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William Penn, The Dali Lama in Birmingham, Alabama The Dali Lama advises to visit a place once a year that you've never been. I never thought that the year 2017 would mean Birmingham, Alabama but our Southern Appalachian Yearly Meeting & Association of the Religious Society of Friends (SAYMA) lead me in that direction. The only thing I knew about Birmingham, Alabama is what I saw on television in the 60's and the events that led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the beginning of the end of racial segregation in the South. Black residents held sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters to challenge Jim Crow laws. Black folks took to the streets to protest racial discrimination and attacked with fire hoses and police dogs. Sept. 15, 1963, a bomb planted by a Ku Klux Klansman in the 16th Street Baptist Church exploded, killing four young black girls. Birmingham, Alabama had much more charm than I had visualized. I would have love to spend more time exploring the city but alas that was not the agenda. We met at the Quaker Meeting House in Birmingham. It was great to be in a actually meeting house with far more diversity than what is in my home West Virginia Quaker Worship group. We have less than a dozen and only a handful of "official Quakers" but we are all very active. We meet at the Library. Activism was my initial attraction to the Quakers. We did visit an Ethiopian Restaurant and decided to utilize that in our next pot luck. There are other ways to celebrate diversity.   Abracadabra  |
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