Singing freedom songs, “Ain’t Nobody Gonna Turn Me Round” and “We Shall Overcome,” twenty-one students, seven parents, and four teachers, from West Springfield High School in Springfield, Virginia, participated in the ultimate field trip and historical commemoration experience on Sunday, March 6, marching with ten thousand other people, many veterans of the civil rights movement, across Selma, Alabama’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. The Bridge March marked the fortieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday. “I can honestly say,” senior Sara Ronken wrote on her Pilgrimage Reflection card, “that this has been the most life-impacting school trip I have ever experienced. I feel as though we are all blessed to be able to have lived through the fortieth anniversary of one of the most influential events in the civil rights movement. I know that I studied and learned about what African Americans went through, and are still going through, but I was never able to totally understand it on the level that this trip helped me to reach.” For all of us, the trip was a dynamic learning experience that took history instruction far beyond the walls of a classroom.

Let me take you back to September, when school starts. The thirty selected students participating in my Applied History class&emdash;a combination public history/museum studies/historiography course&emdash;know coming into the course that there will be a focus on African American history and an eight week unit on the civil rights movement. During the first semester, students participate in an intensive and rigorous classroom component of the program, while in the second semester, students receive early release time to work as interns at local historic sites and museums such as Ford’s Theatre, Arlington House, and the Alexandria Black History Resource Center , among others. While in the classroom, students produce two specific projects, a proposal for a monument to the movement that will be hypothetically erected on the National Mall in Washington, DC; and a multifaceted essay assignment requiring students to investigate a major event from the movement within the context of how that event was depicted in feature-length Hollywood films. They next have to explore how that event was covered by the white and black press. For the latter part of the assignment, students are required to conduct research in the Periodicals and Newspaper Division of the Library of Congress.

For the past five years, I have eagerly led students on what I call the annual civil rights pilgrimage. The pilgrimage becomes the culminating activity of our intensive study of the history of the movement. Our pilgrimage generally takes us to Atlanta, Georgia, Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma, Alabama, concluding in Memphis, Tennessee. The sites and museums we visit are directly related to readings and activities utilized during classroom instruction. By crafting such an experience, students get to appreciate fully the dynamics of the movement of which they have read and investigated. In this context, visiting Martin Luther King, Jr.’s parsonage in Montgomery, and looking at the small crater left on his concrete porch, the physical reminder of the night in 1955 when his home was bombed, students are able to make the leap from readings to reality. History suddenly becomes palpable. I am able to take students to the large memorial marker at the foot of the hill leading to the Alabama State House that lists, in timeline fashion, all of the historical events that took place on the capitol grounds, save the March on Montgomery in 1965. Albeit that the commemorative marker was erected in the 1940s, I ask students to consider what is not there and speculate as to why the March on Montgomery has not been identified with the addition of a recent marker or notation. Then I ask them to consider how they, as historians or custodians of public memory, might provide a solution. We also take time to consider the implications of the juxtaposition of the huge Confederate Monument on the State House grounds and the simple, but evocative Civil Rights Memorial, designed by Maya Lin, two blocks away, in front of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Such experiences provide an exceptional opportunity for contemplation and raise contemporary historical questions and issues for students to consider.

Charles Moore (with camera) with Percoco and his students in front of the Brown Chapel.

To be sure, my students are well grounded in civil rights history before we leave. This experience does not take place in a vacuum. Rather than teach the movement in a didactic fashion, my approach with my seniors, is to immerse them in a very hands-on study and approach to examining the civil rights era. The idea of having students design and create a civil rights memorial came from my own long-standing interest in public monuments, commemoration, and memory. For this activity, I have brought into the process Michael Richman, a freelance art historian and the editor of the papers of sculptor Daniel Chester French. During the summer, prior to the Applied History experience, students are required to walk the Mall from the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial at the foot of Capitol Hill to the Lincoln Memorial. They are given a list of fifteen public monuments to observe and evaluate and a worksheet with evaluative questions to complete. Shortly after school begins, Richman visits my class and we spend a ninety-minute period talking about their visits, observations, and evaluations. In particular, Richman and I are helping to develop eyes that look at monuments critically, determining what makes one a better memorial than another. We want them to understand that as design teams they need to consider a variety issues when designing such memorials. A month later, Richman meets us on the Mall and we walk the monumental corridor between 17^th Street and the Lincoln Memorial, looking at the World War II Memorial, the FDR Memorial, the Korean War Memorial , the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial. We also study the site near the Tidal Basin of the proposed memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr. During our scouting expedition we study the topography of Constitution Gardens and West Potomac Park, making sure that students understand the lay of the land and its relationship to sight lines and approach possibilities. Students are restricted to a two acre site of their choice in Constitution Gardens or West Potomac Park. When our walk is concluded we provide students with an extensive pamphlet based on the one provided to prospective architects and sculptors of the World War II Memorial. This serves as their guidelines for teams designing their memorials. In January, when the memorial projects are due they are judged by an independent jury consisting of a sculptor, urban planner, and a representative of the National Park Service.

The author’s students pause to reflect at the Civil Rights Monument&emdash;created by Vietnam Veterans Memorial designer Maya Lin&emdash;at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.

By Thanksgiving, our study of the movement is well under way and includes an extensive look at photographs and films of the era, a lesson in listening to music from the movement, and lessons utilizing from primary source materials found in the federal records. Students also maintain personal journal accounts about their learning. As in previous years, I had students read Walking With The Wind. This year, I added Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and its Legacy by Paul Hendrickson. As a bonus follow-up, Hendrickson visited with my students and talked about his writing and the emotion involved in dealing with a sensitive topic. The book is based on an iconic image captured in black and white by photographer Charles Moore. The photograph was taken in 1962 at the height of the James Meredith crisis in Oxford, Mississippi, and graphically captures the visceral hate on the faces of several Mississippi sheriffs called to Oxford to assist in the state’s attempt to block Meredith’s entry to Ol’ Miss. In an essay assignment based on the readings, I ask my students to explain the power of photography as it relates to historical memory.

Students also examine a selected feature length film about an event in the civil rights movement for historical accuracy. Films include, The Long Walk Home, Ghosts of Mississippi, and Selma, Lord, Selma. As part of their research, students compare how these events were covered by the black and white press of the time. While most students know The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Post, none of them are familiar with the Chicago Defender, Baltimore Afro-American, or the Pittsburgh Courier, and the seminal role those papers played in black history.

After crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Percoco and his students listened to central characters of the movement such as John Lewis, Jessie Jackson and Correta Scott King.

By the time we leave on our pilgrimage, students are well versed in the history of the movement and are ready to apply their learning to the museums and sites we visit. In Birmingham, we visit the Civil Rights Institute and the 16^th Street Baptist Church, site of the 1963 bombing that killed four young girls. In Montgomery, we tour the state-of-the-art Rosa Parks Museum and Institute. We visit the Voting Rights Institute and Museum, the Dallas County Court House&emdash;where blacks attempted to register to vote, only to be abused at the butt of a billyclub by Sheriff Jim Clark&emdash;and Brown A.M.E. Chapel, the launching site for the various marches that took place in and around Selma in 1965. We conclude our pilgrimage with a visit to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, site of the Lorraine Hotel where Martin Luther King, Jr. was slain on April 4, 1968. Prior to our visits to these museums, I remind my students to consider what they have learned about memory, interpretation, and presentation of historical information as exhibited in these facilities.

But I am not sure I will be able to duplicate the experience of this year’s class in Selma where, after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, we listened to central characters of the movement such as John Lewis, Jessie Jackson and Correta Scott King. Nor will I ever be able to forget the image of Charles Moore&emdash;standing outside Brown Chapel sporting his famous photographers vest with cameras slung around his neck&emdash;telling my students what it was like to be a white southerner documenting the movement while being dubbed a pariah and dealing with death threats. We stood and posed with Mary Liuzzo, daughter of slain Detroit housewife and activist Viola Liuzzo who was killed by the Klan. I was moved that my students were able to tell her that they had learned about her mother and knew of the sacrifice that she had made. John Lewis signed my students’ copies of his books, talked with them and shook their hands. Not unlike those Civil War veterans’ reunions one hundred years ago, my students and I were caught up in the collective consciousness of what the movement meant and still means. For many of us it was clear that the movement is not over and that American society still has more bridges to traverse. 

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Jim Percoco has been a teacher at West Springfield High School in Springfield , Virginia , since 1980. He is the author of Primary Sources: A Guide For Teachers And Parents (1995), A Passion For The Past: Creative Teaching Of U.S. History (1998) and Divided We Stand: Teaching About Conflict In U.S. History (2001).