By Nathaniel Tabachnik
Day one of our journey began today as we traveled the city of Atlanta with the bus as our only real home. We went from site to site, meeting with some of the most interesting, vivid and knowledgeable people I have ever met.
Our first stop was the Leo Frank tree, where we were introduced to our first speaker of the day, Tim Cole, a friend of Billy’s who is an expert on the Leo Frank trial and lynching. Leo Frank was a Jew living in Atlanta who was supposedly the last person to have been in contact with Mary Phagan. She was a 13 year old girl who was found murdered in the basement of the pencil factory where Leo Frank was the manager. Leo was arrested and put on trial. After a travesty of a trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to be hung. The Governor of Georgia on his last days in office felt that the trial had not been fair and commuted the sentence to life in jail instead of death. This did not sit well with some of the townspeople, who resurrected the KKK and took Leo Frank from jail and hung him. This made Leo Frank the one white person out of 400 documented lynchings in the South in the early 1900s. Tim Cole’s extensive knowledge of this topic brought up many issues among us, including questions on how the different races reacted to this trial and lynching. This was something I had never really thought about before, and it is incredible to see the impact of these events.
We then had lunch and some time to walk around Underground Atlanta.
After lunch we went to the National Historic Site for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There we learned about Dr. King’s relationship with Gandhi and the power of non-violent protest. We walked around the museum just soaking up all the clips of Dr. King’s speeches, quotes and marches.
Our next stop was the Names Project/AIDS Memorial Quilt. People from all over the country who have lost a friend or family member send in a 3×6 foot panel of cloth (the approximate size of a grave) in which they try to capture the life of the loved one who died. Stepping into the building where the entire quilt is stored is both awe inspiring and tragic. Rows upon rows of quilts are stacked neatly all the way to the ceiling and when you are walking amongst these rows the silence is almost tangible. We had two speakers at the Names Project: Billy and Janeace. Billy, not our trip leader, is a man living with HIV/AIDS and he told us his story. His story made AIDS personally a bigger issue in my mind and made it painfully real to me. Janeace works for the Names Project and told us the importance of these quilts, how they are created and stored as well as what they represent.
Our final stop was listening to probably THE most interesting, vivid, emotional and wisest 92 year old I have ever met. His name is Reverend Williams and he walks in with the most fantastic booming preacher voice and give us some priceless wisdom only brought on by living a full and long life. Reverend Williams was arrested over 15 times with Dr. King during the Civil Rights struggle. He integrated Georgia schools with his children, was the first black person to sit at some lunch counters and marched in many protests. He made us answer the question of whether history is always good and whether Dr. King’s death was a huge loss to the world or was needed for his message to be a success.
After all of this we had dinner and then went to Billy’s old high school where we got to run around and play on the football field or just sit and talk with our new friends. We are all having an amazing time and cannot wait for tomorrow and the upcoming weeks!
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