OUR RIDING THE FREEDOM TRAIL JOURNEY

In October of 2018, a racially diverse group of 44 of us departed Georgetown by bus to undertake a civil rights journey to Selma and Montgomery, Alabama. My wife and I had traveled to Montgomery earlier that year to attend the Equal Justice Initiative Summit and the opening of the National Memorial to Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum. From this transformative experience, we returned home with the idea of inviting others in our community to take this journey to learn about the civil rights struggle commemorated in venues in both Selma and Montgomery. Within four months we had organized and advertised a four-day journey that we called “Riding the Freedom Trail”.

We wanted to provide folks in our community who were concerned about racial equity and justice issues today with the opportunity we had to visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (lynching memorial) and of the Legacy Museum: from Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, along with opportunities to explore other historical sites from the civil rights era and to learn about the challenges that come from working towards racial justice in America. We had been deeply and emotionally moved by seeing the lynching sculptures, the jars of sacred soil from lynching sites around the South, engaging the video reminders of the 1960’s civil rights movement, and hearing the stories about those who made sacrifices for freedom at hallowed places like the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, the Rosa Parks Museum, the Freedom Riders Museum, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the other memorials to the civil rights movement. 

After developing the itinerary for this Riding the Freedom Trail journey, reserving motel rooms, and chartering a bus, we set out to invite anyone interested to come to an informational gathering to learn about participating in this event. In an effort to include high school and college students in this journey, we asked friends and churches in our area to provide scholarships for those who could not otherwise afford to go. Thanks to their generosity we were able to include several high school students and three college students along with the working and retired adults who signed up for the trip. When some whites in our community asked us “why would you want to go see such tragic things?” we liken it to visiting a Holocaust Museum – “you go to remember, so as not to repeat such history.” It is our contention that if one does not acknowledge the past injustices, then we cannot truly have racial reconciliation today. We also set aside time on the day-long bus trip to build relationships among the racially-mixed and intergenerational travelers, most of whom did not know one another, and to prepare them for what we would see and encounter in this educational experience. We were also intentional about setting aside time each evening to debrief as a group what we had experienced from each day’s events. Our group shared the bonds that come from learning, remembering, and feeling the painful injustices, the deep commitments, and the inspirational acts of those who paved the way for racial freedom during the civil rights era.

The first full day we visited the National Park’s Selma Interpretive Center and listened to the stories of Annie Pearl Avery, an original member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who still lives in Selma. The college students and school youth on our trip recognized that they were sitting amongst a living civil rights legend and were inspired by Annie Pearl’s parting words, “You’ve got to vote. It’s important. People died for that right. You’ve got to vote.” While in Selma we stopped at the Brown Memorial Chapel and we marched across the infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge, singing together “We Shall Overcome”. We then had a quiet reflective ride from Selma to Montgomery, tracing the same 54-mile roadway of the original march. When we reached Montgomery we made stops at the State Capital building to learn about its memorials to Confederate heritage, and to visits to the Rosa Parks Museum, Freedom Rides Museum, and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) Civil Rights Museum all of which provided an abundant wealth of history and opportunities to walk back in time.

After spending the night in Montgomery, we spend the next morning attending a worship service at the King Memorial Dexter Avenue Baptist Church before visiting the National Memorial to Peace and Justice and then the Legacy Museum on the history of enslavement, the Jim Crow era, and segregation. Adding significant meaning to our journey was the presence of Mrs. Johnnye Patterson of Taylor and her daughter, who are the surviving relatives of Mr. Caldwell Washington, one of the lynched victims in the 1930s in Texas. We also had an opportunity to meet with several attorneys from the Equal Justice Initiative, who originally documented the lynching, to hear their reflections on the memorial and the Legacy Museum. Connecting family histories to these memorials added to the solemnity and impact of these visits. To capture our Riding the Freedom Trail experience we had invited two film students from the University of Texas to join us to document the entire journey and to include interviews with each of the group, collecting their reflections of the trip and personal stories of experiencing racism. They provided us with a 4o minute video of this Riding the Freedom Trail experience to share with others who might be interested in what we learned from this journey to the places where civil rights history had been made.  Here is a link to a short video that was produced from our trip to Selma and Montgomery in 2018-