By Hon. Michelle D. Fentress
When I considered our country’s tortured history from slavery to the civil rights movements of the 1960s through the present, being born and raised in the Commonwealth always offered me some level of peace and comfort. I didn’t grow up thinking that we, here in the Commonwealth, had as much of a turbulent history in these struggles as our southern counterparts. For that reason, visiting Alabama or anywhere else I considered the “deep south” was never on my bucket list. To be quite honest, I was worried about seeing, in color, the places and visible reminders of past events that previously had been etched into my memory as grainy black and white photos and video recordings—lynchings, beatings, mob violence . . . Bloody Sunday.
Despite my reservations, I visited both Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, twice in the last two years. The first time was as a participant in the National Judicial College’s Anti-Racist Courtroom: Theory and Practice four-day course. The second time was as a member of the Justice Riders 2024—a consortium of approximately sixty federal and state judges from the First Circuit, the Supreme Judicial Court and each of the Trial Court Departments who, along with our families, incurred the expense personally to travel to these two historical sites. These trips gave me a reality check about the comfort I alluded to at the start of this piece, as well as an overwhelming desire to encourage other judges to visit Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, and apply the lessons I learned in their approach to judicial decision-making.
Anti-Racist Courtroom
Over the course of four days, the Anti-Racist Courtroom course offered judges from the United States and Canada the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of how marginalized racial groups have been impacted by legislation, the execution thereof, and related judicial interpretations within the US legal system. The course, taught by judges, law professors, and legal professionals, offered painful lessons that brought into stark focus the shameful reality that judges played an active role in the further subjugation of Native Americans, Black Americans, and Asian Americans. We learned about court decisions resulting in convictions being overturned due to the inclusion of non-white witness testimony1 at trial; the separate but equal doctrine being expanded to increase the number of racial groups that could lawfully be separated from whites2 and we also discussed inconsistent legal determinations3 that have, in part, given rise to constitutional challenges we are seeing play out today.4 To say the course was comprehensive does not do it justice. We discussed cases and laws I had not had reason to recall since law school. The Anti-Racist Courtroom was more than just a course, it was a re-education of concepts that did not quite resonate until I became a decision-maker in our District Court Department. This immersion into the legal underpinnings of our country’s most difficult and turbulent eras made the trips to Selma and Montgomery so incredibly impactful that I committed to returning with my family one year later.
Selma, Alabama
Selma’s historical significance is not limited to the Civil Rights Movement. During the Civil War, Selma was a major arms producer and provided critical naval support to the Confederacy. The 1865 Battle of Selma occurred during the last month of the Civil War and resulted in a major setback to the Confederacy that ultimately led to its surrender to the Union Army. While the trip to Selma did not focus on the war, the historical context is essential to understand the significance of both Selma and Montgomery.
In Selma, we visited a very well-maintained Confederate cemetery adorned with Confederate flags of all sizes, many of which were not tattered or weathered—they looked new. The cemetery has a cannon pointed toward the North in the event the South were to “rise again.” We learned about the Daughters of the Confederacy who maintain those grounds and take pride in doing so. I was troubled by the fact that such an organization exists, when their guiding principles, if borne out, would undo these United States of America.
While in Selma we heard from Joanne Bland, a Black woman who grew up in a segregated Selma where those Confederate flags were used to threaten her very existence. She took us to various sites in Selma and recited her personal stories as well as the stories that would become the timeline for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. She told us about the department stores that she could not enter and the ice cream parlor she could not frequent because she was born Black in an area and era that longed to return to a time when America was not United and Black people remained enslaved. She told us that she had been jailed thirteen times by the time she was eleven. I had tears in my eyes as she called upon my three children to take a picture with her in front of the mural depicting this part of her life story. She called upon my eleven-year-old again as we stood at the site where a young, not-yet Congressman John Lewis galvanized and prepared the youth of Selma for the march that would lie ahead. Joanne, like my oldest daughter, was eleven at that time. I cannot fathom any of my children having to endure any of what we heard.
Ms. Bland educated us about the events that would spark the first attempted march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge now known as Bloody Sunday. We learned that, for years, local Selmians and organizations like Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) worked tirelessly to obtain equal voting and civil rights but had been unsuccessful. Ms. Bland vividly described the sights and sounds from that first attempted march that are forever etched in her memory; the screams, tears, blood, tear gas and police brutality. During both of my trips, judges marched across the bridge in a profound parade of remembrance. In 1965, two days after Bloody Sunday, hundreds of Selmians, their allies and foot soldiers, marched fifty-four miles over five days to the state capital, Montgomery, to advocate for voting rights.
One of the most striking takeaways for me from Selma, was the clear and perhaps intentional disregard, neglect, and lack of investment in the city –a place of such historical significance. Many buildings are dilapidated, and some look completely abandoned. It is a shame.
Montgomery, Alabama
The Montgomery leg of the trip offered an opportunity for participants to take self-guided tours of many of Montgomery’s historic landmarks and visit three sites, each of which is part of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI): the Legacy Museum, the National Museum of Peace and Justice, and the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. Other landmarks were also close by: the Rosa Parks Museum, the Freedom Rides Museum, Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, and the Southern Poverty Law Center Civil Rights Memorial Center.
The Legacy Museum provides an immersive experience into our history from slavery to mass incarceration. The exhibits are wide-ranging and span the trans-Atlantic slave trade–where our own beloved Boston Harbor was identified as a bustling port of entry for the enslaved–to Emancipation, the Black Codes era, Jim Crow, the struggle for Voting and Civil Rights, and present-day issues reminiscent of that history. The museum offers visual and audio re-enactments, newsreels, and authentic remnants from those dark times. One of the features that almost makes you think you’ve emerged from the darkness of that history is a brightly lit room full of jars of jellybeans. Upon closer inspection, one learns that the jellybeans demonstrate the unscrupulous means employed by town registrars to deny Black people the right to vote. The room included actual poll tests, each of which asked the most absurd questions. A wrong answer, of course, resulting in a denial of voter registration. I still have no idea how many jellybeans were in those jars—the same is surely true for every Black person who had to answer that question when they attempted to register to vote. I took one of each of the three variations of those tests to hang in my lobby as a visual reminder of how far we’ve come. There was so much pain in that museum. A few hours are not enough time to take it all in.
The National Museum of Peace and Justice cannot adequately be described. It must be seen to be understood. This outdoor Museum honors the over 4,000 Black people who were lynched from the start of emancipation to 1950 with steel monuments that document the names, places and dates of each known and unknown (but accounted for) victim to racial terror. It is expansive, it is quiet, and it invites deep consideration of how committed the perpetrators of these crimes were, and how anguishing these atrocities must have been for the victims and their families. The stories attached to some of those named are scattered throughout this outdoor Museum and they all tell the same story of vigilante violence, false allegations and a deep-rooted animus against Black people, especially Black men and boys. The magnitude of the site is shocking. It is one thing to have a cursory understanding of the history of lynching in this country, it is quite another to see such a profound visual and artistic representation of those reprehensible acts.
I had an opportunity to see both Museums twice, but during my second trip, I also visited the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. You can visit the Park by riverboat or bus, and we opted for the riverboat. The boat ride traveled along the Alabama River, a major corridor for the slave trade. My family and I sat in a boat on a river that was used to transport, for sale, people who might have been my ancestors. It was a lot to take in. The Park featured art installations of all types, real slave quarters, and a train car modeling those used to transport enslaved people to Montgomery, to name a few. It also incorporated the indigenous Native American experience with art installations vividly depicting their erasure and displacement. The last stop within the Park is a sculpture of what appears to be a giant book of names. Park staff explain that those names represent the Black people who were named, not merely labeled as property, for the first time in the 1870 US Census. With iPads in hand, the staff helped my family search our surname to find its location on the massive wall. My children were thrilled and wanted to search for every surname connected to our family. We found them all and even though those names very likely did not belong to our ancestors upon their arrival, we felt an overwhelming sense of pride that we were among those recorded in history.
Conclusion
I would urge all law professionals, not just judges, to visit Selma and Montgomery for an experiential education on how the law was weaponized in those areas in particular, and the United States as a whole. Each of the sites served as a reminder that local, state and federal legislation and executive action can be used as a sword against marginalized peoples.
It is critically important that judges have the historical legal education this trip engendered. The depth of this historical legal perspective is fundamental to understanding the importance of our role in our system of government. Of the three branches of government, we are the only one tasked with reviewing laws and acts perpetrated under the color of law to determine if they are consistent with the promises and intentions of our Constitution. I cannot fathom any presently sitting judge questioning the wisdom of those judges who found the courage to do what was right and just in the midst of such obvious distortions of the legislative and executive function of our government. The view from Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, offered a stark reminder that our democracy is fragile.Laws can be passed and executed in ways that challenge the very foundation this Nation stands on. The trip to Alabama portrayed a past we must commit to never return to and a present that requires our vigilance, as jurists who have taken oaths to follow the law, consistent with the Constitution. It brings into focus the significance of our judicial branch—an independent branch of government that serves as a check on the others at all stages of the cases that come before us. As I reflect on my time in Selma and Montgomery, I find a deeper commitment to maintaining this perspective for every bail hearing, probable cause determination, motion to suppress, trial, and plea. I hope the other judges in attendance, regardless of court department, find a way to apply these reminders and lessons in their courtrooms too.
1 People v. Hall, 4 Cal. 399 (1854) (interpreting a California Criminal Proceedings Rule from 1850, which provided that “no Black, or Mulatto person, or Indian, shall be allowed to give evidence in favor of, or against a White man”, to also exclude Asians from providing such testimony as well.)
2 Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927) (citing Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), finding no violation of the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment where an American girl of Chinese descent was denied admission to a high school reserved for white students and was required to attend a “colored-only” high school).
3 Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886) (determining the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment also protected Chinese “aliens and subjects of the Emperor of China” by virtue of a treaty between the United States and China of 1880), but see Terrace v. Thompson, 263 U.S. 197, 211 (1923) (affirming the right of the states to make laws prohibiting private land lease agreements involving citizens of the United States and Japanese residents of the United States who are “subject[s] of the [E]mperor of Japan” and finding no violation of the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the 14th Amendment)
4 Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U.S. 181, 202 (2023) (determining Harvard University and the University of North Carolina’s admissions programs violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment because “both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”)
Judge Fentress was appointed to the District Court by Governor Baker in 2020. She currently sits in Brockton District Court.
