This month, as a team, we returned to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit the Legacy Sites. And on this return, we were bringing our new expanded team. We had folks with us who’d not been permitted to go because of probation issues last year and folks who weren’t on our team then. We had family members with us. And we understood that returning to Montgomery, to the site of so many historic struggles for civil rights, was going to be about the hard work of always rejoicing, even when confronted with sorrow.
You don’t walk out of the Legacy Museum without weeping, don’t see the giant Corten beams that acknowledge Americans who were lynched in this country. And yet, if you are like we want to be, you do not let that suffering make you forget who we might be.
One story that matters. Just after we’d left the museum, and as we entered the Memorial, we asked a young brother to take a flick of us all. He grabs the camera, looks at the 8 or 9 or 10 of us in the photo, my mother and youngest son with us, the first time I’d been away on a trip like this with my mother, the first time she’d been on a trip like this with my son.
And a young kid, a friend of the photographer, photobombs us.
Clearly the kid ain’t know me. Ain’t know my momma, who was right there with me. Ain’t know my young boy. Ain’t know who we were. He could not understand that we were going to invite him and all ten of his friends in the photo.
Minutes later, we got all these young brothers in the flick with us. We believe freedom begins with a book. We believe that when you see us, you will see love. Do you believe it? If so, tell someone, freedom begins with a book.