Day 5: Oxford, MS - Indianola, MS

Miles today: 200
Total: 1300

Mississippi is always a crucial part of the course. By the time we get here, students feel comfortable with each other as well as with the basic trajectory of the CR movement, both of which are necessary to dig into Mississippi. For anyone interested in learning more about the state, I highly recommend James Cobb's The Most Southern Place on Earth.

After spending the night on the wonderful Oxford Square [Square Books is one of the best bookstores I have ever browsed, and I'm quite the connoisseur], we headed over to the University of Mississippi. The university was founded in 1848 to educate slaveholders, who seemed to otherwise be going off to college and questioning slavery. It carries this legacy of white supremacy with it today, as do many of our institutions. James Meredith integrated the university in 1962, and his first day on campus led to a riot in which 2 were murdered and dozens more injured. The federalized national guard ensured his admittance.

At the university, we spoke to Susan Glisson, executive director of the Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, and two of her student interns. They outlined their work both in the community and on campus. Outside of the university, activists at the institute have helped communities commemorate Civil Rights sites in different areas of the state (we saw several new postings related to Emmett Till today that were new from just last year), guaranteed that civil rights history is now required to be taught in Mississippi public schools (through legislation passed in 2006), and assembled a team to prosecute those responsible for the deaths of the three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, MS over fifty years later. Finally, they are in the midst of creating a Mississippi Truth and Reconciliation Committee in the vein of the South African one. On campus, they are working on a series of initiatives to better integrate the campus socially and to challenge racist traditions that the university and many of its students continue to practice. We all left feeling inspired and also informed about ways to bring these actions into our own communities.

We spent the remainder of the day touring the Mississippi Delta. We toured the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale (a local museum that is always a student favorite) and ate next door at Morgan Freeman's blues club, Ground Zero. We visited the Sumner courthouse where Emmett Till's trial was held, Fannie Lou Hamer's gravesite and memorial garden in Ruleville, MS, and blues-related murals in Tutwiler, among other sites. To learn more about blues in the Delta, check out Alan Lomax's The Land Where the Blues Began and listen to the recordings he made in the 1930s and 1940s that preserved the work of a generation of blues men and women in the Delta.

Day Four: Memphis, TN - Oxford, MS

Miles traveled: 150
Miles total: 1050

We devoted most of today to our tour of the National Civil Rights Museum at the site of the Lorraine Motel, where King was murdered on April 4, 1968. It's certainly the most comprehensive museum of the movement; I only wish that we had had time to include other great Memphis museums related to Civil Rights, such as the Rock'N'Soul museum.

The National CR Museum provides an excellent overview of the traditionally-defined trajectory of the movement. Students always express frustration over the lack of women and gender-based analysis in the museum (they are my students, after all!). They also quickly realize that it portrays the "hotspots" of the movements (the events that received national media attention) and tells little about other areas. They also quickly see that the very site of the museum means that MLK will be (overly?) emphasized; they always like to point out the mere passing mention given to Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and other Black Power-related movements.

The museum contains a rotating photography gallery, and this year's exhibit was stunningly powerful. The exhibit, "Chilean Photography and Human Rights," depicts images from the military dictatorship of Gen. Pinochet in Chile from 1973-1989. They represent a striking picture of life and strife under Pinochet's rule.

Also new this year was the short documentary The Witness. This half-hour film creates a real emotional and intellectual connection to MLK's assassination. It makes clear his commitment to economic equality and does not shy away from the fact that he was killed in large part because he was taking action on the issue of the redistribution of wealth in American society in order for everyone to be able to live a life of dignity.

Day 3: Nashville, TN - Memphis, TN

Miles today: 250
Total: 950

We began the morning at the Civil Rights Reading Room in the Nashville Public Library. The room houses a variety of Civil Rights resources, and large pictures from the movement in early 1960s Nashville envelop the room. Here we met Mr. Donzel Johnson, a World War II veteran who was studying at Fisk during the time period of the Nashville sit-ins. He shuttled those participating in the sit-ins from Fisk to the downtown lunch counters and back. He also gave us some interesting perspectives on his views of non-violence as a strategy at the time (he chose, for example, not to directly participate in the sit-ins because he did not adhere to a strategy of non-violence). He was joined by a fellow Fisk alum, Mr. Rucker, and together, they provided a wealth of knowledge and inspiration.

We then walked to the 5th Ave Arcade where the sit-ins took place [a plaque in disrepair that marked the site during our first visit has been gone the past two years] and took some time to tour the campus of Fisk, where we saw, among other things, a series of murals by the famous Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas [pictured here].

After driving to Memphis, we talked with Chuck McKinney at Rhodes College - another one of our favorites from years' past - about ways in which the narrative of the Civil Rights movement gets truncated and simplified, and he encouraged students to think critically about the many facets of the movement. We ended the day with a plate of barbeque ribs at the famous Rendevous.

Day Two: Knoxville, TN - Clinton, TN - Nashville, TN

Miles today: 250
Total: 700

Today, we met with one of our favorite speakers, Cynthia Fleming. Cynthia has met with us every year of the trip, and she's always a student favorite. Cynthia graduated from Knoxville College in the 1960s was active in the Black Power movement. She does an excellent job, among other things, of situating the role of the HBCUs in the Civil Rights movement and talking about gender dynamics in the Black Power movement. A professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, she just completed her newest book called Yes We Can? It chronicles black leadership from the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr in 1968 to Obama's election this past fall. She based it on dozens of oral histories that she conducted over the past five years; it will be published this fall.

After a quick lunch, we made our way to the Green McAdoo Cultural Center in Clinton, TN - a new stop for us. The center chronicles the desegregation of Clinton high school, the first public high school in Tennessee to do so. It offers details on how desegregation played out in a small town of 4.000. The National Guard had to guarantee the entrance of the Clinton 12 into the school [see accompanying picture of the tank] given the mob that had gathered. While at the center, we met with Jerry Shattuck, a white student who had been the captain of the football team and senior class president during the 1956-57 school year when the school desegregated.

We then drove to Nashville where we had our first of many discussions, and the themes that emerge each year during the course - non-violence as both strategy and ideology, museum analysis of which stories are told and why, the role of MLK, and grassroots activism/organizing strategies - are already some of the most important questions that students are pondering.

Day One: Richmond, VA - Knoxville, TN

Miles today: 450
Total: 450

After an introductory lecture this morning, we hit the road for one of our longest driving days. In the past, we have used this day to visit the Robert Russa Moton museum in Farmville, VA. While we didn't make it there this year due to time constraints, I recommend it to folks who live in central Virginia. It chronicles the 1951 student strikes when students walked out of classes to protest second-class facilities at their high school (which serves as the museum today). It also commemorates Prince Edward County's role as one of the five cases that made up the monumental 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which desegregated public schools. Finally, it recounts the county's decision to close schools for five years rather than integrate. It's especially powerful when paired with talks by local activists from the 1950s who still live in the area.

After

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