SMU Civil Rights Pilgrimage

 

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., Meadger 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 sometimes gave their lives in the struggle for equality and freedom.

In March 2005 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 now taken for granted by most 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.

SMU Civil Rights Pilgrims will journey to Jackson, Mississippi where Freedom Riders’ buses were attacked; we will walk across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge toward Montgomery; visit monuments and museums that today celebrate the hard won political changes in a nation’s social and moral structure. We will visit Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church where four little girls died in the 1963 bombing. In Memphis, we will visit the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was assassinated.

Participants will prepare for their journeys with an extensive exposure to historical documents, literature, film, and photographs from this tumultuous period of America’s history.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 in their preparation, participants will enter the experience of the Pilgrimage knowledgeable about a part of history that preceded them but which has continued to shape their horizons and their futures.

The SMU Civil Rights Pilgrimage is coordinated through the Office of the Chaplain in cooperation with the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs and the Williams P. Clements Departments of History.

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