After our Challenge 4 presentations on Friday, the fellows and I took a trip to the Henry Ford Museum as a part of our Immersion Activity. This trip was definitely a trip down memory lane because I was fortunate to visit the Henry Ford Museum as a child. Although a lot of the exhibits at the museum have not changed since my childhood there was one exhibit that really stuck out to me. It was the Civil Rights exhibit.
In the Civil Rights exhibits, there were displays of American history regarding the slave trade that showed the different was that slaves had to create innovative ways to pick cotton from what they were provided. Further down the exhibit, there was a display of the Jim Crow era. In this part of the display, they showed the bus that Rosa Parks sat on when she refused to give up her seat which was instrumental in launching the Montgomery Bus Boycott. They also showed “white only” and “colored only” water fountains as well as a display on the origin of the Ku Klux Klan.
As I walked through this display, I began to get emotional. I was reminded of the stories that my grandfather, aunts and uncles had told me about growing up in the South during the Jim Crow Era. They personally endured the things that were being displayed. Just when I thought that I had taken all of the emotion that I could take in one setting, I looked up on the wall and saw a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. that really spoke to me. The quote stated “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
When I read this quote, I began to think about the things that are going on in society today. With the deaths of Travon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Renisha McBride and countless others, too many people are sitting back as if these things do not matter or as if racial stereotypes are no longer a problem. Too many times people of color are being abused or murdered because of unsubstantiated fears that are based on stereotypes. This is a real life issues that still exist yet some people continue to be silent as if it doesn’t. There are too many lives at stake to just turn a blind eye to what is going on. All lives matter, whether they are African American, Hispanic, Caucasian, Native American, Asian or Other. If we continue lose sight of that point as a society, we are only killing ourselves.
After reading this quote, I even more inspired to voice my concerns in protest of this issue because now I have an even better understanding of its importance. I want to live and in order to do that I must continue to show that my life matters and so do the lives of everyone around me.
