Kelly Ingram Park is a spot in Birmingham, Alabama where many important events of the Civil Rights Movement took place. The Children's March, organized by SCLC and Martin Luther King Jr, took place on the streets surrounding the park. This demonstration was most well known for being the site where policemen unleashed vicious dogs on children and sprayed them at point-blank range with powerful fire hoses. The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where a bomb killed four innocent girls getting ready for Sunday School, faces the park. Kelly Ingram Park was planned to confront head on this history of violence. The statues that fill the park are not just uplifting memorials to key leaders, even though there is a statue of MLK, but they're instead meant to challenge the viewer into confronting this legacy of violence. Some statues include a policeman unleashing a snarling dog upon a child and children staring at the viewer behind prison bars. I became interested in this park after attending Professor Dell Upton's talk entitled "The Iconography of Sacred Places" last spring. In his lecture, he showed detailed pictures of the individual statues and described the politics behind each statue, such as how a statue of MLK was erected rather than a statue of one of the actual leaders of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement. He made the park seem really inspiring, as if it was a living monument to the movement. However, I went to visit the park this summer and experienced a different reality. The park was a small patch of grass with statues sporadically placed throughout, not the heart of the Civil Rights District that Professor Upton glorified. Also, it was sadly ironic that this park which was supposed to glorify how African Americans won their equal rights and civil liberties was filled with homeless African Americans, including a woman who was clearly a drug addict who accosted me while foaming at the mouth when I got out of the car. I left after five minutes. The visit affected me deeply; I was really disappointed and troubled by what I saw there. It made me think about what really is the point of spending money to memorialize the Civil Rights Movement when many African Americans still are not economically liberated.
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