African American Rhetoric and Expressive Culture (Eng/Rhe 370) –

Course Immersion Trip to Selma, Montgomery, and Birmingham, Alabama and to Memphis, Tennessee

Professor David Timmerman (Rhetoric) and Professor Tim Lake (Director of the Malcolm X Institute)

It was our intention to have our immersion trip give students in the course a firsthand experience with significant historical sites and significant cultural expressions related to the African American experience. Both in terms of the elements of the trip that we planned in advance as well as several additional experiences that happened in more serendipitous ways, the trip met our goals for the course and the students.  

The trip began with the powerful experience of participating in a slate of events that annually commemorate Bloody Sunday—the voting rights march that crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama when peaceful demonstrators were brutalized. Our students took video footage of several of the weekend events, had their pictures taken with both Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, and learned a great deal more than we could have covered in our course. In a serendipitous event, we were invited to participate in a slavery reenactment demonstration wherein we were designated to play the role of and be treated just as African Americans were during slavery. None of us will forget this powerful experience. 

The trip moved on from Selma to Montgomery and the rich history of Dr. Martin Luther King’s leading of the bus boycott, preaching in Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church (itself a stone’s throw from the Capitol Building and steps where Jefferson Davis set up the first “white house” of the confederacy and gave his secession speech. Indeed, seeing these historic locations, including M.L.K’s home, which was bombed, were all very moving. From Montgomery, we traveled to Birmingham, where we toured the 16th Street Baptist church where four young girls were killed by a bomb. There is a memorial park across the street where the police used water cannons and dogs on the demonstrators. There, serendipitously, we ran into a man who on the spot challenged our students’ understanding of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. He challenged many of their assumptions and “held court,” to the amazement of our students. Our trip ended in Memphis with a tour of Stax, an influential recording studio; a night on Beale Street where freshman Reggie Steele performed two songs; and a morning at New Olivet Baptist Church (Daniel King’s ’10 home congregation) with a powerful ministry to the needy in their community. 

Assessment:

We are just now receiving term papers from our students and assessing how the trip has shaped their understanding and conceptual development in terms of the course content. We have also received a copy of the evaluation survey for the course conducted by the Center of Inquiry. We have not had a chance to fully digest the responses, but a quick look would seem to indicate that while the results are not uniform, they are very strong and positive for most students. We must note that there was a glitch in the results.  Anne Bost indicated that two of the respondents in the results are from the 2007 trip we took, and there is no way to take those responses out or know which they are at this point. We were pleased to see in the surveys that a good number of students found the trip connected well to the course material, that it expanded their cultural and personal horizon in various ways, that they enjoyed the interaction with other students and the faculty, and that they would encourage the college to continue the immersion course program. 

There was a written comment complaining about the organization of the trip and a word of note on our part is in order. We had a complete itinerary for the trip, which we distributed to students a week before we left. However, the first major piece of the trip was working as official videographers for events during the bridge reenactment in Selma. Tim had made multiple contacts with Angela Brown, the director of the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma. Unfortunately, a few days prior to our trip, Tim was informed that this person had been let go from the NVRMI due to budget cuts. This meant that we had lost our principal contact person and that, indeed, the first day in Selma surely would strike the students as disorganized. However, Tim did a tremendous job still making these good experiences possible for the students as our work with taking pictures and video continued.

Logistics:

As we have experienced in the past, this is the most difficult part of the trip both on the planning side and in the implementing of the trip. Tim Lake took a planning trip during the summer of 2008; this, added to the time on the phone and over email, obviously means it was extremely time-consuming. On this trip we had the added element of doing the driving ourselves. We had two vans and so both professors drove all the time. Over the nine-day trip, we drove a total of sixteen hundred miles, most of them with our students sleeping comfortably in the back. One of my favorite moments occurred after driving eleven or twelve hours from Crawfordsville to Selma when, as he was getting out of the van, one student said, “Wow, are we here already? That was easy.” 

Problems/Suggestions for Future Trips:

We had no significant problems on the trip. The students followed the rules and directives we set out. Unlike our previous trip, the students wanted to eat dinner all together each night, which we did. Students wrote very strong blog entries that speak to the power of the experience(s) in their lives.