Berks County Bar Association The Berks Barrister Spring 2018 - 21

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject

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to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state

Being Reminded of

wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall

Slavery and Segregation

abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall

any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process

While Traveling on
the Blues Trail

of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of
the laws.

By Sharon M. Scullin, Esquire

I

n October 2017, my husband
Jim Rothstein and I took a
road trip with friends from
Wimbledon, Thomas and Tricia, to
follow the Blues Trail in Louisiana,
Mississippi and Tennessee.
Thomas has been a rock and roll
guitar player from his pre-teen
days at the time of the British
invasion. He is a huge fan of the
Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and
other bands that based their music
on American traditions and he had
always wanted to see the birthplace
of rock and roll. We began our
journey in New Orleans and ended
in Memphis, with several stops
along the way. Coincidentally,
aspects of the trip touched on
the history of the battle for Civil
Rights in our country.

New Orleans is a cosmopolitan city, filled with tourists
and musicians from all over. It was also one of the busiest slave
markets in the South before the Civil War, trading slaves from
Virginia and more northern states all through the South. One of
the most impressive attractions in the city is the World War II
Museum; it is really well done in its photographs, audio-visual
supports and written explanations. The Museum has one gallery
called The Arsenal of Democracy, which addresses Hitler's
theories of racial supremacy and the uneasy light that it reflected
on the hypocrisy of the United States. African Americans were
not allowed to join the U.S. Marines or the Army Air Corps.
In the Army, they were in segregated units. In the Navy, they
were only permitted to be cooks or stewards. These assignments
broke down during the course of the War, based on need and
pressure from the unions. The Museum has two traveling exhibits,
one called Fighting for the Right to Fight and another on the
Tuskegee Experiment, highlighting the manner in which African
Americans eventually won the right to face combat.

After New Orleans, we headed
towards Memphis, stopping
for various music or historical
attractions. As soon as you leave
multicultural New Orleans, it feels
as if segregation is suddenly a much
more recent fact of life. There is just
something about the stratification
of the society and the miles on miles
of cotton fields that remind one
that "the past is not dead; the past
is not even the past" as William
Faulkner observed. We toured Laura
Plantation, the only restored Creole
plantation. This is where the Brer
Rabbit stories originated, brought
to America by the Muslim slaves
from the Senegal-Gambia basin
that worked at Laura. The Laura
Plantation maintained meticulous
records about their slave residents
both before and after the Civil War,
when they became share-croppers for lack of any alternative. It's
heartbreaking and jolting to be brought face-to-face with the
documents that treat humans as chattel.
Our next stop was a recording studio in Jackson, called
Malaco. I had called ahead and Wolf Stephenson, one of the
founders, gave us a fantastic tour. Jackson is the site of many
important Civil Rights monuments. Medgar Evers, field
secretary to the NAACP, was assassinated in the driveway of his
home there on June 12, 1963; this home is now a museum. The
Greyhound Bus station, where the Freedom Riders were attacked
in 1961, also has a monument noting that history. As a side-note,
Eudora Welty, the writer, is buried there.
In Vicksburg, we visited the Civil War battlefield, which is
very well curated, as national parks usually are. It's enormous

Continued on page 22
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