By Jenna Luginbill, for the Chippewa Valley Post
It’s now three months in the past but January’s eye-opening UW-Eau Claire adventure known as the Civil Rights Pilgrimage is still fresh in my mind.
To see additional photos from the January Civil Rights Pilgrimage, click here.
This trip is an educational opportunity focused on the roots of the civil rights movement, and its efforts still today. Back in 2007 Jodi Thesing-Ritter, the Executive Director for Diversity and Inclusion at UW-EC, was presented with the idea for an alternative spring break experience that would teach UW-Eau Claire students about the civil rights movement.
The idea has since been expanded to provide trips both during the Winterim period in January and during spring break.
Thesing-Ritter said she hopes that everyone who participates in this trip is “able to understand the systemic roots of racism. I hope they resolve to upset those systems of racism in their communities so that someday our world will be a more just and equitable place.”
On the trip this year, I learned more about the civil rights movement in those 10 days than I did in all the prior 19 years. This trip completely immersed me in the civil rights movement, and because of this I gained so much more knowledge out of each day. When you are surrounded by something all day for 10 days, you can’t try to ignore it.
Trip led to awareness of issues
Because of the awareness of civil rights issues that I gained on this trip, I am much more aware of how I choose to live each day and what I can do to change the institutions our society has put in place to give many people unfair advantages over others.
A total of 112 participants can be taken on the trip each time and to date 1,840 people have taken part in the Civil Rights Pilgrimage. The January trip included students from UW-EC, UW-La Crosse, and the University of Winchester in England.
Each Civil Rights Pilgrimage is different, as the design of the trip is planned and led by student coordinators. On the trip this winter we visited 10 different cities starting in Atlanta, GA and ending in Memphis, TN.
Growing up in the Midwest in a predominantly white community, Martin Luther King Jr. is one of the few civil rights activists that I learned about during my pre-college education. Being able to see the many places he visited throughout the movement and engage with people who worked alongside him, was an unforgettable opportunity.
Two of the many activists with whom we interacted were Charles Person, a freedom rider, and Joanne Bland, one of the young activists who participated in “Bloody Sunday,” the act of around 600 people who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in an attempt to begin the Selma to Montgomery march.
On that day in 1965, state troopers violently attacked the peaceful demonstrators in an attempt to stop the march for voting rights. Bland also participated in “Turn Around Tuesday,” an event two days after “Bloody Sunday” where approximately 2,500 protestors set off on a second march but were stopped by a temporary restraining order that kept them from marching all the way to Montgomery.
The Legacy Museum
Every speaker we heard on the Civil Rights Pilgrimage had the same message, “we will overcome”, and I, too, agree that we will overcome someday. During the first leg of the trip, we visited four cities in Alabama including: Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Montgomery, and Selma. The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, in Montgomery, was one of the most stimulating experiences due to the nature of the information presented there.
This museum opened to the public on April 26, 2018 and is located on the site of a former warehouse where enslaved black people were imprisoned. It is found halfway between an historic slave market and main river dock and train station where tens of thousands of enslaved people were trafficked.
The Legacy Museum dramatizes the evolution of enslavement of African Americans to the current mass incarceration that affects approximately one in three black men/boys who are projected to go to jail or prison in their lifetime. One of the exhibits includes testaments from persons currently experiencing incarceration.
This part of the museum caught my attention because life as a college student often feels separated from the world off campus. Before this trip I rarely, if ever, thought about what life is like for those experiencing incarceration and those who are involved with the criminal justice system.
The Whitney Plantation
Halfway through the trip we spent two days in New Orleans, LA where we visited the Whitney Plantation, a museum that is one of 26 sites featured on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail. On the grounds there are various buildings from former plantations in the area as well as original art and imaginative exhibits commissioned by founder John Cummings.
At this museum we received a name tag with a story about an enslaved person who had lived on the Whitney Plantation. This helped me imagine – in every corner of the plantation- what life would’ve been like for the individual on my nametag.
The majority of the Civil Rights Pilgrimage revolves around the civil rights movement that started in the 1960s and is still ongoing today. Taking a day to acknowledge where and how this movement began was important to help me remember why this trip exists today.
One of the imaginative art exhibits in this museum is known as The Field of Angels. This memorial is dedicated to the 2,200 Louisiana enslaved children who died before their third birthday.
Their names are inscribed on granite slabs along with quotes illustrating their everyday life on the plantations. In the middle of the field where this exhibit is located, there is a sculpture of a black angel carrying a baby to Heaven, which brought me to tears when I first laid my eyes on it.
Exhausting but worthwhile
While visiting a museum each day can become exhausting, this trip gives any participant a sense of what went on during the civil rights movement and why the progress that we have made thus far is not the end.
A part of this trip that wasn’t an exhibit or museum but was influential to my experience was the physical journey we took. We started the Civil Rights Pilgrimage in Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthplace and ended it at the very motel where he was assassinated.
For anyone interested, you can look forward to the 2020 winter and spring breaks for this opportunity. The trip costs $700, which includes all transportation, museum admissions, speakers, a few meals and lodging. Students who would like to take part in this trip but may lack the financial means can pursue scholarship opportunities through the Blugold Financial Aid Office.
Jenna Luginbill is finishing her first year at UW-Eau Claire, where she is enrolled in the Honors Program. She is a 2018 graduate of Memorial High School.
Note: the home page photo shows a memorial to the “Little Rock Nine,” the nine African-American students who integrated Central High School in 1957 under the protection of federal troops and despite the opposition of Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus. The statues of the students are positioned as if they were approaching the Little Rock city hall. (Jenna Luginbill photo)
If you enjoyed this story, please remember there were costs involved in producing it. We have no paywall, and we rely on our readers to help us meet the costs of reporting community news and information you often won’t find elsewhere.
An annual CVPost membership is $50, but contributions of any amount also matter. Please consider helping community supported journalism survive by clicking the Donate button below.