The Civil Rights Trip Adult Participants  — from Baltimore City College High School, City Neighbors schools, and The Park School — started their journey on Saturday, June 22, 2024. 

Day One. We departed early (6am) from Park School, with a surprise send-off from Head of School Dan Paradis. Our first stop was Greensboro, North Carolina, where we spent several hours at the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, located in the iconic F.W Woolworth's landmark, learning more about the Civil Rights Movement. The bravery demonstrated by four Black college students from North Carolina A&T State University — David Richmond, Frank McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil — who led sit-ins at the whites-only lunch counter in Woolworth's sparked many reflections amongst our group. 

Here we are in front of the museum:

We also visited North Carolina A&T State University:

Trip participants shared thoughts when prompted with the question, "What do you think had the greatest impact on the Civil Rights Movement?" 

"The power of women and their impact on the larger movement." -- Budd-Brown

"All the many, many regular folks who took great personal risk to form collective strength." -- Martin

"The Power of History is in Telling the Truth." — Equal Justice Initiative

DAY TWO. This was a difficult day, where we reckoned with the brutal history of our country — 400+ years of slavery, racial terror, segregation, and mass incarceration. We visited the Legacy Sites, including the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the Legacy Museum.  These sites, created by the Equal Justice Initiative's Founder and Executive Director Bryan Stevenson, gave us an opportunity to deeply engage with the history of racial injustice.

We began our day at the extraordinary Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, located on the banks of the Alabama River where tens of thousands of enslaved people were trafficked.

We then visited the the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which honors more than 4,400 Black people killed in racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950. 

The afternoon was spent at the Legacy Museum, which is located on the site of a cotton warehouse where enslaved Black people were forced to labor in bondage.

DAY THREE. We started the day finishing our video on the Freedom Riders outside the Montgomery Greyhound bus station. This multi-racial coalition of people, the youngest being 19, committed to challenging segregation by riding segregated public busses from D.C. to New Orleans, charting a course through the Deep South. The groups of travelers endured multiple attacks by mobs and police forces which resisted by vandalism, assault, and incarceration. The violent response of individuals and systems garnering the response of the federal government and made national headlines, catapulting the issue of segregation into the international consciousness.

We then visited the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial to martyrs of the movement. We learned about so many folks who died, and about the current movements pushing for justice and resisting it. We then walked around Montgomery (honoring folks who marched from Selma to Montgomery to advocate for just voter protection rights), and read plaques that told the story of Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat, and the subsequent 380-day bus boycott that forced the nation to look at the injustice that segregation perpetuated. In doing so, the boycott also inspired much of the subsequent sit-ins, marches, protests, and boycotts of the 1960s. Our final stop in Montgomery was at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was a pastor. 

We then drove to Selma. A local tour guide, Columbus, shared with us the history of Selma’s role in the Civil Rights movement. He shared how his own family marched in Selma, endured the violence of Bloody Sunday when police attacked the marchers and hospitalized 70 citizens, and continued to advocate for voting rights. We rode around the town looking at landmarks and considering how  before walking across the very same Edmund Pettus Bridge (named after a KKK Grand Wizard) that the marchers walked on. After reflecting as a group, we headed to Birmingham for the night. 

Dixie Endures

by Charlie Junkins

Just a short walk up the hill from the Rosa Parks museum and statue, and across the street from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where Dr. King pastored, lies the Capitol of Alabama. There, you’ll  find the statue of Jefferson Davis, owner of enslaved people and president of the short-lived Confederate States. In Selma, I walked under a bridge named after a Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan, the name blazing in the sun. Our tour guide informed us that in a response to an effort to re-name the bridge, Alabama politicians passed a law prohibiting the re-naming of bridges older than 40 years old, and requiring a committee to approve names for newer structures. Of course, the committee was all white. Of course, the name of Edmund Pettus still emblazons the bridge. Before this trip I knew that there was still lots of active resistance to racial justice, but driving around Confederate flags in Selma, walking across a bridge that honored the KKK, and seeing slave owners honored in bronze in the Capitol, I felt much more palpably just how hard people are holding on to the Antebellum South.  

Perhaps more disturbing than iconography, Selma evidenced an economic backlash to the progress of the Civil Rights Movement. Just like in Greensboro, when businesses chose to close rather than integrate their diners, much of the (white-owned) businesses in Selma moved across the river into Selmont County. The economic effects were lasting, and our bus was deeply quiet as we drove through dilapidated neighborhoods ravaged by poverty and a recent tornado. Selma, a legendary name in the Civil Rights Movement, had paid a very literal price. I couldn’t help but think of the pattern of white flight we still see from white families and income leaving city centers like Baltimore in response to civil disruption that seeks justice. 

Even though heroes gained many political victories in the 1950s and 60s that put justice into law, economic injustice is pervasive and insidious. 

DAY FOUR. We arrived at Kelly Ingram Park, an assembly spot in Birmingham for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and others in the movement.  Student demonstrators, almost all children and high school students, were set upon with fire hoses and police dogs under the direction of Birmingham's Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connors. The park is just outside the 16th Street Baptist Church, which was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan, killing four young girls. We also visited the National Civil Rights Institute. 

A highlight of our day was having lunch with and learning from activists Richard Finley and Kim McNair Brock, whose sister Denise McNair was one of the four little girls murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. 

After visiting these sites and speaking with people involved in the movement, we spend time reflecting and sharing. Collectively processing what we have seen has been such an important part of this trip.

DAY FIVE.  Three Schools, One Vision! City Neighbors, Park School, and City College. 

We started our day at Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Jackson.  Medgar Evers was the first NAACP field secretary, and he was assassinated at his home in 1963, in front of his wife and children,.  When he built his home, the bedroom windows were deliberately small and located unusually close to the ceiling. His children slept on box springs and mattresses in order to be closer to the ground. All of this was done to protect his family from being shot while they slept.

We then spent the morning at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum  before heading out into the Delta and visiting the Rosedale Freedom Project, a nonprofit supporting young people through community building, exploration, artistic creation, and the study of social history and grassroots democracy. The Freedom Fellows, who are middle and high school students, shared their work with us — short films that students scripted, directed, and produced, environmental projects focused on local fauna, restorative justice workshops  led by Fellows, and more. We LOVED meeting the students and spending time hearing their stories.

DAY SIX. We started the day with a stop at Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School. Built in 1929, Dunbar was considered the most modern high school constructed for African Americans in the state. We then headed down the street and saw Little Rock Central High School, a whites-only school, which featured every amenity and program a student could imagine.  The stark difference between the two schools — architecture, curriculum, opportunities — was sobering.

We had the honor and privilege to meet Dr. Sybil Hampton,  who attended Central High School in 1959, two years after the Little Rock Nine integrated the school. She was the only African American student in her grade and graduated in 1962. In her three years at Central, NOT ONE PERSON WOULD SPEAK TO HER. Dr. Hampton shared her wisdom, insight, and brilliance with us for close to two hours (she is 80!). Her successful career spans too many achievements to list (read more here), but what struck many of us was her unwavering strength — grounded in her family, community, and faith — in the face of unimaginable adversity.  Dr. Hampton's experience at Central did not define her or limit her. She took what she needed from Central and rose up.

The state capital, with a scultpure honoring the Little Rock Nine.

Our last museum.... the National Civil Rights Museum, former site of the Lorraine Motel. We paid our respects at the site of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.

Closing night on Beale Street. Good food, great music, lots of laughter. 

DAY SEVEN. We are on the bus for 14+ hours, making our way back to Baltimore.