Sojourn to the past

Elizabeth Eckford, September 1957

Sojourn to the Past is more than an extended field trip or 10-day conference. It’s a journey of shared history.

HE HAD A DREAM THAT ONE DAY HE WOULD LEAD A GROUP OF high school students, from different creeds and ethnicities, through the South, to retrace the journey taken in the 1950’s and 1960’s by Civil Rights leaders and ordinary citizens who stood together in the fight for racial equality.

He had a dream that this group of young people would begin their sojourn at Stone Mountain, Georgia, where the Ku Klux Klan was founded and where Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, the leaders of the Confederate States of America, are etched into the mountainside.

He had a dream that one day his students would have the opportunity to listen to Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech while sitting in the shadow of these Confederate leaders.

He had a dream that the sojourn would conclude on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis where Dr. King was assassinated in April of 1968 and that the students would have the chance to hear Dr. King deliver his own eulogy.

“He” is Jeff Steinberg, a former history teacher from San Francisco who is the executive director of a civil rights education program for high school students called “Sojourn to the Past.” Over the past twelve years Steinberg has taken more that 6,000 Bay Area students on an unforgettable journey to visit some of the most important places and meet some of the most important people of the Civil Rights Movement.

But don’t think of “Sojourn to the Past” as merely an extended field trip. It’s so much more than that. “This is our shared history as Americans,” Steinberg states emphatically.

The sojourn begins and ends in Georgia and Tennessee, respectively. After the trip to Stone Mountain the group heads to Atlanta where they are met by Brown-Trickey who talks to the students about the power of young people and ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Brown-Trickey was one of nine students who desegregated Little Rock’s Central High school in 1957. After the landmark Brown vs. The Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954, it took another three years for Little Rock to admit blacks into its schools.  She explains what it was like to go to school surrounded by angry mobs and the National Guard who were at the school to protect the students. During her presentation Brown-Trickey makes the connection between her experience as a member of the Little Rock Nine and today’s race relations.

“I don’t want (today’s) young people to be silent to injustice,” Brown-Tickey says. ‘They have an obligation to get involved. I want to make young people aware of personal and institutionalized racism.  I want to get young people to think and use the principles of non-violence as a way to combat racism. I need youth to think.

“On my first day at Central High, watching all that opposition, I said to myself, ‘I’m coming back no matter what.’ I want (the Sojourn students) to know that at sixteen you can take responsibility and you must. I tell (the Sojourn students), ‘I was your age when I went to Central High School and changed history. You can make a difference.’”

After Atlanta the group traveled to Alabama, the state where the hatred of blacks among some whites was so intense that the Ku Klux Klan forged alliances with local law enforcement and Governor George Wallace’s office to kill civil rights workers.

Steinberg started each morning of the 10-day sojourn with a classroom style lecture to give some historical context and background for what they’d experience that day.

On their morning in Selma, the students learned the significance of Sunday, March 7, 1965, the day when Lewis and a group of 600 gathered, intending to march to the state capitol in Montgomery, to protest voting rights violations, which made it nearly impossible for blacks to register to vote. Lewis led the march but as the group crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Alabama State Troopers incited a riot by using nightsticks and tear gas to push back the marchers. Lewis’s skull was fractured after being hit in the head several times by the police during the melee. That day became known as Bloody Sunday.

The Sojourn students learned that another march to Montgomery began two weeks later. That march was led by Dr. King and included members of the clergy, 8,000 marchers, 2,000 soldiers from the United States Army and 1,900 members of Alabama’s National Guard. The fifty-mile trip between Selma and Montgomery took four days and by the time Dr. King and his followers reached the state capitol the number of marchers had grown to more than 25,000.

These marches made such an impact that less than five months later President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, which made discriminatory voting practices illegal.

After the classroom lecture the students took a walking tour of the city. Congressmen Lewis led the students on a mini-march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and described the events of Bloody Sunday.  Joanne Bland, the co-founder of the Journeys for the Soul museum led the group through other parts of Selma. Bland and her sister were among the 600 marchers on Bloody Sunday. Her sister was severely beaten by state troopers and as the melee wound down Bland found herself in her sister’s lap.

As Bland lay on her sister she felt drops of moisture drip hit her face. “I thought, ‘My God, my sister is crying.’ But they weren’t tears, it was blood.”

During her tour Bland shared with the group that she began her civil rights activism at the tender age of eight when she attended a freedom and voters’ rights meeting held by Dr. King.

The Selma that the students experienced during their walking tours was very different than the city that existed nearly fifty years ago. The city has new museums that chronicle the history of the Civil Rights movement. One is the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute whose mission is to collect and document the struggle for voting rights. The exhibits are diverse and present a fair and balanced recount of that turbulent time in history. There are exhibits documenting Dr. King’s legacy and Non Violence and there are other exhibits that trace the history of the Ku Klux Klan and Sheriff Jim Clark, the man who ordered the police attacks on Bloody Sunday.

After their walking tour through Selma, the students were bussed to Montgomery, on Interstate-80, the same route taken by Dr. King and his followers on their way to the state capitol in March 1965. When the students arrived they found a city that had also experienced significant change since the 1960s. The group visited the Civil Rights Memorial Center, which was designed by Maya Lin, the same architect who designed the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC. The center offers a 20-minute film about the Civil Rights Movement, interactive exhibits and the Wall of Tolerance, where the names of more than 500,000 people who have pledged to take a stand against hatred are digitally displayed.

The group’s last stop in Alabama was Birmingham, where retaliation against blacks was almost a daily occurrence. In fact, the early 1960s, Birmingham was the center of so much violence it became known as “Bombingham.”

Students visited the site where, on September 15, 1963, members of the Ku Klux Klan placed sticks of dynamite underneath the stairs of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Once the congregation had settled in for services the Klansmen detonated the bomb resulting in the deaths of four girls: Denise McNair (age 11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Cynthia Wesley (14).

Even after eyewitnesses identified those responsible for the bombing, it still took more than a decade to bring them to justice.

Chris McNair, whose daughter Denise died on that day, speaks to the Sojourn students and urges them to remain compassionate. “I cry sometimes about people who would bomb a place that is supposed to be safe and holy but let me tell you about hate.  If you allow it to absorb you it cuts off your creativity and you (only) end up punishing yourself.”

By the time he was through recounting his memories of that Sunday morning in 1963 many of his listeners were in tears, unable to comprehend how the Klan could harbor so much hatred towards blacks. Many sought out McNair for comfort and to apologize for the tragedy that took his daughter’s life.

In Little Rock the students have the opportunity to meet arguably the most famous member of the Little Rock Nine, Elizabeth Eckford.  History books incorrectly state that Eckford arrived alone at Central High because she didn’t have a phone and didn’t receive a message sent the night before informing members of the Little Rock Nine to meet at specific location where the National Guard would escort them to school.

In reality, the other eight students never met at a central location. They were taken to school by their parents and Eckford rode to Central High on a public bus. She tells Sojourn students that she didn’t think twice about taking the bus, “I asked myself, ‘Where am I going?’  All I’m doing is so simple.  I’m just going to school.”

Her arrival at Central High School was frozen in time in a photograph taken by Arkansas Democrat staffer Wilmer Counts. Eckford arrived at the school alone in a neatly pressed white dress and wearing sunglasses. An angry mob of 150 people shouting racial epitaphs, cussing, spitting and calling for her to be lynched followed close behind. Eckford calls the walk from the bus stop to school the longest block of her life. She found herself unable to enter the school so she continued walking down the street.  Eckford arrived at a drug store and tried to enter to get away from the mob that was following her.  The store owner locked the door when he saw Eckford coming.

Eckford meets each Sojourn group in the Central High School auditorium and tells the students how the history books have gotten her story wrong. During the question and answer session she often asked if she ever considered suicide.

“When I was at Central it had 1800 students,” says Eckford. “Do you know how many white kids reached out to me?  Two.  They made me feel human.  You have power.  Do you know how much power you have to help somebody?  When you see a student being bullied or terrorized in class and you share your humanity with them, you know what you might do for that person?  You might be someone’s hope someday.

“When you reach out to someone who is being bullied or terrorized what you do for that person might help someone live one more day. That’s power. You have the power to keep each other alive.  You have more power than your parents your teachers.”

The students are asked to stand in front of the school and make a commitment to themselves. Says Steinberg to the students, “Take it in, look all around and before you write let the spirit of history be your guide.”

It’s been fifty-five years since she took the longest walk and Eckford still suffers from post traumatic stress disorder. She considers Sojourn students part of her on-going recovery efforts.

Sojourn to the Past is so much more than bus rides, classroom lectures, monuments, museums and walking tours. Its real value – its unique value – are the people who give of their time to share their experiences.

Reena Evers, the daughter of Medgar Evers, the Jackson, Mississsippi NAACP field secretary who was gunned down in his own driveway in 1963 by a Klansman, says it’s important to show the Sojourn students that there’s a human element to what they’re learning. “(I tell the students) the Civil Rights Movement is not something that happened 100 years ago. I was part of it and I’m right here in front of you.”

Evers also gives her time to the Sojourn students, often traveling with them, without revealing who she is (she uses her married name) until they reach her parent’s house.  There she talks about the assassination of her father and how it forever changed her family. Once the students discover who she is, it becomes clear that these events were real and their life decisions will have a lasting effect on others.

Students who have experienced Sojourn of the Past have said they feel like they formed a bond with others who have taken this trip and better appreciate how voices that speak together can be much more powerful than one that speaks alone.

Sojourn to the Past isn’t without its challenges. While there is no shortage of people who want to provide help and support, Steinberg says the real challenge is keeping the program funded.  With the down economy, corporations and foundations are cutting back on grants to programs like Sojourn to the Past and it’s becoming more difficult each year to keep the program going. “When those who were directly involved with the Civil Rights Movement are no longer here, who’s going to continue the legacy if we don’t know the stories?” Before that can happen, however, Steinberg spends much of his time raising funds (and that’s in addition to making presentations to more than 25,000 students annually).

So what keeps Steinberg going despite all of the challenges?  Perhaps it’s the words Dr. King spoke as he delivered his own eulogy, “If I can help somebody as I pass along, if I can cheer somebody with a well song, if I can show somebody he’s traveling wrong, then my living will not be in vain.” One+