Civil Rights and Movement Music at the 2025 Jerome Rohwer Pilgrimage

A version of this article originally appeared in Pacific Citizen.

This Memorial Day weekend I had the opportunity to participate in the 2025 Jerome Rohwer Pilgrimage. Having recently attended the National Reparations Rally in Washington DC, my thoughts were centered on the historical parallels among Japanese Americans and African Americans, and our shared experiences living under institutional white supremacy. Over the three days I spent in Little Rock and Memphis, I came to further appreciate these linkages as I explored historic civil rights sites and spent time with local communities in the Delta.

The main purpose for my return to Arkansas was to moderate a panel discussion on mixed-race Japanese American identity. This topic is rarely discussed in pilgrimage programs despite the growing presence of mixed JA folks. Preparing for the presentation gave me a welcome opportunity to delve into my paternal family’s history – itself a unique blend of Spanish, Czech, German, and English heritage, which I have sometimes felt the need to minimize in order to find acceptance within JA community spaces.

The panel also gave me the opportunity to deepen relationships with friends and colleagues who participated as co-presenters during the session. This included Tsuru for Solidarity Director of Organizing Becca Asaki (Irish-Japanese), Artistic Director of Global Arts Performance Initiatives at UIUC Krannert Center Jason Finkelman (Jewish-Japanese), and Emmy Award-winning film/television producer Rachel Watanabe-Batton (Nigerian-Japanese). We each shared details of our family histories in individual presentations, then reflected together on the similarities and differences between our experiences. We started the program by asking how many people were mixed, how many had mixed children, and how many had mixed grandchildren. Almost everyone in the room raised their hand.

I was uncertain how this program would go over, as I have never participated in a similar session at a pilgrimage. Happily, it was very well received by the audience of about 150 pilgrims. During the Q&A participants shared stories about their own challenges in navigating their mixed identities, and one of the survivors whose daughter had struggled with acceptance thanked us in tears afterwards.

After an emotional morning and in search of a good meal, Rachel and I ventured into downtown Little Rock where we ate at a taqueria near the Riverwalk shopping district. On our way back from the restaurant we stopped at a café across the street. Waiting on our coffees, I spied a display of cigar box guitars made by a local Arkansas luthier. A three-stringed model fabricated out of a bright blue Monte Cristo cigar box caught my eye, so I picked it up and started strumming. Tuned similar to the banjo with a tonal quality somewhere between a resonator guitar and a shamisen, I bought it on the spot.

A little while later I met Jason in his hotel room and showed off my new instrument. I figured we might find an interesting way to improvise together using his berimbau – a single-string bow percussion instrument. The berimbau is used in Capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art that combines elements of dance, music, and combat. It developed out of the resistance and resilience of enslaved Africans in Brazil. 

The cigar box guitar was also invented out of necessity, originating in impoverished communities of the rural South. Often associated with the period of enslavement, cigar box guitars are rooted in a lineage of resistance through cultural expression. Given the parallel origins of these two instruments, their sounds melded together in a complimentary way. We moved into the hallway and played some impromptu entrance music for the closing dinner.

The dinner program featured a tribute to the 15 survivors in attendance at this year’s pilgrimage. Each survivor was gifted a kintsugi bowl and honored in a photo slideshow. The program also included video remarks from Rohwer survivor George Takei, and a recorded piano performance of Clair de Lune by Jerome survivor Alice Takemoto that left many pilgrims in tears.

Following dinner, pilgrimage committee chair John Nishio opened up a room across the hall where Jason and flautist Ori Kawa began another improvised tune. Ori played the Shinobue, a short flute that is used in Japanese folk music. The three of us played together for half an hour, as a crowd of about fifty pilgrims watched our spontaneous performance. This concluded the formal pilgrimage program, but my journey was only beginning.  

Aside from the panel, I decided to visit Arkansas a second year in a row because pilgrimage committee member Mari Carpenter agreed to organize a one-day excursion to Memphis. Mari works as Senior Director of Museum Collections at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. She previously served as a curator at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, and continues to champion interracial solidarity in the field of public history.

While she has no direct family ties to the wartime incarceration, Mari has roots in the Mississippi Delta. Several of her family members lived near the former sites of Jerome and Rohwer, on the other side of the Mississippi River. We met at the 2024 pilgrimage where I taught her the tanko bushi, and we have since become good friends. 

Our Memphis excursion began with a tour of Stax Records Museum of American Soul Music. Operating from 1960-1975, Stax was the Mid-South’s answer to Motown - a blusier, funkier version of what was happening in Detroit during the same era. Central to the museum’s narrative was the role that race and racism played in the creation of Black music genres in the Delta, and the significant role that many recording artists played in the civil rights movement.

Beginning with the humble origins of gospel music, the exhibit detailed how race, religion, and the Mississippi River were key elements that defined the Memphis Sound. The museum also told the story of segregation through music, explaining how Black musicians were excluded from white radio stations in the Jim Crow South and had to create their own stations to play Black music. 

The main attraction was the recording studio and control booth where countless hit records were cut. For fans of soul music this is hallowed ground. Hit singles like Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign,” Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man,” and Booker T. and the M.G.’s “Green Onions” were all recorded here. The space resonates with echoes of the past, when music was made to groove and organize to – truly the soundtrack of the movement. After dancing our way through the rest of the museum, we drove across town to Central BBQ where we enjoyed some of their world-renowned Memphis cuisine.

Following lunch, we visited the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, the site where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. The museum’s core exhibit spans the transatlantic slave trade and period of enslavement to post-civil war reconstruction and the civil rights movement of the 1950s-1960s. With Mari as our guide, we were given a behind-the-scenes tour from the perspective of a museum curator who managed many of the collections on display in the main exhibit. She told us stories about how certain artifacts were sourced, like the retired sanitation worker who donated his uniform. Mari also spoke of the emotional toll of curating problematic artifacts such as lynching postcards and Klan robes. 

The museum made effective use of built environments in ways that were haunting, incorporating human-sized statues into recreations of historic events including Maryland diner sit-ins, the firebombed Freedom Riders Greyhound bus, March on Washington, and Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. Particularly evocative was the slave ship hold that allowed visitors to crouch on the floor in the cramped conditions that enslaved Africans were subjected to while enduring the Middle Passage.

Another room held a replica of the jail cell where King wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Sitting inside the space listening to the letter read aloud was a powerful experience I will not soon forget. We spent a long while in one room dedicated to the Albany Georgia Freedom Singers, a group established by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Youthful voices singing songs of freedom were piped into the room, accompanied by projected images and footage of protests on the wall.

The main exhibit culminated with an in-depth section on the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike that began after two African Americans, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were gruesomely killed on the job. They had taken shelter from rain in the back of their truck when it malfunctioned and both men were crushed to death. After peaceful protests demanding better working conditions were met with violence from local law enforcement, King and other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference became involved in negotiations with city officials, also lending their moral and spiritual support to local organizers.

It was here that King participated in his last protest march on March 28, and gave his final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” at Mason Temple church on April 3. In the closing words of the speech given the day before his death, King prophetically stated, “I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”

In the final gallery is an original Memphis garbage truck with projections of images from the sanitation workers strike featuring picket signs emblazoned with the iconic slogan, “I Am a Man.” The gallery leads into a hallway where visitors can view the two modest motel rooms where King and his entourage slept the night before his assassination. The exhibit ends at a window overlooking the balcony where King was shot. We took turns paying our respects mere steps away from where King spent his last conscious moments on this earth.

As we processed the sobering reality that what was gained during the civil rights movement came at such great and terrible costs, we shared quiet conversation with museum docents who offered their own local perspectives on the events that transpired in this place. I later learned that we visited the museum on the 5th anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. I wonder what Dr. King might say in the face of such continued injustice today.

Following this extensive four-hour visit to the museum, our Memphis excursion ended with an informal dinner at BB King’s Blues Club on Beale Street where a small group of pilgrims enjoyed live blues music performed by two local bands. After a challenging day of learning, listening to these soulful sounds was a cathartic experience, reminding us that amid the difficult work of social movements we must also make space for joy. My time in the Delta reminded me of this as the music of this region was born of great struggle, yet offers a means of taking that hurt and turning it into something beautiful. A symbol of resilience and cultural resistance you can stomp your feet, clap along, and shout to. 

Although the times we are living through today are grim, the Black civil rights movement stands testament to the power of organizing. These Black activist leaders overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles to achieve their goals. Acknowledging that the current administration seeks to undo much of their progress, we have been given a roadmap to resistance by these movement ancestors who paved the path before us. To quote Chinese American activist Grace Lee Boggs, “we are the children of Martin and Malcolm. Black, brown, red and white. Our birthright is to be creators of history. Our Right, Our Duty. To shake the world with a new dream!”

I am grateful to the organizers of the Jerome Rohwer Pilgrimage for offering such meaningful opportunities to experience both the sites of our own historic traumas in Arkansas, and these significant historical sites related to the civil rights movement in Tennessee. I look forward to attending future pilgrimages, as we build towards collective liberation in our own time.

For more information about the Jerome Rohwer Pilgrimage visit: www.facebook.com/groups/JeromeRohwer