BWAP 2025: Underneath the Edmund Pettis Bridge ~ Axell Boomer

Underneath the Edmund Pettis Bridge,

there’s a piece of graffiti depicting a bird in flight beside a tree. The bird, with orange, red, pink, and green feathers, hovers in search of a place to rest. The tree stands approximately the same height as the bird, and about one-third of the bird’s width. Distressed, the bird needs to perch upon something; but the tree is unprepared to support it.

In the graffiti’s context—a trunk of the Edmund Pettus Bridge—I understood the piece to be an assessment of our country’s remembrance of the Civil Rights Movement. American classrooms often instruct the Civil Rights Movement as a national panacea to racial injustice; a closed chapter with a happy ending. Individual persons, speeches, or letters receive much of the credit for institutional changes. The lives, motivations, and theologies of the “foot soldiers” go unlearned. Even their sacrifices are taught incompletely. I don’t recall ever learning in middle school that a North Carolina court imprisoned and sentenced Freedom Riders to work on chain gangs. These simplified narratives decontextualize movements for racial justice.

On the trip, we ended our nightly “debriefs” with the question: where did you (or didn’t you) see God today? We could see God in the solidarity of a movement, in the ability to endure one hundred pounds of water pressure or withstand the bite of a police dog. Visiting Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery, it is difficult to leave without learning that educational and religious institutions can mobilize effective nonviolent resistance. For me, this is an easy lesson to learn—to see how the institutions I currently belong to have, in the past, functioned in support of human dignity.

But there’s another reality about American Christianity that was not necessarily communicated on the plaques or in the museums we visited: white Christian communities saw justice—saw God—in their lynching of people of color. Addressing the penal theory of atonement in the American South, historian Donald G. Mathews writes, “Religion permeated communal lynching because the act occurred within the context of a sacred order designed to sustain holiness.” Many white Southerners understood lynching as “righteous violence”; a means of punishing and eradicating threats to the racist social system.

This relationship is not causal. White Christian American understandings of the penal theory of atonement did not create lynching. However, this theology did provide a framework—a rationale—for injustice. These mentalities direct white Christian Americans to be entertained by, to revel in, to worship the abuse of people of color—groups of people often not afforded the title of human.

Perhaps controversially, I believe that rights, treatments, and opportunities should not depend upon where you —or your parents—were born. All humans have dignity which must be protected. But it seems many Christian Americans have confused the word “human” with “American.” These Christian Americans prioritize the well-being and security of members they feel fit in their own “American” community, leaving the rest abandoned or enchained. The persistence of lynching throughout America’s history demonstrates the cruelty that groups of Americans can endorse and/or are willing to tolerate in the interest of an imagined safety or protection.

I found the graffiti under the Edmund Pettus Bridge just days before our country fell into a new administration. We are (as we always have been) in a moment where the federal government of America dehumanizes, displaces, and denies the existence of minority communities. This is not really a new administration. Our federal government continues to recycle ideas and strategies of the past for new eras of racial violence, meanwhile refusing any history that recognizes that the folks who hold power in this country do not love freedom. I do not believe the challenge is to see God in this moment—seeing God does not stop injustice. Rather, this moment asks us to shed our tolerance of brutality and recognize the systems responsible for it.

Returning to the graffiti, the word “uprooted” comes to mind. The bird’s legs resemble the trunk and branches of the tree; in flight, the bird is the uprooted tree, but its body represents the roots. When flying, the bird absorbs the full attention of the viewer, communicating the traditions and motivations of movements that have endured despite being unobserved and buried. At times, it requires a place to rest. If you will entertain this admittedly inconsistent metaphor a moment longer, a contemporary movement could find restoration and orientation in the coalitions of the past. Yet, so often, we are only offered incomplete portraits—trees the size of saplings. We must know in full—both the nuances of past racial justice movements and the hegemonic forces that sought to crush them.

Axell Boomer (he/they) is a senior studying history and religious studies.

Photo: Graffiti under the Edmund Pettis Bridge.