My husband and I have a new understanding, one that deeply moved our hearts and forever impacted our souls, following a civil rights-focused trip in April through Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham, and Memphis. We journeyed for four days with 30 University of North Carolina alumni. For some of the time, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch provided riveting accounts of courage by thousands of our country’s Black citizens who endured unfathomable cruelty and abuse during the civil rights era.

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During this experience, we gained a new understanding of the deeply entrenched structures that crippled prospects for Black Americans from 1619 forward – 250 years of slavery, then eighty years of Jim Crow (including lawless violence against Black Americans), the brief flowering of the civil rights movement and hope for racial justice in the early 60s, but then the advent of draconian incarceration policies that continue disproportionately to affect Black Americans. 

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As for public policy, the past 40 years have seen the erosion of civil rights protections by courts and legislatures. The establishment of Juneteenth as a national holiday at least keeps alive the ideals of Black liberation and racial justice in a society that has never come to terms with its history of racism.

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As an educator and advocate for social and emotional learning, I thought I understood the "basic" history but actually, I was seeking to be shaped by a "collision of my heart and mind", to quote one of our guides. It is vital for me to understand the roots of centuries-old racism in our country – how discrimination and inequity suck the life out of families and continue to be faced by people of color in our country daily. I had hoped this trip would help me become a more informed and compassionate educator. It far surpassed what I could imagine. 

I was shocked at how inadequate my own education of the era had been as a child and how many names of unsung heroes and images, accounts, and first-hand sources were never brought forward in my history classes. The story of the civil rights movement is not confined to the South.  As a child growing up in Chicago, I was unaware of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s efforts to bring the civil rights movement to my city, where he focused on racially imbalanced schools, housing discrimination, and police brutality.  I was also unaware that the tiny fingerprints of enslaved children could be found on many of the bricks that were molded out of clay and used to build much of Manhattan.

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I share the following recollections from my trip with the hope that they will inspire you and your students to make this journey, read firsthand accounts, and advocate for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging for all human beings.

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In Memphis, I was deeply moved by the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, especially when I watched a video of Fannie Lou Hamer’s speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.  She spoke of the incredible abuse she endured at the hands of the police.  What struck me, though, was that a critically important part of her audio was actually silenced when it was aired on national TV. That part incriminated the white police as she described in detail the beating and humiliation she experienced. I was grateful for the museum’s integrity and the powerful force of her defiance in the uncensored version. 

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After listening to accounts of Rosa Parks’s bus boycott in Montgomery, right outside the very church where Dr. King had rallied people to organize, I was then stunned to see what had become of the strong Black neighborhood that had supported the boycott. It was torn apart and in disarray. I tried to imagine the huge sacrifices individuals made each morning to get to work to support their families while avoiding public transportation in order to stand up for their right to sit anywhere on the bus. Today the neighborhood is cut through with a freeway, and its historic vitality is largely gone. Our tour guide, Wanda, is working hard to bring back the community there. It was the strength of the community and local churches that made MLK and Rosa Parks’s vision for change possible. I think of how our schools are today’s places for connection and change, and I am hopeful that each of us as educators, together with IFSEL’s vision for “a world where empathy abounds and all people thrive”  will help restore and renew our humanity.

The indignities I saw in story after story of inhumanity are excruciatingly depicted in letters, videos, displays, and reenacted holograms of enslaved people, as well as stories of tremendous bravery and sacrifice. These were sometimes too difficult to take in. I want to return there and be an even better witness. Overwhelmed, I found myself weeping with one of our tour guides. She, too, had to leave the incredibly moving Legacy Museum in Montgomery, saying, “I’ve toured this 20 times, and today, it is bringing me to my knees.” I was deeply humbled to experience our connection that day, and I will never forget it.

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My husband and I were inspired by the work of the Equal Justice Initiative, founded in Montgomery and led by social activist Bryan Stevenson, an esteemed attorney who has dedicated his life to advancing racial justice. While his offices are bomb-protected like a fortress, they stand as tall as the reach of the words from the Declaration of Independence that his work embodies: " All men are created equal.”

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At the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, quotes appealing to our highest selves hang amidst copper monuments suspended from the ceiling, representing the 4,400 Black Americans who were lynched in 800 counties across the U.S. between 1877 and 1950. We looked for counties where we had been in our lives and found them. It felt devastating.

Finally, and with enormous awe and reverence, we entered The Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, a new 17-acre memorial park by the shores of the Alabama River in Montgomery, officially opening on Juneteenth that brought together beauty and hope. A giant hand sculpted out of metal is full of soil and lifting up a tree; towering sculptures of magnificent Black women and children line the pathways along the river; and an enormous wall inscribed with the surnames of more than 122,000 persons from the 1870 Census whose ancestors had had their names taken from them at the start of slavery. 

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We went from Montgomery to Birmingham.  I shall treasure the inspiration of Rev. Dr. Carolyn Maull McKinstry, who was an eyewitness to the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four young girls on September 15, 1963. Rev. McKinstry narrowly escaped injury, but the emotional trauma has haunted her life. Despite the horrific bombing that Sunday morning, no one around her talked about it or the evil at its source – not before the bombing and not after.  After 25 years, she began to truly process her experience of racial hatred and violence and has written a heroic and wise book, While the World Watched.

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And then there is the I Am a Man Plaza in Memphis, where the names of 1,300 sanitation workers are etched into a wall to mark their courage in striking for safe working conditions and fair wages. This is the cause that Dr. King was championing in April 1968 when he was assassinated.  

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“You are a part of this now,” the docent in the plaza offered.

Yes, I am.

And I have changed. 

Thankfully, I have my husband with whom to share these images and emotions.

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For Juneteenth, I’m writing to share with you that what we wish is for every single American to take this journey - for seeing and being there to be an essential part of every middle and high school education.

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Walk the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where marchers moved on Bloody Sunday; allow the pain and resilience behind the suffering and truth to fill us up and move us all forward with hope, knowledge, a commitment to reconciliation, and real, lasting justice.

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Janice and Steve’s recommended reading list:

A More Beautiful and Terrible History: the Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History, by Jeanne Theoharis

Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson

How the Word is Passed, by Clint Smith

While the World Watched, by Carolyn McKinstry