Students often use February vacation as a time to step away from their textbooks, but (as usual) a group of Brookline High Schoolers is bucking that trend. This year, eleven BHS students and one teacher will open their history books, flip to the chapter on the Civil Rights Movement, and jump straight in. Guided by the award-winning “Sojourn to the Past” program, the group will travel through five states, visiting historic landmarks, meeting pioneering figures, and visualizing for themselves events that are seared into the nation’s memory.
“Every single day we will be visiting a location, or meeting a person, that I teach about in my U.S. History class,” says BHS teacher Kate Leslie, who is chaperoning the trip. “We’ll walk over the Edmund Pettis Bridge, which was the site of the Voting Rights March; we’ll visit the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was shot, we’ll see the 16th Street Baptist Church where the four little girls from Birmingham were killed.” The students will also meet Congressman John Lewis, who, as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, took part in the original Freedom Rides and helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington. The students are reading his memoir, Walking with the Wind, in order to prepare for the trip, and junior Susan Klau has been looking forward to meeting him for over a year. “I have so many questions I want to ask him, and I want to hear more of his stories,” she says. “In my eyes he’s as important as any of those textbook figures that we learn about.”
They will also spend a day with Elizabeth Eckford, the first African-American student to integrate a white southern high school. “Each of the Little Rock Nine got phone calls because they were supposed to meet up before school and walk there together with a police escort, but Elizabeth Eckford didn’t have a telephone, so she walked there by herself – she went through mobs of people who were spitting on her and harassing her,” explains Tahira Saalik, another future Soujourner. “I think it will be really cool to meet her.” John Lewis, the Little Rock Nine, and many other civil rights activists were very young when they helped drive the movement forward, and their stories especially resonate with the high schoolers. Ms. Leslie hopes that this trip will teach her students that they too can make a difference. “There are many connections between the struggles for justice and equality in the past and the struggles that we are still fighting today. I hope that our students learn to see themselves as modern-day activists,” she says.
Even before setting out, the students have gladly taken up that mantle. For the past few months, they have been organizing fundraisers in order to cover the cost of the trip. Although their past efforts focused within the high school, with their next event, “Take a Bite for Civil Rights,” they hope to pull in some community support. In exchange for an $85 donation, attendees will meet the students, enjoy a three-course dinner at The Fireplace, and hear three local panelists – activist Judith Freize Wright, historian and educator John Cawthorne, and former METCO director Ruth Ellen Fitch – share their own stories of the movement. And if the fundraiser is successful, eleven young Brookline residents will have stories of their own when they head back to school. “We’re the next generation, and so we are the messengers about how to continue the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement,” says Klau. “Hopefully we can bring all of that back to our town.”
Want to help send off the Sojourners? Visit www.takeabiteforcivilrights.com to reserve tickets for Take a Bite for Civil Rights at The Fireplace on February 6th at 6:30 PM. Tickets are $85 and seating is limited, so hurry!
By Cara Giaimo
