Birmingham Civil Rights Museum

Elder and Sister Barfuss enjoyed an outing on Saturday Preparation Day to the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum, downtown Birmingham.  The Baptist Church across the street was bombed five times and rebuilt!! The statue commemorates four girls who were killed in the 1963 bombing!  Our hearts went out to the struggles that Birmingham and surrounding areas experienced when we were children growing up in Idaho.  Jim Crow laws and discrimination was so bad it fueled racial tensions.
     This monument was a beautiful showpiece at the entrance of a lovely city park full of people.
                   The Civil Rights Museum showed conflicts from all over the world still happening!!
     Baptist and other Church leaders led the civil rights movement and were the target of crime and bombings. The lack of fair housing, employment and equal funded schools put the African American in a subordinate position that lingers today.  The saying was "Separate, but equal." Nothing was equal!!
     This visit broadened Elder and Sister Barfuss's understanding of the plantation mentality that still exists.  There is a racial generational divide that is perpetuated in the media, politics and funding fair housing and schools today.  The South has wonderful verbal hospitality and it is a joy to see people praying in public.  There is still a huge divide between haves and have nots that is seen in health care, neighborhoods and opportunities.
"And now I desire that this inequality should be nor more in this land, especially among this my people; but I desire that this land be a land of liberty, and every man may enjoy his rights and privileges alike, so long as the Lord sees fit that we may live and inherit the land, yea, even as long as any of our posterity remains upon the face of the land."  Mosiah 29:32

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