A Journey Into History:
The SMU Civil Rights Pilgrimage

Four decades ago, years before the vast majority of SMU students were born, their parents and grandparents struggled to establish and claim equality of opportunity and protection under the law in the United States. Race was the principal issue in this struggle. During the decade of the 60’s, places such as Jackson, Selma, Montgomery, Atlanta, Birmingham, and Memphis established themselves as memorials to the struggle for civil rights. The names of Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, Viola Liuzzo, and Chaney-Goodman-Schwerer flashed across newspaper headlines. Organizations such as the NAACP, SCLC, and SNCC, and movements such as The Delta Project, Freedom Summer, and the Selma to Montgomery March became household words for a generation who later parented current SMU students. The 1960’s were years of social upheaval in American society as the moral and legal foundations of a culture were shaken by a generation of young people who gave their lives in the struggle for equality and freedom.

In March 2009 students, faculty, and staff from Southern Methodist University will journey back in time to reclaim memory and renew respect for those who struggled to secure civil rights often taken for granted today. We will travel from Dallas in pilgrimage to those “shrines of freedom” across The South; meet persons who participated in and witnessed the struggle for freedom, and walk where these recent ancestors gave their lives. Further, this year's journey will capture a sense of contemporary race and class issues with a first-hand look at Katrina damage and recovery.

SMU Civil Rights Pilgrims will journey to New Orleans, Louisiana to get a sense of race relations, urban segregation and poverty in the contemporary United States; we will walk across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge toward Montgomery and participate in a reenactment of Bloody Sunday. We will visit monuments and museums that celebrate the hard won political changes in a nation’s social and moral structure. In Montgomery, we will visit Dexter Ave. Baptist Church and have dinner with heroes of the movement, those who knew Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Turning toward Meridian, Philadelphia and Oxford, Mississippi, pilgrims will engage the memory of Goodwin, Cheney and Schwerner and the experiences of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi. In Memphis, we will visit the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was assassinated. En route to Dallas, Little Rock's Central High School will our last highlight of the trip.

Participants will prepare for their journeys with an extensive exposure to historical documents, literature, film, and photographs from this tumultuous period of America’s history. Guided by members of SMU’s William P. Clements Department of History Professors Ben Johnson and Glenn Linden and Political Science Professors Dennis Simon and Matt Wilson, participants will enter the pilgrimage with new knowledge about a part of history which preceded them, but has continued to shape their horizons and futures.

For information regarding the 2009 SMU Civil Rights Pilgrimage, please contact the Office of the Chaplain.