Day 14: New Orleans, LA - Selma, AL - Montgomery, AL

Miles today: 400
Miles total: 2700



Today, we left the French Quarter very early to travel to Selma, AL. In Selma, we met with Sam Walker, activist and tour guide at the National Voting Rights Museum, who told us more about the 1965 Voting Rights march and Bloody Sunday. After touring the museum, we marched over the Edmund Pettus bridge as the marchers did en route from Selma to Montgomery. We also visited several other related sites in Selma (such as Brown's Chapel AME, which became the headquarters of the movement in Selma and where MLK delivered several speeches) and the sites of the campgrounds where the marchers stayed overnight on their 5 day march to Montgomery. (At the time, the land used for their camping was owned by local Black farmers). We drove along Highway 80 into Montgomery, which is the same road the marchers took. In response to these actions (and several violent murders), the Voting Rights Act was passed in April 1965. We also saw the newly opened Lowdes County Interpretive Center, another Civil Rights related center in what was once one of the most dangerous southern counties for Civil Rights workers.

Day 13: New Orleans, LA

We had originally planned to spend the day in Hattiesburg, MS, but our contact there who was going to open the archives for us and speak about the Black Panthers was unable to make it. So we spent one more day in New Orleans. We visited Louis Armstrong Park (still closed from hurricane damage but soon to re-open as the site of the National Park Service's Jazz Historical Site), Preservation Hall, and the NPS's current Jazz Historical Site at its temporary location on North Peters street by the river.

I have no good pictures from the day, so here's a personal one of me at Cafe du Monde with the world's (or at least New Orleans'!) best cafe au laits and beignets.

Day 12: New Orleans, LA

Nearly 2 weeks into the trip, we gave the students the day off (and us too!) to explore the city.

Day 11: New Orleans, LA

Our first of three days in New Orleans, we started by visiting the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University. The Amistad research collection houses one of the most extensive archival holdings in the nation on ethnic minorities, with a particular emphasis on African-American history. Students spent the morning working on their research projects.



After lunch, we met Times-Picayune reporter Gwen Filosa for a tour of areas affected by Hurricane Katrina in late August of 2005 and to talk about contemporary issues of race and poverty in New Orleans. It seems that little change has taken place since last year. The Lower Ninth Ward still seems eerily desolate, although a few (a very few) modular homes now dot the area. Official street signs and stop signs have been erected, and the roads are much improved over the pothole ridden ones of a year ago. Construction crews speed by the area and signs everywhere offer numbers for contractors and, especially, demolition workers. Otherwise, little has changed. Weeds have overtaken the many remaining concrete stoops and foundations where homes once were, giving the area the feel of a country field as opposed to an urban neighborhood. The picture above shows Robert Green's memorial to his wife and granddaughter, both of whom died during the storm. His FEMA trailor sits behind the memorial.

Day 10: Jackson, MS - New Orleans, LA

Miles today: 200
Miles total: 2300

The day started with a downpour as we made our way over to the Medgar Evers House Museum. This house was purchased by Medgar Evers and his family when he moved to Jackson to become the NAACP field secretary there. It was one of the first developments in town created by Black businessmen. The home provides a stark and frightening look at the terror that plagued the Evers’ family. The piano partially blocks the front window, which was to help stop bullets fired into it. All of the mattresses sit directly on the floor – again to protect sleeping family members from stray bullets shot through the house. A bullet pockmark remains on a kitchen tile. We learned the details of how the cars were parked and lights kept off to provide as much protection to the family as possible against bullet fire. Despite these precautions, Evers was gunned down in his driveway in 1963.

His murderer Byron de la Beckwith, who instantly bragged about being the assassin, faced two trials with hung juries both times. He eventually was convicted in a third trial held 31 years after the murder. While Evers’ wife Myrlie wanted to keep the house, she received so many death threats that she and the three children (she was carrying a fourth and lost it when Medgar was killed) moved to California. She eventually deeded the house to Tougaloo College, who owns it today. Castlerock Productions used the home in its 1990s film The Ghosts of Mississippi and in exchange for using it, they left all of the period furniture in the house that they had bought for the set. With this acquisition and additional state funds, Tougaloo was able to open the house as a museum on an appointment-based system. The college plans to soon close the house, conduct major renovations, and reopen the house as a full-time museum with regular operating hours during the coming years.

We also stopped by Jackson State, the site of the 1970 murder of two students during Vietnam war protests on campus (which is rarely mentioned with the frequency of the Kent State shootings which took place at the same time). On the way out of town, we saw the Greyhound bus station where the Freedom Rides ended. We arrived in New Orleans in the evening.

Day 9: Oxford, MS - Philadelphia, MS - Jackson, MS

Miles today: 400
Miles total: 2100

Today, we spent the morning in the archives at the University of Mississippi. This stop was our first archival one, and the special collections at Ole Miss have extensive Civil Rights holdings, including an audio Blues collection and the papers of James Meredith.

After a quick lunch, we headed southeast to Philadelphia, MS. The students had watched Mississippi Burning (1988) over the weekend and were anxious to see some of the associated sites. Philadelphia is where three Civil Rights workers (two white men, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and one Black man, James Chaney) traveled to investigate the burning of a church during Freedom Summer in 1964. [There were 67 church burnings/bombings in Mississippi during 1964 alone.] While there, the local sheriff arrested them late in the afternoon. Released later that night, they were never seen alive again. Their bodies were found a couple of months later in an earthen dam outside of town. After the release of the factually inaccurate but highly emotional and compelling Mississippi Burning, a sign was erected at the Mt Zion church (the church they came to town to investigate) to commemorate the three men. We met the pastor of the church who encouraged us to come back on a Sunday sometime to speak to the many congregation members who remember the 1964 burning and subsequent murders. They told us that the grave of James Chaney, located several towns over, is still regularly desecrated. We made our way to Jackson later in the evening.

Day 8: Clarksdale, MS - Ruleville, MS - Oxford, MS

Miles today: 200
Miles total: 1700



Today, we toured the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, MS (after begging them to open it for us on Memorial Day). They have received a donation of display cases since our visit last year, so their museum has a new cohesiveness and direction to it. Since the students went to the Rock'N'Soul museum in Memphis and we added readings on music, they better understood the connection between the blues and the Civil Rights movement than our group last year. We headed down to Ruleville to see Fannie Lou Hamer's gravesite. While there last year, we met with community members (including the mayor and Hamer's campaign manager Charles McLaurin) who were beginning to spruce up the gravesite. This year, we were greeted by a large, impressive memorial garden. While it's still under construction, the community has done a lot to the space with little funding in a year's time. We then headed toward Oxford, MS, where we toured around Ole Miss (the University of Mississippi). James Meredith became the first African American to attend Ole Miss in 1962. His enrollment led to a riot 30,000 strong on campus that killed 2 people and injured dozens. Thousands of troops were called in to quell the violence. With the Mississippi sun baking us at a crisp 100 degrees, we were all excited to get to the hotel and into the pool.