Freedom Riders
Tracing the civil rights movement leads students down new roads
February 4, 2010
A few weeks after wrapping up her freshman year at Richmond, Heather Thornton, ’12, packed her bags and textbooks and climbed aboard a van bound for the deep South. Along with seven classmates and two professors, she was on her way to the historical heart of the civil rights movement.
Taught by professors Melissa Ooten and Brian Daugherity, the trip, a “course in motion,” is offered every summer to undergraduates who want to study the civil rights movement. Rather than sit in a classroom, they visit the actual sites and cultures from Greensboro, N.C., to New Orleans that were home to civil rights activism.
For two weeks, the class follows the development of the movement through activities like meeting locals who challenged segregation laws, sleeping in sharecropper shacks for a night, and visiting the motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
Though powerful, these weren’t the only experiences that stuck with Thornton. Driving for weeks in a small van — and studying and eating while surrounded by classmates and professors — evoked the memory of the freedom riders that traveled a similar route on buses to protest segregation in May 1961.
An international studies major with minors in history and potentially Spanish, Thornton has always been interested in civil rights struggles and how they impact her life today as an African-American woman. She jumped at the opportunity to meet the real people who fought those battles — an experience she rarely encounters while studying history.
An interest in race relations and the South led history and leadership studies major Amanda Kleintop, ’11 to sign up for the trip in the summer of 2008. She says she “wasn’t interested in civil rights before the course simply because I had never learned anything about it beyond your standard narrative of the movement,” but that “this basic narrative … was pretty much blown out of the water” during the trip.
“We were learning the history of the civil rights movement, but all around us was the present — the direct results of the history we were studying,” Kleintop says. “We saw New Orleans’ Ninth Ward … the shacks in the Mississippi Delta, and even the wealthier towns whose poorer black residents were separated physically by railroad tracks or major roads from middle-class whites.”
As a leadership studies major, Kleintop had studied ideas of servant leadership and empowerment, but didn’t fully grasp the power of those concepts until seeing how, and where, leaders like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. embodied them. “While I’ve taken many courses at Richmond that carry [themes of activism], you simply can’t hit home so well in a classroom setting,” she says.
Taking those lessons back to campus, Kleintop prioritized her involvement with activities focused on social justice. She helped bring back the Day of Silence to highlight harassment that gay and lesbian students face, reinvigorated the Student Alliance for Sexual Diversity, and volunteers at the Fan Free Clinic.
Thornton also felt empowered by the trip. “I used to think, ‘There’s only so much I can do,’” she recalls. But a conversation with one man on the trip, who as a high school student was arrested 226 times and beaten by police for attending sit-ins and trying to vote, inspired her. Now, she says, “I’m not as limited in what I can do.”
History 299: A Course in Motion is being offered for the fourth time this summer. More information is available from the School of Continuing Studies at: http://scs.richmond.edu/summer/opportunities/study.html.
