there are things to visit in cincinnati

so for a day while i was home, i played tourist with my mom. we went to three museums in one day--the Cincinnati Museum Center to see and exhibit called Freedom Sisters, to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and the Cincinati Art Museum.

Freedom Sisters is a traveling exhibit through the Smithsonian. if it comes to a city near you... SEE IT! it was truly incredible and moving. the energy and passion in these twenty women lives, from birth til death (@ age 87, Mary Church Terrell was organizing a picket line b/c she was refused service in 1953 at a restaurant b/c of her race... in DC, the same city where she was elected as the first African American woman to be elected to the school board almost fifty years earlier). they lit my fire.

the freedom center has been in cincinnati for years, and it is embarrassing that i had not been there yet. it transformed our riverbank into holy ground. it memorializes the past, contextualizes the present and inspires growth for the future. if you want to read more about my visit there... below is the contextual education reflection i wrote about it. as reflections for seminary can be, it is a little lengthy. here goes:

“I began to understand that unless you understand what happened in the past, it is hard to understand what is happening now… that’s why I started dealing with painful things. If you hear this from somebody who cares for you, you are more likely to take it in than to turn it off.” –Artist Tom Feelings

I was dwarfed by the structure within the structure. A slave pen had been brought across the river, from it’s original ground in Kentucky to make this ground holy. Standing inside the museum, it is monument to the pain and the suffering cause by centuries of selling people. On the farm of John Anderson, a domestic slave trader, the building housed people who were waiting to be sold. There was no room to move and little air to breathe. The more people who fit in the space, the more efficient the system. There was a second floor where the men would be chained to the ground. The proximity to the Ohio River, made the slave traders especially fearful of escape, because it would likely mean freedom. On the first floor, women and children who were less likely to run were held without chains, but in equal bondage. A monument stood with the names of the people on John Anderson’s inventory. A letter in his hand, describing the cost of the slaves and his order for more stood outside the pen. It made real the inhumanity of the system.

As I stood outside the pen, mourning my country’s history, but encouraged by Tom Feelings to engage in the ugliness, a classroom full of elementary schools students were inside the pen, listening to a docent. She asked them questions and they eagerly replied. History came alive for them. There were two things that amazed me by their exchange. First, the docent always referred to slaves as people, never as slaves. This was not the language that was used when I learned history as a small child. By calling people slaves, we lose sight of their humanity. It is too easy to think of them as property unconsciously. Naming them as people reveal the true tragedy of slavery. Second, the children so easily identified with people from another time and place who came before them. The children imagined themselves as the people imprisoned in the pen. One child answered a question about those people more than one hundred years ago in the first person: “So they could break in and get us out!” How easily children identify with the shared humanity of someone they can never meet. How can we encourage adults to regain that ability?

By making this ground holy, this museum stands as monument the to suffering and pain in our shared history. It brings the land alive. It reminds us of the blood and the tears that flowed into the ground, and down the river. It illustrates what the river meant to those walking to freedom. It gives me a new sense of place, a new grounding, a new understanding of a location that I feel so personally tied to.

It is not all about the ugliness or about history. There is just as much hope in this place as there is pain. There is just as much discussion of the legacy of slavery now—racism—as there is of historical slavery. Everywhere I looked, God was in the picture. This is a story that cannot be told without theology, and I am sure that it is a wound that cannot be healed without God.