The confrontation between marchers and a bevy of uniformed, armed police in riot gear with billy clubs and tear gas, many on horseback, violently drove back the protestors in a televised event that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”

On our bus, I sat beside a dad who brought his fifteen-year-old daughter along on the trip. He read from the Wikipedia article from his smart phone. “Wow, check this out – Edmund Pettus was the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan!” he said in disbelief. “And they still have his name on the bridge.”

Really.

“Whoa,” his daughter said.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge

As we walked in silence over the water on the famed steel structure spanning the banks of the Alabama River, my mind was filled with images of the violence in black and white. I could hear the screams and the explosions and the hooves of the horses, and the whacking of clubs on the bodies of fallen marchers, men and women.

And then, from several years back, memories of the 50^th Anniversary that I recorded and watched from start to finish, when dignitaries gathered here and made powerful speeches. I still recall my feelings as former President George W. Bush, Congressman John Lewis and then President Barack Obama spoke of the significance of that horrible day. They paid tribute to the marchers who put their bodies in harm’s way to secure their simple but inaccessible, constitutionally guaranteed right to vote.

Martin Luther King issued a call for clergy to come to Selma to assist. One who did, a Unitarian Universalist pastor from Boston (a graduate of St. Olaf College and Princeton Seminary) was clubbed to death on the streets of Selma in broad daylight on the city streets. The perpetrators, three rabid segregationists, were seen attacking the reverend and his two clergy friends. They were arrested and charged with the crime but then acquitted by an all-white jury. The story of Rev. James Reeb is the subject of a new six-part podcast called White Lies.

Montgomery

From Selma, we traveled to Montgomery, following the route of the 54-mile walk made in five days by those marchers. In Montgomery, we saw the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Church where King organized the march. We saw the spot where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the city bus and the place where she was arrested for her “crime.”

But most poignant of all, we pulled up to the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), celebrating the work of Attorney Bryan Stevenson who has devoted his career to defending the rights of the wrongly accused. In a larger sense, the institute exposes the monstrous injustice of a criminal justice system that has become in essence, the New Jim Crow. Some years ago, I was riveted by Stevenson’s Ted Talk which, to date, has had some 6 million views.

Today, a museum documents the long history of the evils of racism – from slavery to forced segregation to the denial of access and the basic rights of citizenship to imprisonment to police brutality and then, the Final Solution - lynching.

It was a fitting close to our journey there in Montgomery. From the EJI Legacy Museum, a shuttle took us to the newest exhibit just a few miles away on a grassy hilltop overlooking the city of Montgomery. Beautiful gardens surround the stark focal point of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice up there on the hill – a disconsolate memorial to the 4,400 known “terror lynchings” of black people between 1877 and 1950. It’s “an aspect of the nation's racial history that’s discussed the least." We were greeted by sculptures of human forms, men and women in chains. Fear, anger, despair and desolation in their faces. And then up the hill, to a squared off space where rusting metal columns are suspended from a broad ceiling. As I walked, descending through the hanging columns, I moved from being surrounded, reviewing the names and dates and counties and cities etched in steel, to walking beneath them, forcing me to look upward, as the mob would in those terrible scenes of triumph, white faces seeming to celebrate the dead body hanging by a rope from the branch of a tall tree above.

Then at home, resuming my daily walk, I had time to think. It hit me with clarity – this journey has been my Second Great Awakening.

Before the start of this trip, I would have told you - with a discernible degree of self-satisfaction - that I am “woke.” I wanted you to know (and it was important to me that my travel team know) that I’m not like all those other aging white male Boomers – you know, unaware of their “whiteness” and all its imagined advantages. I would tell you about my enlightenment, the books I’ve read and the shame I feel over the assumptions of privilege. How I see clearly the dynamics of supremacy and the determination of my tribe to retain and protect this inheritance.

Then, in our debrief, one of my black sisters complained of woke fatigue.

“It is annoying… and exhausting,” she said.

Our leader defined the phrase well. Woke Fatigue - it’s us white guys who want to prove that we’ve been illuminated and now we are good. Let’s be friends. Share with me what it’s like to be black. Please - tell me I’m OK. Confirm it: tell me I’m good and that I’m not a racist.

Ouch. Woke fatigue. That’s it. The spurious claim to wokeness that my black brothers and sisters can spot in us wide-eyed white guys from a mile away.

This is the Second Great Awakening. The first: awakened to my whiteness. The second: awakened to the fact that I have not yet “arrived.” I’m not really woke at all – at least not in the way I thought I was.

Here I am one week later: a fellow learner. A fellow pilgrim; a sojourner with a new passion to address the injustice, to tell the story, to work toward sensitivity, to support the cause, to make the case.

One new friend calls it “embodied solidarity.” To be present. Active. Honest. Courageous. Sacrificial.

It’s not about me.