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A Journey, Not a Tour
Submitted by Nguyen Weeks on Fri, 07/13/2007 - 5:03pm.
This sounded great to me, as I had never had a chance to really visit the South in any capacity other than Florida, and I thought it would be good to familiarize myself with this part of my country, and get to see the historic and exciting landmarks of the civil rights movement. I jumped on the opportunity. I had absolutely no idea of what I was getting into.
My dad, my friend Ari Brouwer, and I embarked for Atlanta the Friday before the Civil Rights Journey began, and arrived Saturday. I was ready to see the sights that, for some unbelievably naïve reason, I thought I had a good understanding of. After spending the next day at Ebenezer Baptist Church and the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Center, the concept of understanding was blown thoroughly out of my mind.
I don’t believe that I had ever felt as humble as I did walking in the shadows of these civil rights giants, and learning of the thousands of individuals who played such a pivotal role in the movement, especially the children. Also, I met Dr. King's sister, which was almost surreal.
Throughout the trip, I continued to read and hear about more and more people who had contributed to the movement, including Nelson Malden, the barber of Dr. King. His stories of the Montgomery bus boycott and his firsthand experiences with Dr. King were amazing to hear. In fact, from the mayor of Selma, James Perkins, to Sam Walker at the Voting Rights Museum in Selma, to Greg Atchinson of Montgomery, every story opened a wealth of new knowledge to me that my school curriculum seemed to left out.
Although the whole trip was amazing, the one experience that stood out to me the most were our nightly meetings with Kimberly Richards of the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond. When I first heard about these meetings, I figured they were sort of something we would endure at night in order to get to the next day of sight seeing. This may have been the worst judgment I made all trip. Miss Richards showed us all ideas of race and racism in this country that I had never touched. She showed us the system of racism in this country, one that I had really thought was over.
No one had ever explained to me before that our nation was founded on the ideology of race in order to sustain the power of Europeans. She explained the racial tensions we all feel, and it was truly enlightening. For me, who had always thought that of course I was not a racist, racism just comes from ignorant people and the KKK, I realized how wrong I really was.
If you get the opportunity to go on this journey, do it. You will come back with tools to attempt to achieve racial equity in your own communities, and knowledge you may have not known was out there. It truly was a "Civil Rights Journey."
Written by Nick Bloom, a participant in the fourth annual Freedom Summer: A Civil Rights Journey.
It was about a year ago that I first learned about Freedom Summer: A Civil Rights Journey, a JustWorks camp of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. I read the description of the program after my parents first mentioned it to me, and I was intrigued. As a participant, I would have the opportunity to go visit all the sights of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, and work in one of the local communities that we would be visiting.This sounded great to me, as I had never had a chance to really visit the South in any capacity other than Florida, and I thought it would be good to familiarize myself with this part of my country, and get to see the historic and exciting landmarks of the civil rights movement. I jumped on the opportunity. I had absolutely no idea of what I was getting into.
My dad, my friend Ari Brouwer, and I embarked for Atlanta the Friday before the Civil Rights Journey began, and arrived Saturday. I was ready to see the sights that, for some unbelievably naïve reason, I thought I had a good understanding of. After spending the next day at Ebenezer Baptist Church and the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Center, the concept of understanding was blown thoroughly out of my mind.
I don’t believe that I had ever felt as humble as I did walking in the shadows of these civil rights giants, and learning of the thousands of individuals who played such a pivotal role in the movement, especially the children. Also, I met Dr. King's sister, which was almost surreal.
Throughout the trip, I continued to read and hear about more and more people who had contributed to the movement, including Nelson Malden, the barber of Dr. King. His stories of the Montgomery bus boycott and his firsthand experiences with Dr. King were amazing to hear. In fact, from the mayor of Selma, James Perkins, to Sam Walker at the Voting Rights Museum in Selma, to Greg Atchinson of Montgomery, every story opened a wealth of new knowledge to me that my school curriculum seemed to left out.
Although the whole trip was amazing, the one experience that stood out to me the most were our nightly meetings with Kimberly Richards of the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond. When I first heard about these meetings, I figured they were sort of something we would endure at night in order to get to the next day of sight seeing. This may have been the worst judgment I made all trip. Miss Richards showed us all ideas of race and racism in this country that I had never touched. She showed us the system of racism in this country, one that I had really thought was over.
No one had ever explained to me before that our nation was founded on the ideology of race in order to sustain the power of Europeans. She explained the racial tensions we all feel, and it was truly enlightening. For me, who had always thought that of course I was not a racist, racism just comes from ignorant people and the KKK, I realized how wrong I really was.
If you get the opportunity to go on this journey, do it. You will come back with tools to attempt to achieve racial equity in your own communities, and knowledge you may have not known was out there. It truly was a "Civil Rights Journey."
