Congratulations to faculty members DuValle Daniel and Brooke Zimmers for their collaborative, successful grant application to develop and lead a study away program at the conclusion of the Winter quarter, of 2024. Daniel, Zimmers, and their students will follow a segment of the Civil Rights / Freedom Rider Trail, from Birmingham to Montgomery, Alabama.
The group will visit several important sites to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and will engage with locals who participated in the movement. Plans include visiting the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham where in 1963, a bomb exploded killing four young black girls and injuring many others, drawing national attention to the hard-fought and often dangerous struggle for civil rights for African Americans. In Montgomery, they will visit the Freedom Rides Museum and the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. Afterward, they will visit the powerful National Memorial for Peace and Justice which recognizes the thousands of lynchings that occurred across the United States. In Selma, the group will visit the National Voting Rights Museum. They will also walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, challenged to imagine the fear and bravery of the Black citizens who in 1965 walked the bridge toward an ‘army’ of white Alabama state and local police officers, and were brutally beaten. The harsh history of African Americans in the United States will be made clear through these potent experiences and faculty-led discussions.
Shoreline students enrolled in Zimmers’ or Daniel’s Winter Quarter 2024 classes, Communicating for Social Change (CMST 203), African American Literature (ENG 247 or 247W), English 101, or English 102, will engage in readings, discussions, and writings exploring systems of power and privilege with a focus on the significance of the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s, and the connection to present-day police violence and voter suppression tactics. The Alabama study away program will serve as an optional final project for students in these courses.
The mini-grant funding for this project was sourced by the International Education department through a College Innovation grant. Please direct questions regarding this project to Colleen Ferguson at cferguson@shoreline.edu
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