By Sheri Leonard Webber
Hope McMath has been active with “Take ‘Em Down Jax” since 2017, but it was two years into those efforts when she came to a critical point of connection. It was her second visit to the sites. “In 2019, I went with a group from 904WARD to Montgomery, Alabama, and the Equal Justice Initiative sites,” says McMath. She describes the museum, memorial, and sites as powerful—tracing threads of connection from the era of enslavement in this country through the Jim Crow era and lynching and into the present day.
“We were sitting in the same church Martin Luther King had, and for the first time, I had this visceral recognition that I’d spent years listening to other people’s stories— painful stories, stories of generational trauma, and triumph—but the one thing I had not done was connect my story,” McMath says. For years, she had faithfully made a safe space for other people to have deep dialogues around their connection to race and racism. “I didn’t even know where I came from or what my people had done or not done … and it hit me hard.”
It was a three-day trip, and the group was returning to Jacksonville. McMath recalls the feeling and that it remained unspoken. “So, I’m journaling on the bus ride home, something I do every day, and I ask myself: why? Why do I talk about this historically and intellectually without knowing how this connects to me as an individual?” A serious accident miles ahead on the two-lane county highway brought everything to a standstill. “We literally sat on this bus for hours, in the middle of the night, somewhere in Alabama.”
The first hour her group enjoyed talking. As the person in charge of the logistics for the trip, McMath tried to keep the bus driver awake. “Sitting there stranded, I had those strong feelings. It was very strange. I’ve never been able to adequately describe it other than a shift in the air,” she says. Others slept, some wandered off the bus to stretch, and people did what they might when there was not much else to do. No one was aware of her inner dialogue. “It was a shift inside me. I wrote in my journal: ‘It’s time for you to do the work.'”
After arriving in Jacksonville around five in the morning, McMath grabbed an hour or two of sleep and then set aside an entire day to grapple with her heritage. “I knew little to nothing about the McMath side of my family and I started researching the genealogy, and there was a lot to discover,” says McMath who began to map her ancestors’ homesteads, pinning the map in places she never knew her people had been, including Alabama. “That’s when I pulled up the map of where we had been stuck on that bus and discovered we had been sitting less than 20 miles away from where my ancestors had lived, fought for the Confederacy, and enslaved people.”
When she could grab spare moments, McMath continued the research. She kept charts and tracked McMath residences and what they owned. She scoured documents, including those documenting the passing down of enslaved people from one generation to the next, from husbands to wives. “As I’m doing this, conversations about the ‘Women of the Southland’ in Springfield Park were growing.” In the summer of 2020, the statue of a Confederate soldier was removed from atop a monument across from Jacksonville’s City Hall. McMath remembers it clearly but understood that the Springfield monument of a Confederate wife reading to her two children would be a far more complicated issue.
