Peacemakers On The Scene
	40th Anniversary Civil Rights Walk Selma To Montgomery Alabama March, 2005

Something happened.    I woke up, and found myself on an aeroplane, only hours away from America.    It dawned on me. I had actually got on the plane. I was flying across the Pacific Ocean, in a direction I had never dared dream I would head in my life, to meet the monster itself. There's no going back. The plane was going to land. And I'd be there. There. Ohmegawd.    The plane lands. The announcements are no longer in Japanese, but are now in Spanish.    Welcome to George Bush Airport, Houston, Texas.    No bloody kidding! No dueling from outside the cave, this one's headed straight into the mouth!    Guards with big donut-filled bums busting seams as they yell orders to jetlagged passengers, general confusion and overwhelmed by ENGLISH, we stumbled our way through, boarded another plane and were safely on our way out of George-land and into Georgia.    Where the sprawl of Atlanta-style Interstate highways, eight lane double express-lanes, and driving way too fast on the wrong side of the road for me to feel safe going around corners greets me to the land of plenty.    The theme of "plenty" is one that stayed for the whole two months, the concept of too much, excess, obesity, things that are overlooked too often as one reaches for another handful of potato chips and slurps on that 32 ounce coke.    So how do you survive in the land of too much for two whole months and not need to book that extra seat for the left buttock on the way home, or book yourself in for detox from that nasty sugar addiction you picked up somewhere? Walk.    The logic stuck me the minute I saw my first dinner layout on the Selma to Montgomery walk in Alabama. Fried chicken, gravy, beans, corn bread, French fries, chocolate cake. Grease and carbohydrates. Wash it down with coffee and make sure you get seconds of everything. The issue of diet problems amongst the African-American community in Alabama was brought up repeatedly during the week-long walk, but as I slowly became accustomed to the very similarly themed three meals each day I begun to understand actually how deep the problem actually runs.    The Selma to Montgomery walk was something I had jumped into head first with next to no understanding of what I was getting myself into. It proved to be one of the most impressionable weeks of my life, as I played sponge to all the information, people, experiences, tastes to be had.    A brief history, for those who (like me!) have no idea.    In 1965, in the midst of the civil rights campaigns of the deep south, some 10 years after the Montgomery bus strike (when Rosa Parks got on and refused to get off triggering a year long boycott), when the Freedom Riders were travelling all over the south, testing the law in businesses and public places that still proclaimed coloured/white only signs, and when Martin Luther King Jr was inspiring the nation with speech after impressive speech, there was a rally in a little place called Selma. At the rally, a young man stepped in front of a police officer to stop him from pushing his mother around. The police officer shot the man point blank.    The community was outraged and declared that since the State killed one of their youths, they demanded a State Funeral for him, and would carry the body to Montgomery, to the State Capitol.    Carrying a body 54 miles is not really logistically a pretty thing to do, so the plan was changed to walk to Montgomery and take the original issue of voting rights to the steps of the State Capital instead.    So, one Sunday, after church, the entire town (well, almost, given almost the entire town was African-American) walked out of their various (Baptist) churches in their Sunday bests, joined together and walked neatly in twos over the Alabama River. At the top of the Edmund-Pettus Bridge they were met by a wall of State Troopers who proceeded to charge at them with batons, tear gas and horses. The day became known as Bloody Sunday.    Footage of the event was shown on tv all over the northern states and people came down in support. It took more organising, more bloodshed and another attempt, but finally they made it over the bridge, and a couple of hundred walkers who left Selma on a Sunday afternoon, arrived in Montgomery five days later part of a crowd of 25,000.    So, we were lucky enough to arrive in the States in time to join the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's 40th Anniversary Walk.    A week of fried chicken, sure, but well beyond the grease and carbs was much to be learnt about the Civil Rights movement, the role of the incredible Baptist church communities, hearing stories of slavery and the KKK, walking past the cotton fields, joining church services in tiny churches with congregations that had never had white people in them before, and what would the south be without all that gospel singing!    Two things in particular stuck me during the week.    The first was diet and drugs. The depressing reality of obesity and diabetes struck day after day. And as we walked into Montgomery through the back suburbs, crack house after crack house lined the street with people dazed and oblivious on their verandas. Children are fed school lunches high in fat and sugar, and low incomes and the easy access to poorly nutrious food keeps people fat, addicted, and desperate. Add to that access to drugs to poor communities and its clear to see that after 40 years, although "officially" the racism has gone and civil rights have been granted, the reality is that simply the weapons have changed. No longer can the government legally keep black and white separate. But getting kids addicted at a young age and with no social security for later on in life, the conditions of everyday living have changed little.    So this is America.    Land of the free.    However, the second thing that got me was the amazing role of religion and the empowerment offered to communities through the Baptist churches. Historically the only place where black people could gather, they had been used as organising centres within communities forever. The power of music and song in expressing the dream of freedom, it was [is!!] incredible.    So a week later I left Alabama and that lingering smell of fried chicken in the air with a head full of information on civil rights, racism in the deep south, and speaking English with a strange southern accent "I aint gonna take it no more!".    It was somewhere I never ever ever thought I'd go. But just goes to show what adventures lie waiting behind hidden corners.    I loved the deep south.    (Oh! and George W. Bush himself visited Montgomery the day before we arrived, the only day we were beaten to the front page of the local papers. No, he wasn't there for the walk.) Inge Arnold reporting.

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