Day four of the Civil Rights Trip

 

Atlanta was wet and windy this morning.

Students had been asking their teachers, and each other, about practical steps they could take to support social justice efforts today.

 

 

 

This morning, they borrowed a room at Morehouse College to take the discussion further.

In small groups, they discussed scenarios cut from a copy of Speak Up! Responding to Everyday Bigotry, purchased at the Southern Poverty Law Center on Monday.

Their teachers pushed them to identify specific action they could take to interrupt - or prevent - the hurtful situations described in each case study.

 

 

The conversations continued on the bus.

 

 

Students voiced reflections, and a teacher read aloud from the coverage of the recent Justice Department report on policing in Ferguson.

 

 

At the heart of the report was a litany of stories about modern debtors’ prisons, and selective enforcement of laws, the same dynamics that Gordon eighth graders had been questioning SPLC staff about on Monday.

 

 

The final stop of the trip was a new one - the Center for Human and Civil Rights.

 

 

It’s an ambitious museum.

 

 

It was jarring to see its dazzling and exhaustive retelling of the Civil Rights Movement, after walking the streets of Selma and Montgomery.

 

 

The generous audio-visuals included vintage images from locations the students had been throughout the week.

 

 

It also included voices that had not been heard all week, including a punishing barrage of video clips of pro-segregationists from the 1960s.

 

 

Much of the museum was given over to a global vision of the present struggle for human rights.

 

 

There are many Gordon third graders who will be affirmed to see that the UN Convention for the Rights of Children was included.

 

 

The presentation of the intersecting social justice movements paralleled some of what Rev.  and Mrs. Graetz, and Rev. Morris, had spoken about the day before.

 

 

  

 

The past-and-present of the museum, and the pragmatism of the conversations at Morehouse, gave a fitting end to this year’s trip.

 

 

 

But it was the bus driver, Herb Brown, who delivered the valedictory for the class of 2015.

Mr. Brown has been Gordon’s bus driver on eight of the fourteen Civil Rights Trips. 

This morning at the airport, he insisted on keeping the students on the bus a few extra minutes so he could share his thoughts with them (full video above).

After thanks, and tributes, and inside jokes, he summed up a message the students had been hearing all week:

It is easy not to care.

It takes energy, and a little more effort, to care.

Keep putting forth that effort.