Our spring break trip down to Atlanta, Georgia and up through Memphis, Tennessee following the Civil Rights trail was an amazing experience that will stick with me forever. Not only was it educational, it was so much fun and definitely holds a high impact on my freshman year of college. As much as I did not like driving for so many hours and bumping around in the backseat for six days, I am glad I went on the trip.
Going on this trip really opened my eyes as to how much farther society can and needs to go. Yes, things are significantly better than they were at one point in our history, but there is so much more that can be improved on in our society. The day that we spent with Joanne was one of my favorite experiences on the trip. Walking around Selma with Joanne and listening to all her stories about the Civil Rights movement firsthand really made it come alive. It was not hard to be at ease with Joanne and be so in tuned to what she was telling us. Her stories were of triumph and heartbreak, yet she managed to make us laugh and have a good time. Joanne’s biggest theme was that we are not done changing the way society works; it is up to us to change society in the future, and it is up to us to raise our kids the right way. I will not forget walking around with Joanne with her telling us about “the hood” and what it was like to grow up there. She did not fail to warn us we were going through “the hood” and her words “if I wave, you wave and if I run, you best start running too” still makes me laugh today.
While walking with Joanne was one of my favorite experiences of the trip, the rest of the sites we visited and the things we learned are still of great importance. Everywhere we went and everything we read in the different museums were all significant parts of our spring break trip. It was neat to be right in front of the road they marched on and on the site of “Tent City” while it was eerie to be standing on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the location of “Bloody Sunday”. Having lunch with Lonnie King (which was amazing) was entertaining but informative. He really knew what he was talking about, and he was such a grandpa-like person that we wanted to take him home. The museums we visited were amazing and educational. While they were similar in the way that they focused on the Civil Rights movement, each museum had its own way of presenting the information and its own style. The Loraine Motel was a museum on the inside but the outside still had the appearance of the hotel and where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot (which was extremely uncanny to be standing there). I really enjoyed touring the museums and getting an in-depth sense for what the Civil Rights movement was about.
I learned so many new things from going on this trip and doing the research beforehand. While I knew the general knowledge of the Civil Rights movement and important people, I really did not know what happened in our history the way I do now. I also would not have learned what a serious prankster Travis can be, how obsessed Kristin Garnett is with Anderson Cooper or how far Tammy would go to protect her hair from getting wet. I had a lot of fun on the trip while learning so much. There are so many memories that I will not forget; I will always remember the stories that we heard and the knowledge I learned about one of the most important events in our nation’s history.
