Civil Rights Field Trip
Thirty five years ago last week, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his non-violence movement found Birmingham, Alabama. Police Commissioner Bull Connor and the white establishment resisted the freedom marchers’ attempts to integrate with police dogs, fire hoses, beatings, and jail time. Martin Luther King wrote his famous “letter from Birmingham jail” in the margins of a newspaper smuggled into his solitary cell. Forty years ago last week, the Rev. King was assassinated in Memphis.
This weekend I will visit Atlanta and Birmingham on a civil rights field trip. This has been a trip that I have looked forward to for many years. I became especially interested in this part of American History within the last 15 years or so, as I have learned more and more about the movement through books I have read and the lessons I have taught in my Civics classes over the years. It is still unbelievable to me that this social injustice, this assault on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, this level of violence and hatred…happened in my life time. Growing up in Iowa in the 1960’s did not did not expose me to these shortcomings, a decade in which America lost its innocence as it came to grips with its past.
The Field trip is being sponsored through the American History Grant which has benefited K-12 educators in the Northfield School district and beyond for the past 3 years. There will be about 30 of us visiting several sites in the “deep south,” the birthplace of King and the birthplace of a movement. I look forward to sharing my experience.
