Courting the Senses

We crossed the railroad tracks.
We traveled back in time.
Life hasn’t changed much.
Eerie feeling.
Gloomy aura.
Bumpy dirt roads.
Poverty stricken.
Trailers and houses dilapidated.
The Struggle to survive.
It’s not fair.
Post-racial world my ass.
White supremacy is thriving.
Dozens of towns across America look like this.
Does anyone care?
No.
Out of sight out of mind.
False progress.
History erased.
No record.
Emmett Till, who?
Rising anger.
Laws don’t mean justice.
Who looks after them?
Empty promises.
Relief never comes.
Waiting for superman . . .

Look with your eyes.
Listen with your ears.
Feel with your heart.
Act with your hands.
Remember.
All those that died in the struggle.
Don’t let them have died in vain.
We cross the railroad tracks.
The grass is green.
The houses are well groomed.
Two shiny cars in the driveway.
White picket fence.
Middle class America.
What does middle class even really mean?
Do you ever cross the rail road tracks?
How does it makes you feel?
I’m nauseous. 1 1 Poem by Kendra Cornejo, used with permission. The author thanks Maitrayee Bhattacharyya, Erin Chapman, Kendra Cornejo, Hannah Duncan, Vanessa Fabien, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Karl Jacoby, Besenia Rodriguez, and Paul Tran for their careful reading and insightful comments.

2 2 This is an original manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in The Black Scholar, 2016 available online; https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00064246.2016.1223482. In the Foreword to Shattering the Glassy Stare, “City as Text” creator Bernice Braid cited research that proves pedagogy encompassing active learning consistently yielded extraordinary outcomes: “students looked, listened, heard, and saw differently and better when the larger place became a text they sought to decipher in terms of the cumulative information they were compiling in their classes. Better yet, they were energized, determined, and persistent about returning to locations, pursuing ideas, and asking questions.” These “field laboratories,” as she aptly named them, transformed students, “they themselves went about assembling impressions, interpreting interactions, seeing into and beyond the immediate world around them.” She continued, “students experienced themselves as discoverers of unknown territory.” 3 3 Peter A. Machonis, ed., Shatter the Glassy Stare: Implementing Experiential Learning in Higher Education – A Companion Piece to Place as Text: Approaches to Active Learning (National Collegiate Honors Council, 2008), 9, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=nchcmono.

Coinciding with my classes on the Black freedom struggle, I invite a group of students to Mississippi for Spring Break. They stay on the Tougaloo College campus, hosted by students and faculty. We travel through the Delta and later engage in archival research at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, where I guide them through their individual projects. Pre-trip seminars and readings prepare students; afterwards we reconvene for debriefing and their formal research presentations. Now entering the seventh cycle, the pedagogical benefits of this trip have made me an active advocate for experiential learning.

The opening poem is excerpted from one written by a student from the 2013 trip. A Latina from Long Island, New York, she understood racism from first-hand experience. She took courses that explained and discussed inequality but in most of her classes outside of Africana Studies and Ethnic Studies she recognized the dearth of critical self-analysis about systemic racism. This was her first trip south and even with all she thought she knew, the poem reveals her disgust, wrenching grief, and anger the day we drove down the backroads from Money to Greenwood in the Delta. It confirmed her understanding of America’s great contradiction, its “false progress” and “home [to] the free and the brave. /But not really.”

As scholars and teachers of “the Black experience,” unless we teach at a Historically Black College or University we usually inhabit marginal spaces in our institutions and the curriculum. If we teach in institutions with general requirements for “diversity” classes, it seems that too many students enroll in our classes under perceived duress, not out of a guiding desire for knowledge. Some of these students make clear their distaste and exude attitudes insinuating that we must be grateful for their presence. 4 4 For multiple scholarly examples see Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., eds., Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (University Press of Colorado, 2012). Many of us must overcome hostility and resentment before we even get to unpack the syllabus during the first week.

At an institution with no general education requirements, my students usually fall under two categories: young social activists wanting to learn tactics from the mass movement to directly apply to their current work; or students (like the poet above) already well-versed in Africana traditions seeking to expand their pool of knowledge. I preach to the converted, as it were, but they need depth and historical context. Despite their enthusiasm, even they come to the beginning of the semester with a distorted vision of the Black mass movements. We compete with mass media that obliterates nuance with stereotypical and uncritical interpretations of a usually homogeneous Black experience, and we have to unteach some of the historical knowledge that most educational institutions impart to students. Historian Douglas Brinkley astutely noted how professors bemoan students’ lack of proficiency in US history and geography yet do not avail themselves to solve that dilemma, for example, through engaging pedagogy or by participating in educational transformation: “There is too much self-righteous integrity floating around our universities, and not enough anarchy and caring,” he wrote, before challenging that “[i]ndividual professors with reformist inclinations must seize the day themselves.” 5 5 Douglas Brinkley, The Majic Bus: An American Odyssey (Harcourt Brace, 1993), 3. Brinkley insisted that, “students deserve drama, the flesh and blood of the past.” 6 6 The Majic Bus, 4. To undo and then rebuild, particularly in one semester, I take advantage of the landscape and the fresh opportunities to make history matter. For this generation, over-stimulated aurally and visually, I engage the other senses.

Making the Investment

Most research and writing about teaching movement history focus on grades K-12. Sam Wineburg, known for his work on K-12 social studies education, suggests methods for improvement. Like Wineburg, I advocate focusing on what the students do know about history, and questioning how they know what they know. 7 7 Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Temple University Press, 2001), viii. However, higher education gives more latitude for this exploration; Africana Studies provides and develops the skills of inquiry necessary for this holistic learning, through the combined demonstration of theory and method. 8 8 James L. Conyers Jr., ed., Africana Studies: A Disciplinary Quest for Both Theory and Method (McFarland & Company, Inc., 1997), 3. The same journeys transform college-age students equally and sometimes even more deeply. I witness students entering college with the dominant narrative that pins racism on the moral failings of others (slavers, slave owners, the generic “bad guys”) but do not recognize their own relation to the products of racism. The interpretive framework in Africana Studies challenges that worldview by encouraging students to listen to voices outside the prevailing discourses in sources often overlooked by the mainstream or academia. This pedagogy denounces myths of objective teaching that reinforces the (oftentimes political) decisions made by educators who dictate how and what gets taught in our classrooms. It also provides a safe space to acknowledge each other’s and one’s own biases. 9 9 bell hooks, “Transformative Pedagogy and Multiculturalism,” in Freedom’s Plow: Teaching in the Multicultural Classroom, ed. Jeanne Fraser and Tony Perry (Routledge, 1993), 91–98. For another brilliant piece about the pedagogy of Africana Studies see: Helen A. Neville and Sundiata K. Cha-Jua, “Kufundisha: Toward a Pedagogy for Black Studies,” Journal of Black Studies 28, no. 4 (March 1998): 447–70.

I am not trying to reconstruct a Freedom School for Ivy Leaguers, but it is a handy metaphor. Charles Cobb, the Civil Rights pioneer who initiated the creation of the Freedom Schools, stated, “There has always been a link between education and citizenship,” a link highlighted by the deliberate policies that withheld equitable education from the enslaved and their descendants. 10 10 Charles M. Payne and Carol Sills Strickland, eds., Teach Freedom: Education for Liberation in the African-American Tradition (Teachers College Press, 2008), 3. My pedagogy enhances students’ civic knowledge with hands-on experience through which they see their own privileges anew, in contrast to the students Cobb and his colleagues targeted. It is an alternative Freedom School – an emancipation from the classroom and all its restrictions and rigidity – one of personal transformation, because as scholar Charles Payne noted, “Emancipatory education is also intended to be transformative.” 11 11 Ibid.

Stephanie Shields, a white woman examining her own career and recognizing her own opportunities, discusses the “intersections of privilege” and the varying levels in which it operates. 12 12 Stephanie A. Shields, “Waking Up to Privilege: Intersectionality and Opportunity,” in Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia, ed. Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs et al. (University Press of Colorado, 2012), 29–30. Brown University students do not always see their own privilege, and this includes Black students (even those who are first generation or from non-professional families). This trip forces an examination of privilege in all its complexities, challenging students of color, as much as their white peers, to understand the diversity of knowledge and experience. I do not define the students demographically here because the learning goals and the skill development does not shift accordingly and I find no clear distinction between white students and students of color in this regard. Shields asserted, “it is not the unwillingness to see privilege, but unthinkingness, a kind of taken-for-granted state. To escape from it first requires insight into our position relative to others and then careful and consistent watchfulness not to settle back into a comfort zone.” 13 13 Shields, “Waking up to Privilege,” 38. Africana Studies and this trip utilizes this diversity, and using all the senses, it transforms.

Research supports the benefits of active learning, taking students into the “field.” Beyond Bernice Braid’s groundbreaking “City as Text” program (discussed further on), Alice Kolb and David Kolb have studied the theories of experiential learning in higher education, forming six propositions from the work of many earlier scholars. Each point relates directly to the outcomes I witnessed over the course of six trips to Mississippi:

1. Learning is best conceived as a process, not in terms of outcomes . . . 2. All learning is relearning. Learning is best facilitated by a process that draws out the students’ beliefs and ideas about a topic so that they can be examined, tested, and integrated with new, more refined ideas. 3. Learning requires the resolution of conflicts between dialectically opposed modes of adaptation to the world. Conflict, differences, and disagreements are what drive the learning process . . . 4. Learning is a holistic process of adaptation to the world. Not just the result of cognition, learning involves the integrated functioning of the total person – thinking, feeling, perceiving, and behaving. 5. Learning results from synergetic transactions between the person and the environment . . . 6. Learning is the process of creating knowledge . . . 14 14 Alice Y. Kolb and David A. Kolb, “Learning Styles and Learning Spaces: Enhancing Experiential Learning in Higher Education,” Academy of Management Learning & Education 4, no. 2 (June 2005): 194.

This trip holistically courts each of the senses, facilitates relearning and challenges past knowledge while students interact with each other, those around them, and their environment.

Students hone their observational skills, but they are also participants in Mississippi. Opportunities for two-way learning are integral to their campus stay at Tougaloo College. Casual conversations on campus about hometowns, academics, food, and the social scene revealed student life at an HBCU to Brown students, and Tougaloo students learned more about an Ivy League institution and the range of students there. My students reported intense cafeteria interactions, some a little confrontational, some engaging. One white student left an encounter a little shaken but determined to revisit her own preconceptions and arguments, and genuinely trying to understand the source of the challenge and the challenger’s point of view. These interactions, these moments of communal learning were (and perhaps still are) the stuff of nightmares for segregationists when the manufactured specter of miscegenation drove supremacists to unspeakable acts and words. Here, these students who might have never met have had an opportunity to interact, break down the colorline one encounter at a time. At such a moment we can celebrate some success in the journey of racial relations, while acknowledging the work yet to be done.

Furthermore, and perhaps not tangential to the learning goals that forces them to use all their senses, students have the opportunity to see me in another element of my job. By disrupting the familiar, a new space opens to mentor and sometimes counsel. As students approach me with their questions or encounters, we further process their experiences with on-the-spot debriefings. A heightened level of trust forms between the students and me: I went to Mississippi at eighteen years old as a surprised and culturally unprepared high school exchange student from England. My students know of my personal story in Clarksdale and my feelings of estrangement as I learned to navigate a new environment at their age, so their experiences are not unique. Witnessing me participate in the life of Mississippi and its people, both movement elders, Tougaloo College staff and faculty, and people we meet throughout the week, signal to students that they too can become active participants in the Magnolia State.

An acknowledgement of gendered dynamics must enter this conversation. The students’ level of comfort with me allowed them to lower (not completely drop) their filter. By temporarily breaking down the formal barriers between student and faculty (while maintaining professional codes of conduct and authority; promoting laughter and casual conversation but not relinquishing formal salutations, for example), I can mentor and guide better. All of this is part of my pedagogical style and each trip leader must find their level of comfort. Re-erecting those boundaries once back on home-campus has never been difficult.

Making it Happen

Two models appealed to me as I developed this journey. Douglas Brinkley, while at Hofstra University, designed a six-week cross-country trip where he turned a tour bus into a classroom. His book, The Majic Bus chronicled his experiences and pedagogy, and he even donated some of the book’s royalties to the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale (one place where our journeys intersect). His Mississippi Delta segment does not go further south than Clarksdale where he concentrates on the blues history. He goes east to Oxford and the University of Mississippi to discover Faulkner, then travels north to Memphis to pay homage at Graceland and the Lorraine Motel. 15 15 The Majic Bus, 131–148. The second model came from veteran Charles Cobb, who amassed quite a collection of grassroots stories about communities, neighborhoods, families, churches, and schools. His book, On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail, is a travel guide narrated by a now professional writer with uninterrupted access to other veterans. His tour, with his personal and researched narration, encompasses the South, not just Mississippi, beginning in Washington, DC. He highlights sites only a local would know—gravesites, homes, sites of buildings long gone but spaces steeped in history and memory—and so creates a lasting memorial to and document of those places for generations to come. 16 16 See Charles E. Cobb, Jr., On The Road To Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail (Algonquin Books, 2008).

I began articulating my ideas in 2009 with one of the college deans as she worked to strengthen the Brown-Tougaloo Partnership. Historic in its longevity and success, celebrating fifty years of collaboration in 2014, Brown’s student participation in the Partnership’s undergraduate semester exchange had ebbed a little, victim of administrative and personnel turnover, and changing priorities. 17 17 See the Brown-Tougaloo Partnership, accessed May 24, 2016, https://tougaloo.brown.edu/. Despite the controversial politics behind establishing the Partnership in the 1960s that did not necessarily have the HBCU’s best interest at heart (particularly during tenser Cold War and conformist politics), and that Brown students on the whole did not value the opportunities presented by semester-exchange to Mississippi, I chose to help in its transformation that might benefit the students we serve on both campuses. 18 18 For some detail about that controversy, see Brown University Library, accessed May 24, 2016, https://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/FreedomNow/themes/beittel/. Using the master’s tools to reform the master’s house (writer Audre Lorde’s brilliant metaphor), I can fulfill my pedagogical goals that promote an Africana Studies pedagogy while ensuring that those participating in the exchange have a transformative investment in the Partnership.

In early February we required an application with references and statements outlining the reasons for their interest. As the demand always exceeded our allotted numbers, participants could not view the trip as a thrill-seeking (and relatively cheap) Spring Break romp devoid of serious intellectual input and reflection. The application and the pre-deadline information sessions spelled out the criteria that usually eliminated the most superficial applications. Students with interest in the longer commitment to a semester exchange got priority. Students also had to demonstrate a dedication to learning Civil Rights history (evident in their curricular trajectory and/or extracurricular activities) although a lack of prior experience did not disqualify them.

The interracial groups selected in 2012 to 2015, from which I pull most of my observations, represented a broad cross-section of Brown’s student body: from first years to seniors, from pre-med students to majors as diverse as classics, education, and Africana Studies. All but one in these groups had never been to Mississippi and their previous experiences varied widely. A couple of them had extensive knowledge and practical skills with labor organizing on campus and in hometowns, or working in New Orleans post-Katrina. A few came from low-income families and knew first-hand the challenges of poverty and dislocation, coming to Brown disoriented and surrounded by affluence and privilege. Those students had deep interests in the US education system and were attentive to the systemic inequalities cemented in race and class dynamics. Despite their differences, they all stepped up for the personal challenges they might face on the trip, during which identities they had formed on one campus (whether as mixed race, Latino, African American, white, Jewish, and/or gay) might be challenged on another.

Creating the Mobile Classroom

On a surface level, I wanted students to see and feel the place that had moved me to a life pursuing intellectual questions with an Africana Studies focus. Once I started the process of articulating my goals and strategies, I found “City as a Text” (CAT) created by Bernice Braid. It is a well-tested pedagogical program, and sets strict guidelines about the process of introducing students to a new place, relying on the elements of discomfort and disorientation to trigger awareness and desire to learn.

My methodology, compared to CAT, is less structured, involving more immersion than pure observation. Many places served as texts: the Tougaloo campus; the city of Jackson; the museums and archives; even Brown, before and after the trip. The place and the students’ experience become primary sources as they engage in active and experiential learning. Thanks to the Brown-Tougaloo Partnership, they live in the dormitories with the other students, except the one night when we travel through the Delta. Tougaloo College has a total student body of under a thousand, on a beautiful campus steeped in activist history and generations of community and alumni pride. 19 19 See “About Us,” Tougaloo College, accessed May 24, 2016, https://www.tougaloo.edu/about-tougaloo-college. During their orientation I prepared the students for a study-abroad experience because I anticipated culture shock. I gave historical details and a foundation, but I also briefed them on the potential issues they might face (how public interactions differed by region, for instance), and what they might expect. I wanted to heighten their awareness before they arrived so that they could observe and experience at a more critical level. I knew they would be surprised at the differences, and they were. They then had to process why they were surprised even with the information they had acquired. They intellectually understood how the historical past has imprinted the present; their theoretical platform rooted in Africana Studies had provided that, but seeing it elicited very visceral reactions and students had to now deploy those tools of critical analysis to comprehend and take their learning to the next level.

My general teaching strategy layers experiences—a field trip enables richer, deeper deposits with each step informing the next. It would be a multi-experiential feast. I met with the selected students at least twice as a group and once individually beforehand. The group meetings begin the bonding process, reading and discussing two books to arm them with the critical analytical tools rooted in Africana Studies methodology. Often I have used my own book, Crossroads At Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta After World War II and Anne Moody’s autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi, to ensure a baseline historical knowledge of the place and its people while also having conversations about their expectations. Reading the product from my Mississippi experience gave students a taste of what they might see: where I went and my research journey. It initiated many discussions as we travelled, especially when I pointed out archives, landmarks, and sites featured in my book. Anne Moody’s autobiography starkly spells out what was at stake as a young Black Mississippian who chose the path of activism despite the terrible risks to her family, her person, and her mental health. Students read about African Americans with African Americans at the center of analysis and with their voices prominent. To not explicitly demand this of the readings would undermine the very work this trip hoped to achieve and ill-equip the students’ ability to process the experience through an Africana Studies lens.

We all get on the flight to Jackson the first Saturday of Spring Break, usually at dawn, arriving early afternoon. Once on Tougaloo’s campus, I leave the students to acclimate, connecting by phone if necessary. On Sunday morning we attend church services, students choose between the Tougaloo Chapel or ride with me to Mount Helm Baptist Church, one of the oldest African American congregations in the city, located downtown. 20 20 Mount Helm Baptist Church, accessed May 24, 2016, https://www.mthelm.org/. Even though not all members of the groups identified as Christians, they threw themselves into this new experience. Reading about the power of the Black church, and then participating in a service takes that book knowledge to another level. Students feel the power: they feel the community and the love. They hear the choirs and experience how sound and music play such profound roles in Black services.

The week in Mississippi pivots around a two-day excursion into the Mississippi Delta. With Anne Moody and my narrative in mind (many had more narratives on which to draw as well), I want them to feel the Delta—to experience the land, the space, the history. Embarking early, we drive to Memphis, just over the Tennessee state line, where we visit the National Civil Rights Museum located at the site of the Lorraine Motel and the boardinghouse from which Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassin fired his fatal shot. Stopping first for lunch on Beale Street, students spend a few hours in the museum, pausing at the balcony to pay quiet homage. The federally-maintained institution provides a multi-layered source of interest, from the lone protester outside, Jacqueline Smith (who used to live in the motel before her eviction in 1988 with many others to make way for the museum construction that became the shrine that she argues King would never have wanted); to the celebration of the case made against the assassin, James Earl Ray; followed by the homage to human rights on a wall of fame that includes figures as diverse as Nelson Mandela to Eva Longoria and Bono. Students trickle out of the buildings, emotionally and physically exhausted.

After a quick peek at the mighty Mississippi River, we head south back into Mississippi on Highway 61, straight into the Delta. The night’s inexpensive stay at the casinos in Tunica anchors the two-day trip and just happened to host Paula Deen’s all-you-can-eat buffet. Who else epitomized Southern cuisine (before her unfortunate comments that revealed a little too much about her character)? 21 21 See “Paula Deen on Her Dream Southern Plantation Wedding,” Talking Points Memo, June 19, 2013, https://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/paula-deen-on-her-dream-southern-plantation-wedding and “Transcript of the Testimony of Paula Deen,” CNN, May 17, 2013, https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2013/06/entertainment/deen-deposition/; That facility closed in June 2014. I want the students to see the stark contrast of the Delta’s poverty against the opulence of the casino strip, and think about the local and regional implications. It allows for the genuflection toward yet another stimulated sense: taste. One student summed up her gastronomic experience by just saying, “chicken fried chicken biscuit smothered with gravy,” when asked about trip highlights – and she insists on the emphasis. Another student said, “I came here thinking I was vegan. No more!” That comment, offered at the Brown-Tougaloo Advisory Board Meeting on Tougaloo’s campus held the same week as our trip, elicited hearty applause and laughter. She did not exaggerate. From the cafeteria serving home-cooked Southern cuisine, to Paula Deen’s devotion to butter, we ate well—and probably a little too much.

The next morning we drive one hour to Clarksdale where we go to the Delta Blues Museum located in the now-defunct Illinois Central Railroad terminal. The site of multiple Civil Rights activities more than fifty years ago, street plaques celebrating the rich blues heritage dot the small city, and more recently local activists have ensured the erection of a few Civil Rights markers. This museum, tiny in comparison to the Memphis memorial, offers a particular homegrown African American history that only displays the musical products. Oftentimes we ate lunch at Ground Zero, the Hollywood actor Morgan Freeman’s blues establishment conveniently located a stone’s throw away, before a brief stop at a gentrified and beautifully stocked general store in the once-thriving feed store where my host-mother bought her chicken feed over twenty years ago. This is not the downtown Clarksdale that they read about two weeks prior to the trip.

Heading out of Clarksdale on Highway 49, passing through the famous crossroads where the guitarist Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil, we pause at the Hopson plantation two miles away, the place where the mechanical cotton gin was developed. We pass through Sumner, and I prompt students about the significance of the town; indeed that section of the highway, renamed the Emmett Till Memorial Highway, serves as a somber reminder. Our next destination, Glendora, wrenches the gut. The students know that they will encounter the Tallahatchie River, but they do not expect to drive into the 1930s. Once off Highway 49 the road becomes graveled and potholed, lined with ancient, dilapidated shacks outside of which young and old congregate with no jobs and no prospects. Following the marker to the building, a simple sign welcomes us to the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center. The local community runs the museum, housed in the former cotton gin where Emmett Till’s murderers, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, seized the gin fan that pinned the boy they mutilated to the depths of the river. 22 22 Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center, accessed May 24, 2016, https://www.glendorams.com. This museum, in contrast to the National Civil Rights shrine to King and the Delta Blues Museum, vividly highlights how local politics affect public commemoration and the location of memorials. Which narratives get public money and who has to raise private money in order to be heard? In this way, students are confronted with the politics of memory making. 23 23 See Owen Dyer and Derek Alderman, Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory (The Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2008), for a deeper discussion on the politics of memory making and African American battles over space; See also Renée Romano and Leigh Raiford, eds., The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (University of Georgia Press, 2006).

In 2013, we unexpectedly met the village’s mayor, Johnny B. Thomas (also Executive Director of the Center). He gave us a tour of the exhibit, peppering the standard tour narrative with personal stories and raw emotion. In one display a military uniform hangs neatly pressed next to a photograph. We learn that the photograph is of Thomas’ son who took his own life as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder following his service. Students confront Glendora nearly sixty years after the murder that galvanized so many of their age to organize a mass of movements for change. Yet so little has changed. They see the history of the mass movement but also that the longer Black freedom struggle continues.

Somberly we rejoin Highway 49 briefly before heading east on a back road to our next stop—the Bryant store in Money—the site of Till’s supposed interaction with Carolyn Bryant. The documentaries Eyes on the Prize and The Untold Story of Emmett Till flash images of this building and all that remains is a crumbling façade. Students hesitate to pose in the thick weeds and private property placards for photographs, nervous to smile for the camera when the evidence of such macabre history serves as their backdrop. Once, a friendly stray dog begging for food easily distracted us from these quiet ethical surprises, from the silent mourning, and tossing a few broken crackers to the grateful puppy allowed for a moment to lighten the emotional load.

Silently moving on toward Greenwood, I watch and listen to the students. They do not say much. As we approach the Greenwood city limits, I urge them to pay attention to the landscape. For miles we have traveled on the backroads where swamps, fields, small wooden houses, and the occasional larger home occupy the view. Once over a low bridge leading into the city, the change is dramatic: manicured lawns, columned mansions, and latest model SUVs on well-appointed tree-lined paved streets. A couple of the students are literally outraged and protest vocally (and unfiltered). They know they should expect this, they have read about the stark economic disparities in the Delta, but in that one instant, they see it. They see it again once we cross the railroad tracks and drive into potholes, past derelict houses and dusty, empty storefronts, older model cars, and too many fast food chains and dollar stores. More cursing. I say very little, letting them feel their indignation as I do every time I drive through the Delta.

Heading west on Highway 82 to Indianola, we go to the B. B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, a handsome one-story building, once an old cotton mill (yet again) where the Blues musician himself once worked. 24 24 B.B. King Museum, accessed May 24, 2016, https://www.bbkingmuseum.org/. This museum, supported by Mr. King and corporate sponsors, boasts a substantial exhibit of the Delta’s rich history through the story of Indianola’s famous son, with educational programming and community service initiatives incorporated into the space. As this is the last of four museums in two days, the students are usually quite weary, but they have had the opportunity to compare and contrast these institutions. During the nearly two-hour drive back to Jackson, we discuss their reactions and analyze how memory is preserved, by whom, and for whom. Indeed, Douglas Brinkley also pointed out, “The road unshackles the American psyche like nothing else.” 25 25 Brinkley, The Majic Bus, 15.

Before the Tougaloo trip, and as a white teenage girl, I would frequently walk into restaurants, movie theaters, or university classrooms and give no thought to the racial makeup of the people around me. After driving through the Mississippi Delta, and discussing local history with the residents of Clarksdale, I returned to my normal routine with a new awareness of the basic privileges I enjoyed based solely on the color of my skin. The shops I frequent, the food I eat, and the courses I study—for the most part—are composed of people who look just like me. Even though I am still a Classics major, the insights I gained from the Tougaloo Trip have compelled me to interrogate the administrators, professors, and students around me about the lack of diversity in my field of study.

Visiting the various museums in Mississippi opened my eyes to the multiple ways Civil Rights History has been told and the possibilities for how it will be told in the future, especially local histories. In particular, the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center in Glendora made me realize the possibilities for educational museums and centers to impact the community as a whole. As someone who probably wants to work in museums, just being able to compare the different types of museums and their effect on each of their communities was eye-opening.

As much as I love history books, I think that when I learn history from books, there’s a way that the history seems far removed from my reality . . . But reading about history and then going to the place where the events took place makes history inextricable from the every day. The Civil Rights tour we did in the Delta is seared in my memory in a way that most history I read isn’t. For example, when I talk about Emmett Till’s murder, I feel a sense of historical authority—I know I’m not forgetting important details or flubbing information. In a deep emotional way, it’s not distant, and it’s not something I simply memorized. Visiting the Emmett Till museum and the place where he whistled at a white woman in Money, and seeing the overwhelming poverty that remains in Glendora left me with such respect for the Civil Rights movement and all it overcame that the stakes for learning history seem too high to forget details.

An archival experience at the state archives dominates the next two days and adds another layer. I had guided them through the necessary preparation process that has to occur before they reach Mississippi. I had met with the students individually to discuss their project choices and pointed them towards other resources, encouraging them to fine-tune their research questions, and as a group we brainstormed, compared, and reviewed further. Once in Mississippi, the students loved the archival experience, even the skeptics. These students appreciated the primary sources they could touch, marvel at original signatures of activists they had read about and generally get a little star-struck—just like I had done when I first started. For some, this becomes, what Braid describes, a “recursive element of learning,” and they will go back to the archives in the future to explore further, addicted to and empowered by their experiences. 26 26 Shatter the Glassy Stare, 22.

This trip provided me with the first opportunity to conduct primary research from original documents. Browsing through the folders in the archive allowed me to see, and hold, the history from the perspective of those who actually worked for and wrestled with the Child Development Group of Mississippi. Unlike a google search or library catalogue, the Jackson archives did not let me overlook contextual documents to find what I was looking for. Rather, I was forced to examine all the files, news clippings, and diary entries . . . stored alongside my particular topic, and I began to understand how challenging it is to resurrect the “truth” from historical evidence. Since undertaking this research, I have begun to develop a more nuanced approach to interpretation and critical thinking in all aspects of my learning.

One of the most meaningful experiences on this trip for me was the time spent in the Mississippi state archives. The chance to research a topic of my choice using primary sources both introduced me to content and practice. I still find what I was studying about Freedom Summer fascinating, and I would love to return to it again someday. I feel like I barely scratched the surface! . . . I got to hold in my hands student work and type-written curriculum guides used by one Freedom Summer teacher complete with his penciled in notes while I studied it. Since then, I have written two more papers using mainly archival sources, and I have enjoyed digging further for information in all of my papers.

Returning to the Familiar?—Post-trip

We depart Mississippi on Saturday (in 2013 we left on Good Friday as Tougaloo’s campus closed), most of us reluctantly. With one or two days to prepare for the last weeks of the semester we all have very little time to recuperate and we scatter in our various directions when we land, promising to reconnect soon. Usually I gather the group together about a month after the trip for a mini-reunion. Using that opportunity to debrief, regroup, and process, I follow the advice from Beverly Daniel Tatum, an experienced teacher of the psychology of racism, to embrace positive emotional responses that can not be reduced to guilt, shame, anger, or despair that can, in turn, build into resistance against the learning process. 27 27 Tatum in Bobo et. al., The Black Studies Reader, 389. Debriefing also provides more informal measures of learning as students integrate their new knowledge in their lives. Using the mass Civil Rights movement history as a foundation, the trip promotes a rethinking of US history and history-making—and the return to Brown’s campus often produces an unexpected discomfort with those markers of privilege that emboldened students before. I note the shift in their questioning, the more concrete avenues they create for their indignation that often means more classes, further study, or a drive toward social and political activism.

At the end of the semester presentations constitute the top and final layer of their learning. Presentations encourage students to articulate the integration of the trip into their learning goals. Opportunities to formally present their original work are not readily available to most students. As this trip does not constitute a course, the fifteen-minute oral presentation is the students’ only responsibility or mode of accountability and a way to evaluate their learning. A campus-wide invitation to the presentations, and the catered lunch in the faculty club, formalizes the event, with invitations extended to the Brown-Tougaloo Advisory Council members (former corporation members and alumni), and the Dean of the College. In this formal setting, students hone their presentation skills, learning to summarize their research, or the process of doing research, and effectively communicate—adding yet another experiential and transferable skill to the many they had acquired throughout the semester. Students who had no previous archival experience talk about the process, where they started, what they had learned, and what they would do differently, while those with more archival research nimbly process their sources into a coherent narrative. The entire event is taped for the institutional archive, and the students have a record of their work in this culminating experience.

Students’ presentations in 2013 (as an example) ran the gamut. One student interested in Black women’s activism found the Freedomcraft Candy Cooperative of Hinds County where she noted her frustration that she had to learn about this group of Black women through a white man’s personal papers because she could find no other source. Another student looked at the role of white supremacist ideology in union-busting in Mississippi (1946–1965) focusing on Operation Dixie, the passing of Right-to-Work legislation, and Claude Ramsay as the Mississippi AFL-CIO president. A newbie to archival research initially thought he would look at how gender and sexuality influenced lived experiences among Civil Rights activists, but after a couple of hours floundering in the finding aids, he finally settled on the Methodist Church during the mass movement after a set of private papers caught his attention. The Freedom Schools records attracted students, particularly the opportunity to see the work of young children from fifty years ago. One student researched the development of the Republic of New Afrika, telling a different story about Black communities in Mississippi; another looked at the Mississippi media’s portrayal of Emmett Till’s murder.

Bernice Braid’s “recursive element of learning” becomes very clear during these presentations and in later follow-up. Regardless of the level of research expertise, all had newfound respect for archival work and most have sought to find ways to do more on campus. Two students in particular took the research they began in Mississippi to undertake significant projects. A 2012 student researched the relationship between Brown and Tougaloo in the 1960s to narrate the Partnership’s founding. His work, a transformative investment in the Partnership through the lens of Africana Studies, uncovered some more of the sordid history between the Brown administration, its CIA links, and the political machinations behind the firing of Tougaloo’s popular president, A. Daniel Beittel, at a time when the college openly supported and sheltered Civil Rights activists and activities. This research became a larger capstone project interrogating the extent to which universities publicly supported their students of color yet undermined their presence and success. In 2013 a student chose to research the Child Development Group of Mississippi and Head Start Programs (CDGM). She continued this research and successfully applied for an internal fellowship and the national Truman Scholarship. She spent the summer of 2014 in Mississippi conducting oral history interviews with CDGM activists and workers. Through her diligence and ability she had unprecedented access to childhood education founders, completing a rich and detailed study that she presented to the organizers whose histories she collected. After graduating she spent a year at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, DC to learn more about the inner workings of federal poverty interventions.

Moving forward I look to support my pedagogy further by utilizing technology more effectively, and incorporate journaling more strategically. Since students carry smart-phones, I want them to post their photographs, emotional responses, and reactions in real-time blog posts, rather than relying on fading memory dulled and blocked by the next distraction and experience. Those with the wherewithal could also post raw shorts filmed on their devices. This would make their journaling more efficient and encourage instant peer reviewing. It is an archive without the filters of distance and lapsed time. Furthermore, I can measure their learning more effectively. As a group, we would then decide if and how to make the blog public to the Brown-Tougaloo community and beyond. Nevertheless, the 2014 trip reinforced the differences in resources between the two institutions—I had taken for granted that students would have wireless access on campus. The next step in this, therefore, is the administrative assistance to facilitate access to technology for the Tougaloo campus at large. There is much work to be done using the master’s tools.

In addition to recording and archiving, recently two Tougaloo faculty members and I piloted joint Delta trips that developed another layer of learning for all students. As students experienced the Delta together, they initiated deeper conversations about history and history-making, comparing their educations, home states, and aspirations. Future collaborations would include a similar trip to Providence for Tougaloo students, and co-taught bi-campus courses. Big dreams from humble beginnings.

The Students Conclude

The Tougaloo trip gave me the opportunity to put the history into an entirely new context . . . More importantly, traveling to Mississippi allowed me to connect the Civil Rights Movement history to 2013 in a more real way. Being able to see the towns where fifty years ago people were fighting for freedom but still do not really have it today drives me to work even harder to educate people about the Movement. It also made it very real that the Movement is far from over and the issues people faced fifty years ago are still relevant today.

I appreciated the uncommon level of care and relationship-building that took place on the Tougaloo trip. That semester marked a turning point for me where I finally felt that I knew my professors, both in this trip and in a few of my classes . . . I worried that my high school background had not prepared me as well as most of my peers and my professors seemed distant and sometimes intimidating.

During my junior year, the year I participated in the Tougaloo trip . . . [t]he average size of my classes became much smaller. This marked a change in classroom dynamics where I became both very intimidated by the expectation that I speak during class discussions and also really appreciated the feeling that my presence mattered in my courses. The Tougaloo trip was one more extreme example of this . . . With only seven students on the trip, the expectation that we be engaged with our work was much greater, but . . . it was also much easier to form relationships with each other and our professors . . . Trusting that everyone around me was similarly excited about what they studied, I felt more comfortable articulating why I was passionate about what I was studying, something I had never done in the past. Through going on the trip and presenting my research afterwards, I practiced sharing my thoughts and emotions on a topic I cared about in an academic setting. I was able to continue this in my other courses following the trip; during my senior year, I chose courses and paper topics that I found more engaging and relevant and through that got much more out of my studies.

The Mississippi Delta is an important geopolitical site. The people who live there and the conditions of their living helps us understand America, its history, and the contradictions of our democracy. Although quite brief, the week I spent in Mississippi not only revealed the incredible tasks people undertake to make sense of their world. It confirmed my belief that history and understanding the world in historical terms provides a necessary framework for imagining a different kind of future: a future where white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, or the valuing of heterosexual bodies over all others does not define and limit access to power. For example, I met a student at Tougaloo College who is now in her second year at Brown’s Alpert Medical School. She . . . saw admission to Brown through Tougaloo’s cooperative Partnership as the “only way” to realize her dream . . . [T]o view Brown and Tougaloo’s graduate school pipeline as the “only way,” whether accurate or not, is indicative of a unique phenomena requiring our most critical attention.

The trip to Mississippi really helped me visualize the curriculum I had been crafting at Brown. Focused on American empire and the Black freedom struggle, I only knew the events or people I learned about in class on paper. Sometimes, professors would show us a movie or explicate a photograph and it would help me to “see” the information on screen. But to “go” somewhere, to map knowledge onto the geography and onto real bodies, is another level of learning . . . History is a living thing. A classroom could not have shown that to me . . . But to “see” it, and therefore never being able to “unsee” it, gives me something that traditional instruction fails to . . . I argue that experiential learning gives room for students to conduct knowledge in ways limited by how rigid “space” has confined the production and teaching of knowledge . . . Experiential learning is, in this view, a deeply political tool for teaching.

The Civil Rights trip gave History urgency. I am a History concentrator, and now . . . it’s easier for me to imagine what that might be like, since I experienced that kind of learning in Mississippi. In that way, all history, even that not related to the Civil Rights Movement, has become more real and relevant to my life. Experiencing the way the Delta remembers and honors its history is contagious.

I created this program to increase students’ experiential learning, to engage all of their senses, but I have also learned from these experiences: I see how I can teach more effectively, what animates students, and learn about them in ways not possible in a formal classroom. I readily concede that this program exists because of privileged opportunities, but we work and live in (or near) places that can become “texts” as Bernice Braid suggests. Even without the Brown-Tougaloo Partnership and the extra resources available, two expensive private schools reside blocks away from Brown’s campus (sometimes using Brown’s facilities and full of Brown faculty’s progeny), and only a block further, the large, underfunded, mostly minority public school has police cars parked to hustle students in or out and away from the other schools’ pristine gates. Just as the mass Civil Rights movement has multiple locations because of its local articulations, the after-stories linger in the public institutions, politics, and streets. Most of our students are already engaged in extra-curricular work in less-privileged communities. With careful preparation, these places can also be our classroom, not only for those who paid their tuition, but also for those we encounter.