Each winter, eighth-grade students at the Gordon School take a trip to Alabama and Georgia to visit historic sites associated with the Civil Rights Movement. The experience has had a profound impact on many students over the years, both professionally and personally.
Morning host Luis Hernandez spoke about the trip with Viva Sandoval, an eighth-grade humanities teacher at the Gordon School and a coordinator of the civil rights trip, Matt Shumate, deputy chief of staff for Providence Mayor Brett Smiley, who took part in the Gordon School’s civil rights trip as a student in 2005, and Miriam Mohamed, an eighth grader at the school who participated in this year’s civil rights trip.
TRANSCRIPT:
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Luis Hernandez: Viva, I wanna start with you. Tell us about the Gordon School civil rights trip. How did this happen? How did this come about?
Viva Sandoval: So Lynn Bowman was the brilliant mastermind behind the trip. She was initially an educator at the Gordon School who actually was in my same position, the eighth-grade humanities teacher, and then she kind of worked her way up in the administration to become the assistant head of school. She was actually the first Black woman hired at Gordon. So she was a trailblazer from the start. She saw a need for students to actually live this history beyond just learning about it in the classroom. So she created the trip and was able to launch the trip in 2002 and Gordon has maintained this legacy of hers and the trip is absolutely the capstone experience of Gordon students.
Hernandez: See, that’s one of the things you were talking about. I wanted to ask you about why is this trip important, and you kind of touched on it. I was thinking about how we learn things in a classroom and look, today we have the internet and everything, but [there’s] nothing like actually being there and experiencing it. What is it that the students take away from that aspect of it?
Sandoval: I think the people and the connections we make that are relational are the most impactful. The students always remember most the people that they spoke with, their charisma, and their kindness. Michelle Browder, the artist who shared her story with so much passion and humor, was able to talk about really difficult content in a way that didn’t feel so jarring and hopeless, but instead, we felt inspired by it.
I think most of the learning that happens actually happens before the trip. The students are put through a rigorous course on civil rights history that goes from reconstruction to mass incarceration today so that when they do get on this trip, they are equipped with the background knowledge and an understanding of the gravity of this history, the complexity of this history, so that once they go on the trip, they can be present and fully immerse themselves in the experience. That’s truly when I really step back. But it’s really the people that we meet with and the relations that we have that create that lasting impact, I think.
Hernandez: Matt, you took the trip back in 2005. What do you remember about the trip and what it meant to you? Why was it important for you?
Matt Shumate: It was important for me because it pulled together different, I think, aspects of my own life. So I’m the youngest of six kids. My dad grew up in South Carolina. Late ‘40s, mid ‘50s. My grandmother became a domestic in Harlem, and she moved my dad and her to Harlem and started this life. I heard the stories of the South, specifically, and I always wondered why we never went to the South. Why didn’t we ever go to see where Dad grew up? And that brings me to this opportunity that as a class, now we’re going to the South to learn history. I was fully aware of, I think, what I was going to see if you will, but actually walking the streets and walking the Edmund Pettus Bridge and sitting down with local leaders to hear their specific stories, it kind of came full circle, if you will, in the sense of kind of understanding that this is history, it’s scary, and it’s something that we have to talk about. We have to face these fears and understand where we came from.
Hernandez: Miriam, you just took the trip. What did you know of the South before you went? What were your thoughts about the Civil Rights Movement? How do you feel now that you’ve had that experience?
Miriam Mohamed: The past few years we’ve learned about the Civil Rights Movement starting from slavery and so I’ve gotten to learn a lot in the classroom about everything that’s happened in the South. And so now being able to see it in person was just really, like, connecting everything that I’ve learned for the past few years.
Hernandez: Was there one moment that you could point to and say, wow, that really had an impact on you?
Mohamed: Definitely when we were walking on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, because we’d seen pictures of John Lewis, Martin Luther King, walking on that bridge years ago. And when I got to walk on there on the same side, the same exact spot that they were on, it was silent. I just felt really strong and like a leader. It felt really empowering.
Hernandez: Matt and Viva, I wanna ask you this. The South is not the only place where the Civil Rights Movement happened, obviously. I’m wondering, do you look at what happened here in New England and how we can incorporate that into this journey?
Sandoval: Absolutely. One of the things we talk about in my class is segregation in the North and especially post-Great Migration, the ways that the North was not this incredible welcoming place to Black Americans that were migrating from the South. We look at actually the ways that Providence itself and the state of Rhode Island is segregated, and we look at the ways that the legacies of policies during the Jim Crow era were absolutely applicable here.
We also look at folks that were in the North that decided to get involved in the movement and they actually went south. For example, the teacher who taught one of the first students that integrated elementary schools in New Orleans was a teacher from Boston who was willing to go down there and teach for Ruby Bridges because none of the teachers in the South were willing to teach a Black child in that school. So it was cool for the students to hear she was from Boston and she actually took that initiative.
Especially in my class, I’m very intentional in incorporating points of connection for students so they could understand this might not be your local history, but there’s actually so many ways that we can connect what was happening there to what happened here in our very state.
Hernandez: Yeah, Matt, we think about civil rights and we think about the South. It is a central point, but in so many parts of the country there was something happening, and especially here in New England. Are we doing enough, first of all, to teach that and how could we do more?
Shumate: I think we are attempting to talk more about that particular history. There were pieces I learned in college about New England that I didn’t even know, specifically around the busing and segregation in Boston in the ‘70s. I wondered, growing up, why we, as a family, didn’t go to Boston. And that brings me back to my dad and this sense that we weren’t wanted potentially, or it’s still a little bit edgy in Boston given that recent history. There is definitely opportunities for us to connect and I think we need to embrace it.
Hernandez: Miriam, I just want to know from you, now that the journey’s over, what has it meant to you?
Mohamed: I think this trip has sort of taught me to really live in the moment and during the trip I was really engaged in all the content that we were learning about. I think that it has taught me to really pay attention to life and don’t let everything just go by because it’s really important to take it all in.
Hernandez: Viva, is there anything else you would add?
Sandoval: I came from a background where I didn’t have access to the opportunities that the Gordon students do. There’s so much backlash happening in the country right now that students can’t handle this history, that it’s too uncomfortable, that it’s too sad. I see it as my place to help students to manage what it feels like to learn this history and to understand that you can always find hope in the story, and especially meeting with the movement makers and the people that actually lived these full lives of activism, that’s where we find the hope and we can build on their legacy.
