Trip across the South opens UR students’ eyes

Amanda Kleintop knows that her hometown of Philadelphia has its share of urban troubles. But it took a trip to the Deep South for the University of Richmond sophomore to connect problems of the past and present.

"I never realized just how much these problems were tied into the civil-rights movement," she said.

Kleintop was one of nine UR students who traveled nearly 4,000 miles in a van with two professors for what's called "a course in motion."

This is the second year for the trip, made possible by a grant from UR's Richmond Quest, a program that encourages intellectual engagement among undergraduates. The course is designed to let the students sample Southern music and culture, in addition to meeting with civil-rights activists and scholars.

The 21-day trip took the students to nine Southern states to touch and be touched by the historical heart of the civil-rights movement.

The students were on the road seeing where history was made as another chapter in civil rights was written.

It was "just sheer luck" that the trip coincided with Illinois Sen. Barack Obama securing his spot atop the Democratic presidential ticket, said Melissa Ooten, who led the trip with Brian Daugherity. But the news proved to be "a powerful link between past and present" for the students, she said.

Though Obama's candidacy and the civil-rights movement show "we have made a lot of progress," Daugherity said, the trip highlighted for students that "we still have a long way to go."

That was true for Hannah Hess, a sophomore from Ephrata, Pa. "I had no clue to the level of poverty I would see," she said.

Traveling through the Mississippi Delta, Hess was struck by the stark "physical barriers that still divide African-Americans" from white neighborhoods. She saw how rivers and railroad tracks isolated black people so that "where they used to live is where they're still living now."

"There were still such extreme levels of segregation or resegregation, or whatever you want to call it," she said.

The group, which recently returned to campus, visited the site of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in Memphis, Tenn., now the National Civil Rights Museum. Other stops included Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Ala., and the bridge in Selma, Ala., where civil-rights marchers were attacked.

In Birmingham, the aunt of Constance Clay, one of the UR students on the trip, spoke to the group about her experiences growing up in the segregated South.

At the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Kleintop said she was especially touched by the Civil Rights Memorial, which commemorates 40 people who lost their lives in the struggle.

"But there's still an open spot left" on the memorial, she said, which shows that the battle is "still being fought for today, and that someone else could be put on that monument even now."

For Juliette Jeanfreau, a junior from New Orleans, a visit to an old cotton gin that had been reconfigured to memorialize the delta blues in Mississippi left her with an eerie feeling. The sharecroppers' rooms, where tourists now stay, still reflect the painful life for the people who once lived there.

She said it made her realize that the "blues may not have come about if these people had not been experiencing the suffering they were going through."

While "something good, or something beautiful, came out of all this struggle," she said, it was important to recognize that struggle.

Jeanfreau said the trip helped hone her skills in evaluating how history is presented. One presentation weighed the amount of coverage The New York Times gave to King's life work compared with coverage of his death.

"And it was the same amount," she said.

For the paper she'll write from the trip, Hess plans to look at gender roles in the movement. In her view, some of the best-known names weren't the true leaders of the movement.

She admires, for example, Virginia's Barbara Rose Johns, who as a 16-year-old led a student protest of conditions at her segregated school in Farmville. Their 1951 protest led to a legal case that became part of the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education ruling.

Johns, she said, "just one day stood up and said, 'It shouldn't be like this.'" Contact Karin Kapsidelis at (804) 649-6119 or .