“It’s important they understand how we got where we are now, so that they can help move us forward to keep fighting for equal rights and justice,” she said.
The tour kicked off in Atlanta, where students spent a week being trained in the philosophy of nonviolent protest at The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonvi- olent Social Change.
They visited King’s former house, and the Ebenezer Baptist Church where King was baptized as a child, and later ordained as a minister, and where his funeral was held after his 1968 assassina- tion.
During the tour, the group met several veterans of the civil rights
movement, including Dr. Amelia Platts Boynton Robinson, age 107, a planner and leader of the March 7, 1965 march that became known as Bloody Sunday. Sched- uled to walk from Selma to Mont- gomery, the marchers got as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma when they were attacked and stopped. Robinson, along with several others, was gassed, beaten, and left for dead. Never- theless, two weeks later, the marchers resumed their walk and on March 25, 1965, arrived at the Alabama State Capitol – a stop on the bus tour, as was the bridge.
Robinson, who spoke to the teens of the threats and civil rights violations she and husband Samuel Boynton had endured, challenged the youngsters to step up to the plate and accept leader- ship, and urged them to avoid drugs, drink, and things that come from the outside and destroy the spirit.
The bus also stopped at the Viola Liuzzo Memorial alongside a highway in Alabama, where a civil rights worker from Detroit was shot and killed by Ku Klux Klan members.
Dean Robb, 89, a civil rights attorney from Detroit who went on the trip, spoke to the students about his experience representing Liuzzo’s family in a wrongful death lawsuit he filed on their behalf against the FBI in 1977.
The lawsuit claimed an FBI informant and employee of the FBI, who was in the car with the Ku Klux Klan members when they killed Liuzzo, had failed to prevent Liuzzo’s death and had, in effect, conspired in the murder.
In Meridian, Miss., the teens
participated in a march in memo- ry of three civil rights activists – James Earl “J.E.” Chaney from Meridian, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York City – murdered dur- ing “Freedom Summer” by mem- bers of the Ku Klux Klan near Philadelphia, Miss. The group visited Chaney’s gravesite, and First Union Baptist Church in Meridian where Chaney’s funeral took place in 1964.
In Montgomery, the group vis- ited the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church & Par- sonage where King was pastor from 1954 to 1960 and where he began his quest for civil rights.
“The students were given a private concert by the same organist who played while Dr. King was the pastor of the church, and who is still organist today,” McGehee said. “At the end of the concert, the students stood and, while accompanied by the organist, sang the black national anthem, ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’”
At the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, the group saw a replica of the public bus on which – on December 1, 1955 – Parks refused to vacate her seat in the colored section to a white passen- ger when the white section was full.
“The Freedom Tour was truly a transformational experience,” McGehee said. “The places we saw, people we met and history we learned demonstrated to the students the courage and power young people possess and the dif- ference they can make in their communities, their state, their country and the world.”
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