Final Preparations

It's early Saturday morning, and I am ready for bed--but know that I will have difficulty sleeping. Concern over packing the right clothes for the drastic changes in a southern winter has long past. I've settled on taking everything. The excitement of the trip itself is what's keeping me awake. After holding a post at Pfeiffer University (NC) for nearly eight years, I finally get to be a student again--and in no ordinary classroom. Later today, I will drive to Atlanta, GA to meet my fellow classmates and instructor, Julian Bond, for the University of Virginia-sponsored "Civil Rights South: In the Footsteps of the Movement" bus tour. We will spend the next seven days in a mobile classroom listening to lectures, discussing history with those who experienced it firsthand, and visiting some of the major museums and historic sites in Atlanta, Tuskegee, Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma.

For a student of the Civil Rights Movement, it is almost overwhelming. I grew up in the South (eastern North Carolina--Greenville). I have been schooled mostly in the region, also (Wake Forest University and the University of Mississippi). I've visited some of the major museums and sites of the movement (downtown Greensboro, NC; at the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, NC; and the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN). But, I've never been to the key locations in Atlanta or those in Alabama. I look forward to Sunday service at the New Ebenezer Baptist Church, taking in the scenery of Kelly Ingram Park, and walking across the Edmund Pettis Bridge.

In addition to meeting Julian Bond and the other members of the trip later today, the highlight will be having an opportunity to meet movement veteran and congressman, John Lewis. I have thought of him a lot today as I've made preparations to travel. In early May 1961, he and 12 others left Washington, D.C. on the "Freedom Ride" to test the federal ruling in the Boynton decision that interstate bus travel had to proceed on an integrated basis. Lewis and his fellow riders knew they faced danger, jail, even the possibility of death. Yet, they bravely went forward.

I can only imagine what his last night of sleep was like that May. I doubt he troubled himself much with the kinds of things that have concerned me today. Te most difficult decision for me has been what to take along as companion reading. I've settled on Lewis's memoir Walking with the Wind, Taylor Branch's second volume in his King epic Pillar of Fire, Charles Eagles's Outside Agitator, and a collection of essays edited by Renee Romano and Leigh Raiford titled The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory.

More detail will come throughout the week. My hope is that this blog can provide some perspective not only on my experience, but also on the significance of the Civil Rights Movement in the nation's past and to its future.