Over summer break, I went on the Journey to Justice trip. It was an intense experience. This trip is led by Dr. Valerie A. Stein, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Evansville, Director of the Ethics & Social Change Major, and Race & Ethnicity Studies Program Faculty Director at the Center for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The journey takes place twice a year and is open to area youth aged 15 years and older, UE students, local middle school and high school teachers, and interested community members. I was asked to join the trip to manage social media and take photographs and videos. I eagerly accepted the opportunity, but I didn’t fully understand what I was getting into.

We began our journey right at home at the Evansville African American Museum downtown. This was a gentle way to ease everyone into the trip. I had been to the museum several times before, so I knew what to expect, but the high school students attending were already enlightened and shocked from the start. Local historian Kelley Coures spoke to the group about civil rights in Evansville, IN, sharing sobering incidents, the rise and fall of Black communities, and introducing the students to racist policies like redlining, which still affects the city today. Most of the students were Black. One of them confided in me, saying, “It’s messed up that an old white dude knows more about my history and culture than I do.” Sorry, Kelley—I’m sure he meant that in an endearing way.

The group met back in Eykamp Hall to discuss what they had learned and what to expect after our departure in the morning. However, they didn’t realize that our first day had already set the tone for the rest of the trip: exploring, learning, and discussing as a group at the end of each day. The high school students imagined college life by spending a night in a dorm, while the adults returned home for a good night’s rest before meeting bright and early to board the bus for one of the most mentally arduous adventures I have ever experienced.

Fast forward to our arrival at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. The museum is housed in a former warehouse where enslaved people were forced to labor. As I entered the exhibit, I was met by a 30-foot wall of screens displaying the rough tides of the Atlantic Ocean during a storm. A flash of lightning sparked across the screen as thunderclaps echoed over the surround sound speakers. Even gusts of wind seemed to graze my skin as I stared up at the towering waves. To my right and left were two door-sized openings inviting me in through the waves, and as I walked through, I found myself underwater.

The ambiance of the room looked, felt, and sounded like I was underwater, with muffled deep sounds and sparse shimmers reflecting off the walls and floor, mimicking refracted light through moving water. The floor was almost completely covered in sand, and the walkway was purposefully coarse and bumpy. In the sand were powerful works of art that shattered the illusion, revealing the harsh reality of American history. These art statues depicted Africans at the bottom of the ocean, buried in the sand with soulful expressions of agony, despair, and desperation. It was palpable—the lives, the bodies, the souls of those who didn’t even make it to the Americas.

The rest of the museum was just as impactful as we traversed through time in the chronological exhibits. When I reached the Jim Crow era of history, I found myself standing in front of a striking floor-to-ceiling display of glass jars on open shelves that allowed the light to shine and reflect from all angles. There were two rows of jars, back-to-back, filled with dirt—red dirt, yellow dirt, dark rich black dirt, so many variations of color, it was beautiful. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that each jar had a name on it. The Equal Justice Initiative had started collecting jars of soil from locations where Black people were killed in lynchings, and some of those jars were eloquently displayed before me. Each jar represented a person, a location. I started to count the jars across, then the rows, and then multiplied that by two—my goodness, there were 400 jars here. I audibly gasped. But this was nothing compared to what I experienced at the National Memorial For Peace and Justice.

We all left the Legacy Museum changed, and this was just our first stop on our first day away from home. Trying to describe the impact of our next stop is difficult, which is probably why the National Memorial For Peace and Justice exists in the first place. The memorial is spread over six acres of land, much of which is covered in a strategic display of suspended columns. The columns are six feet tall and about two to three feet wide. There are 805 of them, each representing a county where a lynching took place, with the names of the victims inscribed on the corresponding column. There are more than 4,400 names. The memorial defines these incidents as racial terrorism. I cried several times on day one.

On day two, we entered downtown Montgomery. I’ve visited many capital cities in the Midwest, but I’ve never seen anything like this. Downtown Montgomery felt out of place, as if its significance had been artificially inflated by some unseen force. The area seemed to be constructed entirely of limestone and marble, giving it an imposing and almost surreal atmosphere. We explored downtown, visited the Rosa Parks Museum, and stood in the very spot where Rosa Parks boarded the bus and was arrested. But I want to focus on another historic landmark in Montgomery: The First White House of the Confederacy.

The First White House of the Confederacy is where the President of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis, and his family resided. The house is perfectly preserved with historical items and furnishings owned and used by Jefferson and his family. It now serves as a museum that regularly welcomes visitors. The museum receives state funding of $175,000 a year to operate. When I entered, I was greeted by a pleasant older gentleman who smothered me with Southern hospitality. I quietly shrunk into the background as the students explored and talked with the curator. I watched many visitors come and go, including young children, who also engaged with the curator. So, I just sat and listened.

It was hard to sit in this space, knowing what it represents. It was even harder to listen to the museum curator tell the group I was with, and the young children touring the home, that Jefferson Davis treated his slaves well, like family. Sitting there, silent and frustrated by the blatant state-funded whitewashing of history, was more than I could bear. I have no doubt my skin was hot to the touch—I was furiously on fire. Finally, I abruptly stood up and stormed outside, where I finally exhaled. I was completely unprepared for this experience, and I was equally unprepared for the juxtaposition of our next stop: Selma, Alabama.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge. I had seen photos and videos in movies and documentaries, but it’s a real place, a real bridge in Selma, Alabama. It is still used as a thoroughfare over the Alabama River, as if nothing ever happened. Entering Selma was bleak. I had never seen so many abandoned homes and businesses in one area, but when we approached this historic landmark, I thought I would see a more vibrant neighborhood. I did not. We crossed the bridge and drove to the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. met with local leaders to plan their march to Montgomery to fight for the right to vote. The church where they started the march on Bloody Sunday and where they began the 54-mile march to Montgomery. Even the church was experiencing hardship. The church was conducting services in a small room because their sanctuary needed $4.5 million in repairs and was unsafe to gather in for services. The Brown Chapel sits in need, as if nothing ever happened.

The group marched from the Brown Chapel to the Edmund Pettus Bridge to cross to the Memorial Park and visit the National Voting Rights Museum. I raced ahead on the bus to capture photos as the group walked across the bridge. The whole situation was surreal. I didn’t get to fully take it in because I was trying to capture the experience of others, but there I was on this historic bridge with cars racing by and people walking to and from wherever they were going, as I’m sure they do regularly. But for some reason, I felt privileged to be there. Even though I was trying to capture the essence of people attempting to understand something they couldn’t possibly grasp, I couldn’t help but feel incredibly honored to be on a bridge where people were incredibly brave and incredibly cruel over 50 years ago. Today, people cross it every day just to get where they are going. I still cannot articulate it adequately.

The National Voting Rights Museum is located just over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and it looks like it’s in an old print shop or small shipping warehouse. It doesn’t appear to be a museum, despite the lettering on the awning that says “The National Voting Rights Museum.” The museum houses photographic galleries of Bloody Sunday and the Selma-Montgomery March, interesting artifacts like plaster footprints of the civil rights foot soldiers, thousands of audio recordings from people who marched on Bloody Sunday and to Montgomery, and much more rich history deserving of respect and preservation. The curator was an adolescent at the time who was there on Bloody Sunday. I felt small in his presence, like everything hard I ever experienced was insignificant. The museum was musty, with cobwebs in the corners. The National Voting Rights Museum of Selma, Alabama, receives zero state funding.

After leaving Selma, we traveled on to Birmingham to visit Ingram Park, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, and the 16th Street Baptist Church. The park was amazing, filled with introspective, thought-provoking art—almost like an extension of the Civil Rights Institute. The Civil Rights Institute was filled with pop culture, presented in chronological order, as we again traveled through time, attempting to understand what it was like to live during the times of slavery, segregation, and when Black Americans fought for the right to vote. The 16th Street Baptist Church was particularly challenging to visit. It was really hard.

Just before 11 o’clock on September 15, 1963, the congregation of the 16th Street Baptist Church was knocked to the ground as a bomb exploded under the steps of the church. In the basement, four little girls were killed—14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and 11-year-old Cynthia Wesley. Addie’s sister Sarah survived but lost her right eye. In the church, they shared their rich history and stories from the past in a small immersive theater. Witnessing the location where the children were murdered and where the bomb was placed was overwhelming. That is all I can say about that.

We left Birmingham and headed to Memphis, Tennessee, to visit The National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Hotel. The outside of the museum is the preserved facade of the Lorraine Hotel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on the balcony. The National Civil Rights Museum is another chronological trip through time, but in this case, it leads to the very room where Martin Luther King Jr. stayed before he was shot on the balcony outside his room. Everything is perfectly preserved, frozen in time. Yet another surreal experience that finally drives home the notion that this was a fight. It was a fight from the first boat across the Atlantic to August 6, 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, a few months after the Selma-Montgomery march. And yet, it is still a fight.

The last stop of our trip was in Louisville, Kentucky, where a man placed 400-year-old shackles and chains on my wrists. We were at the Roots 101 African American Museum in Louisville, sitting together and listening to the curator’s orientation. He wanted to place the shackles on everyone’s wrists before touring the exhibit. I sat at the back to take photos, but once this part of the program started, I decided it would be too intrusive to capture.

I watched as the students lined up for him to place the shackles on each of them, one at a time. He held them up for the students to place their hands through. Once they had their hands through the shackles, he would pause, look them in the eye, and say, “Welcome to America,” as he dropped the chains onto their wrists, and they bore the full weight. The chain visibly pulled them downward, arching their backs to compensate for the burden of the chains. I’ve never seen a group more emotionally moved. The physical weight of our history was almost too much. One student asked, “Is this mandatory?” The curator replied, “No, it’s not mandatory, but our ancestors didn’t have a choice.” The student instantly reconsidered his hesitation and succumbed to the experience.

As I sat in the back of the room, watching each of these students feel centuries’ worth of exploitation in one moment, I couldn’t help but cry. When it was my turn, I feared I would completely break down and sob. He placed the shackles on my wrists just as I had watched him do 20 times before, and still, I was unprepared. “Welcome to America,” he said as he dropped the shackles on my wrists. The weight pulled me forward just as it did the teenagers. I teared up, but I didn’t lose it as I thought I would. I gulped down an audible swallow that landed like a brick in my gut.

After bearing the weight for a moment, he would ask each of us how we felt. The answers varied, but mine was short. At that moment, the only words I could conjure were, “It’s a lot.” Even though I had only worn the shackles for less than a minute, 15 to 20 minutes later, I could still feel them on my wrists. As I sit here writing, I try to remember how they felt on my skin, and I cannot seem to relive that physical experience, but emotionally, the weight is still enormous.

Now, I could go on and write about my takeaway from this experience, and that would probably take another 2,000 words to convey, but instead, I will share the simplified version of what the students said more and more frequently as we engaged in discussion at the end of each day. They said they were going to vote. “People fought and died for me to have the right to vote, and I am not going to waste it. I am going to vote in every election, and I am going to spread this message to make sure everyone knows what it took for us to have this right. We must vote!”

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