Friday, July 2, 2010 8:45 PM

It is good to have a long-time friend who not only allows me to stay at her place on my road trip, but who insists on getting up early -- on her day off -- to make coffee and chat with me before I start out again. Not only that: she even loaned -- and packed with leftovers from our dinner last night -- a cooler for me to carry along the road. I did not share with her that I have a car full of snacks -- most of them chocolate-covered -- to keep me alive as I travel.

Val is an optimist, a great listener, and she laughs at my jokes. The only thing I think could be improved in Valerie is her neck, which -- due to an almost fatal car accident last December -- is full of hardware and doesn't serve her well when she tries to twist her head around really fast to look at something behind her. No matter. I am able to overlook this flaw most of the time. In the future, she and I are going to take a Road Trip together and it will be my job to look behind us when necessary.

I left Val's at about 9:00 and drove straight to Scottsboro, Alabama. Not only does Scottsboro have the largest Unclaimed Baggage Center in the world --which I visited first thing -- but the town is also the site of the "Scottsboro Boys" trial, which took place in the courthouse there in March, 1931.

Nine Black men, ages thirteen-to-nineteen , were accused of gang-raping two white women on a train just outside of town. They were caught, shackled, and taken into Scottsboro, where the first trial took place just two weeks after their arrests. Eight were convicted and sentenced to death; jurors couldn't reach a verdict for the youngest defendant. The case is much too complicated to write about here. There were several trials, the NAACP became involved, and the case is called "the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement," though I'm not sure I agree with that one.

There is a small church in Scottsboro -- 132 years old and built by former slaves -- which houses the Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center. Unfortunately, it was closed today. I did examine the courthouse and the historic section of town, however. Scottsboro is typical of so many Southern towns during the Depression years, which is one thing that makes it so interesting to me (besides the trial, of course). Judging from photographs and film clips I've seen, the historic section is much the same as it was in 1931.

Trivia Question: What was the site of Ricky Nelson's last concert? (First of all, younger ones, you have to know who Ricky Nelson was.) The answer: Guntersville, Alabama, which I nodded to as I drove by today. Val had told me that Nelson performed a fundraiser concert there and was killed in the plane crash the very next day as he left the area.

Highway 431, between Guntersville and Gadsden is the ugliest stretch of road I have ever seen -- and this includes Russ Avenue in Waynesville. Actually, picture Russ Avenue, but with about six lanes of traffic and going on for miles and miles. Think of any fast food restaurant you've ever seen, and there are dozens of them along that stretch of road -- along with hundreds of bargain furniture stores, pawn shops, tattoo parlors, auto repair shops, and Lord Knows What All. There was no grass, and if there were trees, they were hiding.

I arrived at the Holiday Inn Express in Meridian, Mississippi at about 5:00 PM-- and it is first class, open for only two months.

Immediately after I checked in a drove out to see the James Earl Chaney Memorial. (Here's another history lesson for you, Todd! You asked for it. :-))

During Freedom Summer (1964) scores of folks (many Northerners, mostly white, mostly young) moved into Mississippi to encourage Blacks to register to vote. (African Americans all over the Deep South were being murdered for trying to register.)

Briefly (because I know you've already stopped reading, anyhow): In the summer of '64 three young men, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman (both White) and James Earl Chaney (Black) were stopped by "the law" near Philadelphia, Mississippi, kept in jail for a few hours, and then released. Somewhere along the road, as they tried to get back to headquarters, they were stopped and driven to a remote part of the county and murdered. Schwerner and Goodman -- Goodman had been in Mississippi only one day -- were shot. Chaney was brutally beaten, tortured, and then shot. Their burned-out car was discovered after many weeks, and even more weeks went by before an informer told the FBI where the bodies could be found.

Chaney could not be buried in a white cemetery beside Schwerner and Goodman -- segregation laws and all -- and he was buried here in Meridian.

I don't know what I expected in visiting his grave and "Memorial." I left the hotel and was soon out in the country, driving along a small, two-lane road toward the gravesite. (I asked the Black receptionist at the Mississippi Welcom Center how to get there. She was able to tell me, but there was no printed information available. When I got to the hotel and asked the White desk clerk where it was, she had no idea, nor did a couple of the Black (younger) clerks with her.

The "Memorial" is about six miles out of town, and sits closer to the small, sandy dirt road than the other graves there. It sits apart from the others and is surrounded by woods -- no houses, no cars, not even many other graves there.

There had been one of those small, round "photo holders" on the Memorial/grave; it had been broken out. And something I have never seen before: the gravestone/marker was supported by large pieces of iron -- put in place, no doubt, to keep the stone from being vandalized. (I'll post a photo if I can.)

On the marker: an engraving of two hands clasped in friendship (reminded me of the Building Bridges logo); "James Earl Chaney: May 30, 1943 -- June 21, 1964"; and "There are those who are alive, yet will never live. There are those who are dead, yet will live forever. Great deeds inspire and encourage the living."

Chaney's mother is buried beside him.

I don't feel like writing anymore tonight.