My Trip to the Brown v. Board Museum

Yesterday, my mentor offered to take me to the Brown v. Board Museum in Topeka, Kansas. She brought along her father, who I instantly found out was a veteran.

It came out of nowhere, it seemed. When we got to the burger place we were eating at for lunch, he asked me where I was from (as people do here because I guess I have an accent) and I told him Alabama. He smiled and said, “Yeah. I’ve been there. I used to live on Fort Rucker.” “Really,” I said. “Me too.” He smiled and said “Oh, wow. Yeah, I’ve had some experiences at that place.” I smiled, thinking that he’d gotten into trouble with some Southern women or something.

When my mentor came back from the restroom, I told her about our connection and she turned to her father and said, “Wow, I didn’t know you went to Alabama.” He nodded and said that he went to two other bases in different states as well. She again said, “I never knew that.”

He goes on to tell me that he was stationed at Ft. Rucker in the ’60s (’68, I believe) before he went to Vietnam for 9 months. (I thought Vietnam ended before then, so it was a shock to me that it still was going on. I should know these things. I blame my high school.) I was instantly intrigued when he started talking about his time in the military. I always like these stories because you can tell that the people telling them are remembering some great times, but also trying to repress some troubling memories. I will never know or understand what he, or any other veteran, has gone through. But a story helps at least paint the picture.

He told me this story about a time he drove off base to go to church. He said that someone in his group was a practicing minister, who was black. When he said this, he motioned to me and said African-American as he spoke. I took it as his uncomfortableness to say “black” and I understood it, I guess.

Anyway, he and his group took a trip to a church that the black man was supposed to preach it. He notes that, in his group, it was him (a Puerto Rican), the black man, and a couple of other Latinos and a few white people.

Once they all arrived at the church, one of the young people who went to the church came out to greet them. When the young man saw that the minister was black, he went inside to let the congregation know. The young man came out and told the group that  “the younger folks got no problem with it [the black guy], but the older folks do. They’re just stuck in their ways.”

My mentor’s father paused. I nodded. My mentor asked, “So, they didn’t let him preach?” He confirmed, “No.”  He said that they all got back into the van and rode back to base. This was the only time he left base in the 10 months that he was at Fort Rucker.  My mentor said, “Well, you know the church has always been like that.” He nodded and then there was a brief silence before he excused himself to the restroom.

I sat there thinking whether there was more he wanted to say about his time in Alabama or in the military in general, and why he had not spoken about it with his daughter before. I thought about whether the forgotten memories were coming back to him with each step he took to the restroom.

It was an interesting story to hear while we were heading to go to a museum to learn about the black people’s struggle for integration in the school system. I suppose he was trying to connect with me, that maybe my being from the base he where he lived once brought back many more unspoken memories from his military past.

We arrived at the museum the same time as a Boys and Girls Club group was pulling up in a bus. They were loud and screaming as we walked into the museum.

When you first walk in, you see two signs hanging overhead that say “Whites” and “Blacks.” This is the second time I’ve been to the museum and seen this sign. (I’ll write about my first time in another post.) My mentor’s father says, “Uh oh” and walks behind me. For a brief moment, I thought he was picking a bug off of me, but he was playfully telling me that I had to go on the “Black” side while he when to the “White” side. I laughed as my mentor said to her father, “No, I think you’d be more in the middle.” And we collectively laughed.

I thought it was a weird moment, but I wasn’t offended. This man’s got a past, I said to myself.

So we went to the exhibits and I was instantly captivated by this hall of archival footage of white people protesting against the integration of colleges. I heard the infamous, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!” as there were images of riots and people hanging dummies that looked like a black person. It was a lot to look at and it was one of the only moments in my life where I felt overwhelmed.

I look at these images and know that they are history, but I couldn’t imagine living through that or how one lives through a time like that. I felt bad for the black people in the video, but I really felt bad for the white people. Their legacy will forever by that of the person who opposed human rights. Their anger and hate will be forever frozen in time.

Similarly, there is an abundance of images of black struggle, of all POC struggle, are forever ingrained in our minds. Yes, there has been progression, but it seems to revert every few years.

The kids (of a mixture of races) from the Boys and Girls Club loudly came in and were running around like the museum was a playfest. I made eye contact with a few of the black staff members around my age as they tried to keep the kids in order. Some of the kids went to the same hall I went to and I wondered what they thought about the images they were seeing. I didn’t know that they brought kids to places like these. Isn’t it a little too much for them at the moment?

The kids treated the exhibit like a movie oo-ing and ahh-ing, not really comprehending what was going on. I suppose I was the same way, and still am about a lot of things. I don’t think that a person can even stop revisiting certain moments in history because each time you revisit it you start to understand it more and more, as I did today, but I will obviously never actually feel what it was like as a black person, in the segregated South, in the ’60s.

I watched white people view the images and wondered what they were feeling. I wondered in what ways these images affected them. They silently watched in the same way I did, uncertain of what to make of it. I watched my mentor’s father look at the exhibits, wondering what he was thinking. Wondering if he felt left out. If he felt that the story of his people should be told. That they, too, need well-known museums like this. This is what I was thinking, maybe he was thinking these things. I don’t know.

I suppose we are all affected by human struggle in different ways and we’ll never know how other people are affected unless we talk to each other. But, it seems, that that is something so terribly hard for us to do. To let a stranger in.

One of the most chilling things about the museum is the timeline that runs throughout the exhibits. Starting all the way back to the 1600s to 2000, it provides a history of human rights. What I found troubling is that up until the ’90s it there is a constant progression of human rights success. It is when it hits the 1990s that you start to see history repeating itself with the LA Riots and the shooting of black men and death of Matthew Shepard (extending the human rights struggle to sexuality). If they were to add on 10 more years, there would be some great moments, like President Obama winning office in 2008, but I believe that not much in those ten years would speak to the progression of basic human rights accomplished during the Civil Rights Movement and I find that sad.

We rode back to Manhattan (the city Kansas State University is located) and my mentor dropped off her father at her house. He shook my hand and told me that it was nice meeting me. I told him the same. He seemed like a complex man that would always struggle with unspoken memories. Maybe this is something we all with struggle with.

I don’t know this man’s life, I don’t even know the depth of the one moment in 1960s Alabama that he shared with me. But I do know that our encounter brought up some memories in him. Memories he never shared with his daughter, memories that he has been wanting to let out, but with the right person, with the right coincidence like the one I had with him.

There’s so much that we experience, and so much that we forget. So much that we share and so much that we keep to ourselves. There’s only so much that we can share, and when we do it’s quite relieving.

I know I’m crazy for thinking that this encounter with him was some special thing where the universe aligned us together, but I think all encounters with people are special and meant for a reason. Maybe his reason for meeting me today was to tell someone that story, to open up a past that he never spoke about, that he never wanted to speak about. But, one that he should. Maybe. I’ll probably never see him again.

The only thing I regret is that I didn’t take pictures.