Day two of the 2025 Civil Rights Trip

Gordon’s eighth grade has visited the Southern Poverty Law Center every year since the trip began in 2002.
 

The SPLC was founded in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
 

Poor people had new rights and protections, Gordon’s tour guide explained this morning, but those protections didn’t mean anything without effective legal counsel.
 

Since its founding, the SPLC has branched out to include not just lawyers, but also researchers, educators and community organizers who are tracking hate groups and fighting legislature that restricts civil rights and bodily autonomy.
 

On today’s visit, Gordon interacted with the SPLC’s education department.
 

It’s not huge, but it makes remarkably good use of video, audio and interactive media to connect contemporary initiatives like Me Too and Black Lives Matter with the movements of the 1950s and 1960s.
 

It also helps each Gordon eighth grade see themselves in the context of a larger project that has sent hundreds of Gordon eighth graders to Georgia and Alabama since 2002.
 

There’s a hall where visitors can add their name to a pledge to work for justice.
 

After adding their own names, students discovered they could look up previous signers.
 

They began searching the database and found the names of dozens of Gordon friends, siblings and teachers who’d signed the pledge on past Civil Rights Trips.
 

And they watched the names of those who came before scroll down the wall alongside their own.
 

Outside the SPLC, they joined in another Gordon tradition.
 

Maya Lin’s Civil Rights Memorial includes the names of dozens of martyrs to the movement.
 

These students have seen this memorial for years, in photos from previous trips.
 

They know these names from books they’ve found in Gordon’s library.
 

They’ve talked about the power of memorials and the role of the arts in activism.
 

And after some time reflecting, they came together to step into the place where so many Gordon eighth graders have stood before them.
 

With the SPLC, a trip to Selma have been one of two constants in all the Civil Rights Trip itineraries.
 

Gordon’s host this year was Barbara Barge, a lifelong resident of Selma who participated in the 1965 Voting Rights March.
 

She knew that Gordon students had their Civil Rights fundamentals on lock, which freed her up to dig into the little details that made the history come alive.
 

Ask her what the Selma girls thought of John Lewis when he first came to town. Ask her about Dr. King’s favorite candy.
 

She’ll dish about the first gay Vice President of the United States, the murderers who ran the local car dealership, and the questionable management of the rehabilitation of Amelia Boynton’s house. 
 

And if you pay close attention, you’ll find out where Dr. King’s black silk pajamas ended up.
 

She brought students to the George Washington Carver Homes Projects, home of Brown Chapel AME and ground zero for the organizing behind the 1965 Voting Rights March. 
 

There she led a master class in truth telling and historic memorials.
 

What’s the value of plaque that tries to name a “roll call of freedom fighters”?
 

How does it turn out when you make that list thirty-five years after the march that inspired it?
 

And what happens fifteen years later, when Hollywood wants to come make a movie about the whole thing?
 

Some march veterans talked to the team who made Selma. Others dismissed the entire project. When Hollywood got the details wrong, who exactly was to blame?
 

Fellow foot soldier Joanne Bland always gives Gordon an extended riff on the weaknesses of a particular plaque in front of Brown Chapel.
 

Ms. Barge did her version of this classic, then she led the group behind the projects for another Civil Rights Trip rite of passage.
 

She had each student pick up a pebble from the concrete slab where the 1965 marchers had met up, and to hold the name of a marcher in their minds.
 

"Who did you think of?" she asked one, holding the hand that held their pebble. Viola Liuzzo. Your pebble is a pebble she stood on. You are a leader. I am a leader.
 

Who did you choose? John Lewis. Your pebble is a pebble he stood on. You are a leader. I am a leader.
 

Who did you choose? Dr. King. You are a truly a leader, then. I am a leader.
 

Barge’s last stop with Gordon was the Live Oak Cemetery, established as a burial site for Confederate soldiers.
 

It is filled with Confederate monuments, cannons symbolically pointed northward, and dozens of bright, freshly planted battle flags.
 

This is part of America’s past, and, apparently, it is a cause still being supported by many people in Selma’s white community today.
 

Many people, she acknowledged, wanted to keep young white people from confronting this part of history. 
 

It is traumatic. It is uncomfortable. It is dark. 
 

But it is also real. It is part of white history. It is part of American history. And it’s part of a story that stretches into the present day.
 

Selma activists have sought to remove Confederate monuments from throughout the city, and the Live Oak Cemetery has become a bit of a dumping ground for displaced memorials: Nathan Bedford Forrest’s crypt. Jefferson Davis’s marble chair. An obelisk that dedicated to the Confederate dead that used to stand downtown.
 

But Barge spoke passionately about the need to keep this history recorded, remembered and accessible. 
 

It’s no longer confronting people of color in Selma’s streets. 
 

But it’s not gone, and it cannot be forgotten, not by people of color, and not by white people.
 

Ms. Barge bid her farewells, and left the group on their own for the last part of their Selma experience.
 

Edmund Pettus was a senior officer of the Confederate States Army.
 

After the war, he was a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

The bridge that honors him was the site of a bloody, violent confrontation.
 

Television coverage of that confrontation shocked the world.
 

All that is true. And yet.
 

Crossing that bridge has become a symbol of courage, of hope, and the promise of change.
 

It’s something that every Gordon student looks forward to.
 

All of those things can be true at the same time.
 

And everyone who has graduated from Gordon since 2002 has grappled with that fact.
 

Ahead to day three

Back to day one

Dozens more photos from day two

More on Gordon's Civil Rights Trip