Nothing Can Be Changed Until It Is Faced: A UMassD Civil Rights trip to Alabama
In 2019, 2023 and again this past March, UMD Honors students joined Professor Santow for a civil rights spring break trip to Georgia and Alabama. The students are all enrolled in a course that explores the black Freedom Movement of the 1950s and 60s. For each destination (Atlanta GA, Birmingham AL, Montgomery AL, Selma AL) they visited historic sites, museums, parks, and monuments, and met veterans of civil rights campaigns of the 1960s — often in their own homes. History can feel abstract -- just a huge list of names, dates, and places. The trip allowed students to step outside the formal academic setting and gain an emotional understanding of the movement and the obstacles it faced to enhance and inform their intellectual understanding. Meeting ‘foot soldiers’ of the Movement, for example, reveals the psychological and moral pain that so many young black people experienced in the 1950s and 1960s under the oppressive system of Jim Crow – and that people of all races endured in their non-violent efforts to change that system. It also shows them what courage looks like, and just how much our democratic way of life sometimes depends upon it.
MacLean Campus Center 007 (Blue & Gold Room)
Carol Hansen
5089998301
chansen1@umassd.edu