Yes Healing History's Wounds One -On- One Make IT Right

His Ancestors Were Slave Traders and Hers Were Slaves. What They Learned About Healing from a Roadtrip

We embarked upon a journey to test whether two people ?could come to grips with deep, traumatic, historic wounds and find healing. We had no idea where we would end up.

Sharon’s Story

I burst into tears in the parking lot of the Lowndes County Interpretive Center in rural Alabama. Tom and I were five days into the 6,000-plus mile ?healing journey? that informed "Gather at the Table", the book we wrote about healing the many wounds Americans inherited from the legacy of slavery. We had just crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma where, in March 1965, John Lewis (now a 15-term U.S. congressman) and more than 600 protesters tried to begin a 54-mile march to Montgomery. On a day that came to be known as ?Bloody Sunday,? Alabama state troopers confronted the peaceful marchers and viciously attacked them with billy clubs. I watched these events unfold on television as a 14-year-old child embraced in the warm comfort of my family home in Chicag

Tom’s Story

I didn?'t know what to say. So I said nothing. I sat in the passenger seat next to Sharon while she sobbed. Twenty minutes earlier, on the drive from the Voting Rights Museum, I had asked her, ?What would you do if you had lived here then??

?I would kill them,? she said, staring straight ahead as she drove, clutching the steering wheel in a death grip. I watched the first tear roll down her cheek.

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