Day three of the 2024 Civil Rights Trip

There’s a broad narrative being told on the Civil Rights Trip, but it’s being told through hundreds of data points and personal stories.
 

What do you learn when you hear two versions of the same story, told one after another?
 

Yesterday, the eighth grade heard Joanne Bland tell the story of participating in the 1965 Voting Rights March, and its place in the context of a childhood in segregated Selma.
 

This morning, they heard Ms. Bland’s big sister, Lynda Lowery, tackle the same history.
 

She repeated the story of their mother’s death during childbirth, a failure of a segregated health care system.
 

She spoke enthusiastically about learning nonviolent tactics, a lesson her younger sister had more trouble with.
 

Ms. Lowery brought the little details, too, different from the ones Ms. Bland offered: James Baldwin’s defining feature (big eyes), the date of Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death (February 26th, 1965), the name of the dog on Sargent Preston of the Yukon (King), and more.
 

Ms. Bland’s take is irreverent and hilarious. Her sister’s is more tender - hopeful and proud, with tears closer to the surface.
 

Together, they added to these eighth graders’ sense of what it means to be young and brave during uncertain times.
 

Next, Gordon explored the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park.
 

After walking through twelve acres of art, with work from dozens of artists, they found a memorial to the enslaved.
 

Over 100,000 family surnames were displayed, representing millions of people.
 

It was stunning.
 

But for those who chose to linger, names came into focus.
 

It started to seem possible to imagine some of the stories they represented.
 

And that allowed students to find a way to respond.
 

The sculpture park is part of the public education arm of Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, which draws a clear line through American history, connecting enslavement with the post-emancipation era of racial terror and segregation, and current era of mass incarceration.
 

Gordon’s next stop, the Legacy Museum, is another part of EJI’s education work, a stunning multimedia experience (where photos and video are not allowed).
 

The museum traces the evolution and growth of the systematic, persistent oppression of Black people in post-Columbus North America.
 

It covers a lot of history quickly, making it easy to connect across decades and centuries.

And yet, at every turn, the curious visitor can find human scale stories.
 

In videos, slideshows, touchscreens, murals, there are maps of the slave trade covered with statistics. There are advertisements offering human beings for sale. There are the voices of segregationist politicians and language from Jim Crow laws. There are photos of lynchings, and narratives of towns and counties that African Americans were forced to abandon. There is video testimony from men assaulted in prison. There are letters from incarcerated youth to their lawyers.
 

Taken as a whole, all these stories present a powerful vision of four hundred years of history.

 

And on their own? Each one of these numbers, illustrations, voices and narratives offer the visitor a way to connect with the people behind this history, and allows them to imagine what otherwise might seem unimaginable.
 

At Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, where photos also were not allowed, students gathered another data point.
 

They met with Ms. McPherson, who gave them a gracious and straightforward tour of the church, where Dr. King had served as pastor from 1953 to 1960, a period that included the Montgomery bus boycott.
 

The tour was a dramatic contrast from the ones given in previous years by Ms. Wanda Battle, who’d had students moving through the pews singing, dancing and hugging.
 

With very different styles, through very different means, Ms. Battle and Ms. McPherson offered two very different glimpses of the Black church. 
 

They also had one message they both shared.
 

With all due respect to Dr. King, both women warned about the dangers of relying on leaders.
 

As Ms. McPherson explained today, there was a serious void for a year after King left. But then, she said, “the absence of Dr. King forced them to come into their own. They could no longer simply follow, and the church members were compelled to step up.”
 

It was a message of personal responsibility - of finding your own charge - that was becoming familiar to the Gordon students.
 

The final stop of the day was the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
 

At the memorial, there are metal pillars representing US counties where documented cases of lynching and racialized terror occurred. 
 

The pillars are inscribed with the dates of the crimes, and the names of the victims when they are known.
 

In the memorial, the pillars hang from the ceiling, resolving into patterns that make aisles and rows for the visitors.
 

In many spaces, they loom over guests’ heads.
 

But even then, there are names and details of individual stories within view.
 

Even while it documents this overwhelming history, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice is offering a path forward.
 

The EJI has a Community Remembrance Project that is actively working with the counties with histories documented in the memorial.
 

In dozens of cases, counties have responded with a willingness to reckon with and recognize their history of racial violence.
 

Counties that choose to participate, like Dallas County, Alabama, get narrative markers to display, with matching markers erected inside the confines of the EJI memorial.
 

Since Gordon began visiting the memorial in 2019, this garden of markers has grown.
 

A docent proudly pointed out the dozen that were just added in recent weeks, and the space where additional markers can be added.
 

It’s a monumental history.
 

By seeing it assembled, then broken down, into counties, into decades, into families and into stories, these students are finding a way to grapple with it.

back to day two

ahead to day four

dozens more photos from today

More about Gordon's Civil Rights Trip at www.gordonschool.org/civilrights