Traveler Tina

The Look of Non-compassion

in
The South

Prescott writing:  The feel of the installations at the Civil Rights Institute and The 16th Street Baptist Church are to some degree inspirational and loving, but they don’t shy away from the difficult issues.  I did well up several times at the stories of the kindness (like the children of Wales’ gift the the church) and the horror (the bombing of course) of white people. What haunts me like a childhood nightmare; what is the thing I cannot unsee, is the look that is in the eyes of an mob doing an evil thing. You can see this in the photographs of Spider Martin. There are others. One photograph at the institute shows a Klan lynching of two black teenagers near Birmingham, and there is a large crowd of onlookers. Smiling. Reveling. Without compassion.  The look in their eyes is the same as the look in the eyes of white anti-protesters of the Selma to Montgomery March as they jeer at the marchers. I cannot shake the look. Spider Martin

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