My hunt for found objects started with our readings. I didn’t want to start picking up objects without a clear purpose as to what I was going to do. I looked to our class readings for inspiration and found it in a particular passage about the Freedom Rides. The woman was describing her experience as a Freedom Rider. She had worn her best Sunday dress, a pink dress. When she stepped off the bus in Alabama, she was beaten by the waiting mob; the blood from the beating ruined her dress. This really affected me because as a little girl I loved the color pink. My best Sunday dress would have to have been pink. The idea of this girl and her ruined dress allowed me to picture myself as a Freedom Rider. I began to think of what I had at home that I could use to represent this passage. I knew my mom had saved some of my old Jenny Lynn dolls, so I went through the box.

In the box I found a pink dress with a smaller cloth doll wearing a matching dress. I decided to make the dress the center of my shrine. Although the doll was white, there would have been few African-American dolls manufactured at the time. Also in the box I found a pink toy brief case. Since many of the protesters brought books along to study and not simply waste time sitting around, I decided that the briefcase would make a fine addition to my shrine.

My mom is a quilter, so the next place I looked for ideas was in the fabrics she had in drawers and in the fabric stores we went to. I found three fabrics that really stuck out for me. One was of American flags, which I used for the background. I thought that the flags would create a nice background for the rest of the shrine. The American flag has become such a symbol of freedom and justice that I thought it might be ironic to use it for the background of a Civil Rights Shrine, considering the blatant disregard for freedom and justice imposed upon African Americans throughout United States history and the Civil Rights Movement. The next fabric I found was of all the famous and important buildings in the United States. The majority of them are in the north, so I felt that it would be good to represent the Great Migration to the North. The children of the Great Migration would have been greatly affected by it. The children would have been forced to leave the only homes they had ever known, even though it would give them a better chance at life. In the North there was more opportunity for better education.

The third fabric I found was a black and white checkered fabric. The inspiration for the use of this fabric also came from a reading that was assigned for class. The passage was about a white family and a Black family who lived in the same rural neighborhood. Everyday the children would play together. One day the two families happened to be at the movie theater at the same time. The young Black girl began to walk over to her white friend to say hello and play before the show started. She was grabbed by her mother and pulled back in line. She was forbidden to speak to her white friend and playmate in public. The line began to move and the white family went into the main theater while all the Black families went up to the balcony. I wanted to use the white and black-checkered fabric to represent the innocence of childhood, since it looks like a checkerboard. The girl in the story had never felt the harsh sting of racism until she attempted to say hello to a playmate in public.

I used a great deal of the color pink to outline my shrine. I wanted to emphasize the color so that anything else I chose to put in the box would really stand out. I tried to put bright colors against dark colors to make them stand out and I tried to put the objects in a position that made them more prominent. I put the small school bus on a raised platform to emphasize the importance of desegregated education and the general importance of buses throughout the movement. The desegregation of the bus lines in Montgomery, Alabama, through the Montgomery Bus Boycott started off the movement. The Freedom Rides desegregated interstate bus stations across the country. The original Greyhound Bus Line’s uniform button was a great addition to my shrine. Since Greyhound was the major bus line across the nation, its desegregation was a great victory.

On the back of my cigar box lid, I chose to put a copy of a newspaper article that I tea-stained. The article, from the 1980’s, is about the mysterious disappearance and murders of numerous African-American children in Georgia. It disturbed me that I was born in a decade in which many African-American children were being murdered as a result of hate crimes. It was a little shocking that in the twenty-years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, not all that much had changed, if children were still being murdered because of the color of their skin.