There is more to Florida than the big theme parks or bike week or the overcrowded Spring Break beaches. Old Florida still exists – the Florida before all that craziness started. The Florida of the early twentieth century with its mom and pop fruit stands, real life mermaids, manatees and crystal clear springs is mostly in the northern part of the state. It has almost been forgotten, but I think there seems to be a resurgence in interest recently.
After the sobering intensity of Montgomery, there was a need to defrag. I lucked out big time and found some waterfront sites in a Corp of Engineers Park back in Georgia called East Bank. Two nights and a day of sitting in lawn chairs go a long way in restoring the soul.
The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration in Montgomery provides a comprehensive history of the United States with a focus on the legacy of slavery. It is situated on a site just blocks away from one of the most prominent slave auction spaces in America. It was quite the immersive experience. There are wall size videos and interactive exhibits all in a series of room tracing the history of bondage in the United States. Over 12 million captured men, women and children made the Middle Passage to the New World with about 10.7 million making it alive. The numbers are mind boggling.
Rosa Parks – we have all heard her name. I have always thought of her as just the woman who refused to give up her seat on the bus and sparked a civil rights movement. I was set straight when I visited the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery Alabama. She was an early activist and in 1955, when she refused to give up her bus seat to some white passengers and was arrested, she became an icon. It lead to a year long bus strike which brought the Montgomery bus system to its knees.
Eddie Owens Martin (aka St. EOM – pronounced Ohm) was a visionary – a person who had a template for the direction that the human race should endeavor to go. From a sharecropper's child to a sex worker, drag queen, drug dealer, fortune teller to the unsolicited leader of a movement, St. EOM was ahead of his time.
One of the great aviation success stories is the story of Delta Airlines. Delta is one of the world's oldest airlines in operation and it is second among the world's largest airlines by number of passengers carried, passenger miles flown and fleet size. And to think that it had such humble beginnings.
I've always liked places of worship – they can tell you a lot about a community from the sparse Puritan spaces to the ornate Eastern Orthodox churches. I'm not even going to mention the non-Christian holy houses – wait, yes I am. Let me tell you about BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir.
I left those crazy mountain roads and headed further south to that grand old lady of the south – Atlanta. The very first time I came to Atlanta for work. I had the great honor of meeting Fran Tarkenton, the great Vikings quarterback. Minnesota people will know just how cool that was.
