Fourteen Meadville students spent their spring break traveling back in time to the 1950s and 60s, and traveling many hundreds of miles to visit the people and places of the Civil Rights Movement. Eighteen other students, ministers, and lay people also went on the tour, although it was not a credit course for them. The Rev. Dr. Gordon Gibson, the first John Young Fellow at Meadville, served as instructor, and Judy Gibson handled logistics.
Even before the tour left it had reached a high point. Simeon Wright, now of Countryside, IL, visited the bon voyage party Friday night in the Curtis Room. In 1955 Mr. Wright was one of the cousins Emmett Till visited in Money, Mississippi. He shared his memories of being with Emmett Till in the store in Money, of being in the bedroom when his cousin was abducted, and of enduring the press and historians getting many aspects of the story wrong.
The tour visited major civil rights sites with well-developed interpretive exhibits and places that were more out-of-the-spotlight. For many participants what proved most meaningful were the people encountered. The group sang "Lift Every Voice" and "We Shall Overcome" accompanied by the organist who played for mass meetings at First Baptist Church in Montgomery from the bus boycott onward. People in Marion, Alabama, came in from all around town to tell their stories; one of those people, Mrs. Lizzie Kelley, vowed to be there to tell her story as long as she was alive and Judy and Gordon brought people to visit . . . but she died the next day on her way home from a medical appointment.
Angela Lewis met the group at James Chaney's grave and talked about him: the father who had not yet seen her, his ten-day-old daughter, when he was murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Hollis Watkins, a community organizer when he joined SNCC as a teenager and still a community organizer with his own teaching and consulting organization now, led the group in freedom songs as he had led many mass meetings in the 1960s. Over thirty individuals met with the tour group to share such experiences.
Those going on the tour as a credit course presented reports along the way looking at personalities and institutions of the Movement. These written and printed reports were supplemented with videos and with music. Gordon and Judy Gibson and bus driver Joseph Selmon added stories and insights gained during their years living in the South.
One of the students wrote, "This was not a history tour, but a life-changing experience. It helped me confront my own issues and to begin to both reach out to others and heal within." Another wrote, "It is a pilgrimage for all religious people who want to deepen their faith in humanity, the Universe, in God."
There are hopes that the course can be offered again, perhaps in 2008.
