Welcome!

Welcome to the blog for our third Civil Rights travel course [official title: A Course in Motion: The Civil Rights Movement in the South]. I hope you will enjoy seeing brief glimpses into our experiences as we log 3500 miles on the university van and travel across 9 states.

For those of you interested in learning more about the Civil Rights movement, I occasionally will list some of our guiding texts that we read and analyze along the way. For a general overview of the movement, I would recommend Harvard Sitkoff's The Struggle for Black Equality, especially if you are looking for a general text. Students appreciate that it's a fairly quick read. His bibliographic essay in the updated 25th anniversary edition is essential for more in-depth reading on the movement. If you are interested in exploring some of these same historical sites, consult any of these three excellent companions: Charles Cobb's On the Road to Freedom, Jim Carrier's Traveler's Guide to the Civil Rights Movement, or Townsend Davis's Weary Feet, Rested Souls (which is the one we assign and includes excellent map details for hard-to-find places). All three reside on the van's dashboard throughout our journey, and they show the wear from our two previous trips.

While we do not assign the entire texts, we draw heavily on these three essay collections for our additional readings: Ray D'Angelo's The American Civil Rights Movement: Readings & Interpretations, Romano and Raiford's The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, and Bettye Collier-Thomas's Sisters in the Struggle: African-American Women in the Civil Rights- Black Power Movement.

For those of you who may be interested in learning more about the Civil Rights movement in Virginia, I highly recommend visiting the online exhibit by that very name on the Virginia Historical Society's website.

Melissa