodded. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe.”

There was one sculpture that Hall-McGuire had longed to see. It was of five large fingers poking out of the soil, as if a large hand had dug into the ground to scoop up roots. In the center, where the palm would be, a real tree had sprouted.

Hall-McGuire squinted her eyes in the sun. The image evoked her grandfather, herself, her God. Everything in time.

“This is us,” she said. “It’s all in God’s hands.”

Howard worried that the truth might soon be out of the public reach. How much time could there be to preserve history?

A few days after Hall-McGuire and her parents visited the sculpture park, Howard had learned that Hank Thomas’s health had deteriorated so much that he could no longer walk. Charles Person was expecting more bad days than good, given an aggressive cancer.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m on a soapbox, screaming, ‘Look at Alabama! Look at Alabama! We have a lot of history. We need help,’” Howard said on another drive along Highway 80. The reasons were evident to him when passing the Confederate monuments and memorials that dotted his state, erected to blanch the stain of slavery from the Civil War’s narrative.

And now, Alabama lawmakers were even trying to wrest control of the state archives. Meanwhile, Black stories were kept cloistered in old closets, bullets pierced the graves of fallen civil rights heroes, and the childhood home of Coretta Scott King sat abandoned and unmarked. If people did not act quickly enough to solidify a truthful narrative about the civil rights era, Howard feared another rewriting of the public memory.

Howard drove into Selma to meet with James Perkins Jr., the city’s first Black mayor, who urged him to maintain his empathy. His generation was still learning to deal with anger and pain. Even Perkins, who grew up in the small city, sometimes found these memories too traumatizing to relive.

“When all of the protesting was over, the movie theater was still segregated. There was still segregated restaurants,” Perkins said. “And we were children. Children. Between 1965 and 1971, it was hell in Selma. We had to pick up the pieces and figure out how to desegregate the system.”

As mayor, though, Perkins had learned the limits of such feelings. Civil rights tourism had been a boon to the state economy — 4 in 10 visitors come to the state to see the civil rights sites in Montgomery, 2 in 10 go to 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, according to the state tourism bureau — but his city offered little to those who sojourned there. Its downtown was speckled with boarded-up buildings and empty storefronts.

Feelings of embarrassment and shame foreclosed economic opportunities so much so that the city could not help a family repair one of its most historic homes, a place where two Nobel Peace Prize winners — King and Ralph Bunche — planned marches. The family instead offered the house to the Ford Foundation in Detroit. Numbered brick by numbered brick, history was stripped away from Selma.

“That’s what’s going to happen to us if we can’t find ways to save some of these buildings, I’m afraid,” Martha Lockett, who volunteers to run the Selma Redevelopment Authority, told Howard at his next stop.

Lockett told Howard, though, that she had a plan: She was working to add lighting to the Edmund Pettus Bridge. At night, the iconic bridge is but a shadow.

“I swear to you, and I know I’m probably being Pollyanna, but I swear it would change the way people” look at the town, said Lockett, who is White.

Howard said he’d try to find ways to help the city get the money, which was the type of help Lockett needed. They were $1.5 million short of the project.

“Do you think it could be done by the 60th anniversary?” Howard said.

Lockett admitted no, she didn’t think so. But she was hoping that, at the very least, the city would be able to paint footprints along crosswalks to pay homage to the marchers. Other places along the route were doing the same.

Howard vowed to help her find a funding source to work with her, right away. His grand vision of cohering camp sites might not come to fruition in a year, but at least they could do something.

“We’re trying to find a win to show the community that we are partners that can deliver,” Howard told her. “We can’t deliver on all the big things all the time, but maybe we can find a small win here and there. And I think the crosswalk is a small win.”

“That has me so excited,” Lockett said. “It truly does.”

“We’ll keep working,” Howard said.

Howard jumped back to his truck and began his drive home, his father’s hat still swaying from the rearview mirror. He marveled that his work allowed him to experience the wonders of racial progress. In a state that so often denied his father because of the color of his skin, even White people were soliciting him for help.

“I think he’d be proud of what I am doing,” he reflected. His dive into history did not elicit shame, but pride. Not guilt, but purpose.

His truck crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge once again, driving over the brown-green waters that once forcibly ferried people who looked like him. Each time he crossed, he felt the heaviness of that history ease. And one day soon, Howard hoped his work would make it light.