Day two of the 2015 Civil Rights Trip

 

The conversations about privilege, history and responsibility get complex on the Civil Rights Trip.

 

 

Take, for instance, this instruction from a teacher this morning: “Gordon’s eighth grade has a great reputation at the Southern Poverty Law Center, for being smart and respectful. And you have done absolutely nothing to earn that reputation. The thirteen other classes that came before you, they did that for you. So what do you think your job is today?”

 

 

The staff of the SPLC did indeed have high expectations. 

 

 

When the host discovered that one of Gordon’s students had done her research paper on the founder of the SPLC, she was asked to come up and explain the organization to her classmates… and to an small crowd of SPLC staff, who stood listening with their arms crossed.

 

 

Thus began a lively conversation that went overtime, about the SPLC’s work fighting modern debtors’ prisons, disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline, helping immigrants’ children and supporting teachers who want to bring social justice issues into their curriculum.

 

 

Outside the SPLC, students lingered at the Civil Rights Memorial.

 

 

  

 

The memorial is populated with famous words, but also lesser-known names of martyrs, of all races, genders and backgrounds, from the Civil Rights Movement.

 

 

 

On Highway 80, heading from Montgomery to Selma, a student gave a refresher on the story of Viola Luizzo.

 

 

Gordon’s bus was on the same path that she was on when she was run off the road and killed by Ku Klux Klan members in the days after the 1965 March to Montgomery.

 

 

 

The March to Montgomery had been immediately preceded by the Bloody Sunday confrontation on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge.

 

 

 

With the success of the film Selma, and the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday approaching on Saturday, the city was busier than any of the chaperones could remember seeing it.

 

 

When Sheyann Webb-Christburg met the Gordon group at Selma's Voting Rights Museum, she was buzzing with news of camera crews and the Secret Service swarming through town.

 

 

  

 

When Ms. Webb-Christburg was eight, she was fascinated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and participated in the Bloody Sunday march.

 

 

  

 

Today, she is less concerned about King’s legacy than she is about bringing the lesser-known heroes—“and SHE-roes!”—of the Selma movement into the story.

 

 

  

 

In the same vein, the museum was a mix of spectacular and mundane artifacts, from Ku Klux Klan hoods to vintage voter application forms.

 

 

  

 

At Brown A.M.E. Chapel, next door to Ms. Webb-Christburg’s childhood home, she told the stories of the mass meetings there, how she met King, her participation in the Bloody Sunday march and the subsequent, triumphant march on Montgomery.

 

 

 

At the Chapel, Ms. Webb-Christburg introduced Gordon to her friends from the Freedom Foundation and Students United, a mixed-race youth group working for justice in Selma today.

 

 

  

 

Several from the group had been classmates at Morgan Academy, a private school in Selma. 

 

 

After a quick chat with them, and a little internet research, a chaperone read the eighth graders a passage from a recent article in the Nation that made it clear that there is an ongoing, and necessary, battle over civil rights and desegregation in Selma today.

 

 

  

 

As the sun set and news crews set up, the Gordon group crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge two-by-two with Ms. Webb-Christburg, just as marchers had fifty years ago, and Gordon eighth graders have for the past fourteen years.

 

 

On the other side of the bridge, the group was met by an old friend.

 

 

 

Joanne Bland had been Gordon’s host in Selma on many previous visits, and had connected with students so deeply that she came to Gordon to speak at Commencement in 2010.

 

 

  

 

It took the students about ninety seconds to catch on to Bland’s gruff sense of humor.

 

 

  

 

The moment she had them laughing, she switched gears again, telling them of her own participation in Bloody Sunday, “the worst day of my life”.

 

 

Then she turned the tables on them, pulling students out of the crowd and demanding to hear their stories and what they had learned that day.

 

 

At the group meeting later that night, Gordon students repeatedly talked about the power of hearing directly from these women.

 

 

By talking about their own experiences, and by emphasizing the role of the foot soldiers in the movement, Webb-Christburg and Bland opened up the students to start thinking about their own role in social change. 

 

 

  

 

How would they have responded, coming over the bride to see rows of police officers? How would they characterize their own social identities, and the unearned privileges they enjoy? Now that they knew these stories of social change, how could they write themselves into their own chapters.

 

 

  

 

As the day ended, the students admitted to feeling overwhelmed. But they were also getting used to the high expectations people had for them.