'We're trying to show how complicated history is'
The contents of the suitcase, more or less, told Emil Hess's life story. A report card from the University of Pennsylvania, dated 1939. A photograph of him in his Navy uniform during World War II. An advertisement for Parisian, the department store that he owned in the center of Birmingham, Alabama's largest city. And a recording from his son, describing how his father, in the face of competing protests from Black customers fighting for equality and white patrons opposing it, had moved to desegregate the store. The suitcase is now part of a new civil rights exhibit at Temple Beth El, the historic synagogue in Birmingham. It was handed to a group visiting the exhibit, along with a challenge: Figure out why he heeded the activists' call when many others did not. Did he have a genuine desire for fairness? Did he simply fear a boycott? Or did his intentions even matter? "Because now you're in the fight," said Melvin Herring, one of the visitors, raising the point that whatever the reason, Mr. Hess, who died in 1996, had aligned himself with the civil rights protesters and had become invested in their mission. Eventually, his stores were among the first to hire Black salesmen. "He said, 'We're going to stay in the fight.'" Dr. Herring was part of a group from the Black-Jewish Alliance of Charlotte, an organization created to forge friendships between the two communities. The group had come to Birmingham for what has become an increasingly common pilgrimage in the South, making stops at museums and landmarks associated with the region's civil rights history. Many of those places expose the horrors of the past or celebrate the activism that rose up in defiance of it. The exhibit at Temple Beth El is concerned less with villains or heroes than with the great many who fell somewhere in between. It is built on the premise that history is the sum of infinite numbers of small decisions that gradually coalesce into profound change — decisions like the one Mr. Hess made to integrate the Parisian. "What we're doing is trying to show the messiness," said Melissa Young, a historian who helped organize the exhibit. "We're trying to show how complicated history is." Listening to the rationales and the regrets of those on the periphery of the fight has value, organizers argued. Participants might be forced to confront their own ambivalence or the worries that keep them from speaking up about injustices unfolding in front of them now. "Rather than judging history between the good and the bad, or assuming we would have been on the right side," said Margaret Norman, the synagogue's director of programming, "what can we learn by taking a more nuanced look at understanding how people responded with the resources they had?" The exhibit, the Beth El Civil Rights Experience, started giving tours in January to students from Jewish schools and groups from other faith-related and civic organizations. Although it examines this history through a Jewish lens, organizers see it as just as applicable to a broader audience. A sorority in Nebraska recently called to ask for a tour. The Beth El project was conceived in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd provoked a sprawling reappraisal of the reach of systemic racism and the endurance of inequality. The congregation, for its part, wanted to explore how Jews figured into the tandem legacies of racism and activism that have shaped Birmingham. "This is such an active piece of memory here," Ms. Norman said of the civil rights movement. "It's not something at arm's length." Read the rest of the story here.Invite your friends.
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Friday, May 10, 2024
Race/Related: This civil rights exhibit doesn’t focus on the villains or heroes
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