MY ALABAMA EXPERIENCE

By Dr. Stephan Blanford 

Anni, Emily, and I recently had the opportunity to represent Children’s Alliance at “The Alabama Experience,” the annual conference of the Alliance for Early Success, which coordinates and supports the efforts of statewide advocacy organizations across the country.  What an experience it was! 

I was a little skeptical when I learned of the organizers’ plans to hold an immersive conference in a place so steeped in the history of the Civil Rights movement and the scourge of slavery and Jim Crow laws that the movement sought to eliminate. Montgomery, Alabama, as the home of the bus boycott, is well known as the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement. Less well known, it also served as a major marketplace for the sale of enslaved Africans and briefly as the Capitol of the Confederacy, with its own White House. After the Civil War, legislators gathered there annually to pass Jim Crow laws which kept Black people in bondage for another century after emancipation.  

As a descendant of enslaved people myself, with a long family history in that region, I had to grapple with the distinct possibility that members of my family had unwillingly walked the same Montgomery streets that I was walking, in chains.   

During our tours of historic Montgomery sites, we saw many of the locations where the Civil Rights movement first gained traction 69 years ago. We heard the deeply inspiring stories of brave adults and children willing to sacrifice everything for their belief in the equality that was denied to them. The visits to newly renovated buildings with signs outside that demarcated them as former slave markets were deeply unsettling, as were the statistics about mass incarceration, poverty and unfulfilled lives that relentlessly continue today.   

Anni, Emily and I left the conference early. Not because of the profoundly unsettled feeling we had during the length of our stay, or the many facts we learned that make clear the legacy of slavery still persists, but because Hurricane Helene was bearing down on the region. And though I’m safely back home with my family, I am still processing all that I saw and felt during the aptly named “Alabama Experience.” However, I am confident that our racial equity-based advocacy at Children’s Alliance is a modern-day manifestation of the Civil Rights Movement. As we head into a highly consequential election season, I fervently hope that our staff, board, partners and members of Children’s Alliance have as much bravery and persistence as many of the residents of Montgomery displayed back in 1955.