I managed to enlist a friend to join me, and we headed out from Philadelphia to Montgomery by way of the Atlanta airport. Our first stop was Opelika, a small town with a beautiful main street. It was the lunch hour, so we wandered around feeling like foreigners. What was the first thing to attract our attention? It will come as no surprise that it was the memorial to the Confederate dead, erected some 40-50 years after the war ended.
Now, to many, Opelika may not seem all that remarkable of a town. In fact, it does not seem all that different from similar small towns in my home state of Ohio. But it was our First Stop in this foreign place, the Deep South, so a pretty, charming, functioning small town was remarkable. I took lots of pictures.
Since we had nothing else to do in Opelika, we headed to Auburn, where we had a recommendation for lunch and could visit the campus. We wandered around and found the place and, as expected, I felt foreign. There were these beautifully laundered and coiffed southern women, and I was dressed as a northeastern graduate student: no makeup, T-shirt, wrinkled khakis. These women seemed to be perpetually prepared for luncheon as multiple generations of them shopped for trinkets, and we scavenged to find a meal. The recommended place was closed, so we found an all-you-can-eat buffet where we indulged in root beer since we could not find lemonade.
From Auburn, we pressed on to Tuskegee, famous for George Washington Carver’s Tuskegee Institute, its airmen, and the experiments with syphilis conducted on members of the population without informed consent. I must admit that all of this only came back by visiting the place. I’m sure I had to learn all this information at some point in my education, but I had not retained it. I suspect that, somewhere in my brain, it was filed as history that belongs to somebody else: the South, African-Americans, historians of science and technology. But wandering through the Carver Museum that day, I felt the same goosebumps and emotion that I feel for history that is more directly connected to my personal history. We paid our respects to the man.
We were not able to find the airfield, and the sole commemoration of the experiments was a sign indicating an assembly to to commemorate the Presidential apology which was the following morning. So we wandered around the town square where we found more signs of people and the ubiquitous Confederate Memorial. Then we headed off to Montgomery for the night.
