IUSB ‘Freedom Summer’ an exercise in experiential history

Students from three IU campuses retraced history of the civil rights movement last summer

The “Greensboro Four,” as those students will always be called, launched a wave of lunch counter sit-ins across the country. Their simple act helped propel the mid-20th century American civil rights movement and illustrated to a generation of college and university students their own powers to affect change through direct action protest.

Sixteen graduate and undergraduate students from IUSB, IUPUI and IU Bloomington—many of whom were familiar with the movement only through chapters in textbooks that chronicle the events of the 1960s—spent two weeks on a study tour of 10 southern cities that played key roles in the turbulence of the those times. Because of time constraints, the tour didn’t include Greensboro, N.C., but the IU students visited historic sit-in locations in downtown Nashville, Tenn.; attended Sunday services at Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dexter Ave. Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala.; traveled through the Mississippi Delta; visited the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., the site where King was assassinated in 1968; and retraced on foot the final-mile route of the famous Selma to Montgomery protest march.

The group also spent time with those who actually “walked the walk” in the early days of the movement, among them L.C. Dorsey, who described herself as a “foot soldier” in the Mississippi civil rights movement and talked to the students after they’d spent a day foot soldiering themselves in 90-degree heat along the streets of Jackson. There was also Johnnie Carr, a childhood friend of Rosa Parks whose personal courage ignited the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott in 1955. The students also met with Charles Evers, the brother of the slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

Journaling was a very important component of the experience, said Les Lamon, the IUSB history professor who planned the journey, accompanied the students and is now involved in the fruits of that journey as the Civil Rights Heritage Center takes shape on the South Bend campus.

Also along on the first leg of the trip was the South Bend Tribune’s managing editor Tim Harmon and photographer Jim Rider, who chronicled the event in words and pictures.

In an editorial after the journey, Harmon wrote:

“The students stood in the same places where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood, with his words playing through their minds—knowing things he could not have known. Eerie? Yes. But memorable, deeply touching and oh-so-much more real than rote, remote history…History is only boring to people who can’t imagine themselves in the skins of those who made it.”

Lamon, whose research has focused on the history of African Americans and race relations in the South, had brought a personal history to the experience. He was a first-year history teacher in 1965 at Oak Ridge (Tenn.) High, a part of the first public school system in the South to desegregate following the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka decision ruling segregated education unconstitutional. In 1965, Lamon was also an assistant basketball coach for a team that played in Tennessee’s first desegregated state tournament. That experience had meant a basketball game at Clinton High School, which had been desegregated by eight students and then destroyed in 1958 in a fire-bombing that was racially motivated.

“When we walked into the gym at the new Clinton High School that December night,” Lamon wrote in the 1999 winter issue of IUSB’s Vision, “I became a part of the civil rights ‘movement’ whether or not I knew it or intended for it to happen. “

http://www.iusb.edu/~history/freedom.html