Jon Mark Beilue: Where History Tells a Story

WT students travel to Alabama for moving Civil Rights Tour

They walked along the east side of the 16^th Street Baptist Church, just a few feet from where 15 sticks of dynamite killed four African-American girls on a Sunday morning in 1963 as they were changing into choir robes.

They crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where 54 years earlier police used billy clubs and tear gas to attack unarmed demonstrators as they marched to the state capitol in the name of voting rights for blacks. Seventeen were sent to the hospital.

They could stop along Route 80, read the granite memorial to Viola Liuzzo, a white woman from Michigan who was gunned down by four Ku Klux Klansmen after transporting demonstrators to the airport.

“It was surreal,” said Alondra Villa, a sophomore from Tulia. “You think you wouldn’t feel anything being at that spot, but when we were at the 16^th Street Baptist Church, just thinking someone came by and felt the need to put a bomb there, there was no sense in it.

“It puts into perspective the gravity and severity of their actions. When you read about someone placing a bomb and killing four little girls, it’s heartbreaking, but when you stand in the physical location, that just made no sense.”

Over spring break, 14 West Texas A&M University honor students and three professors went to Alabama. For seven days, they followed the Civil Rights Tour, landmarks of racial struggle, of violence, of hope, turning points in United States history to fulfill the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal.”

The students were from a Monday night honors course that Dr. Marty Kuhlman, professor of history, teaches on civil rights. It was the first such trip this class has taken, and Alabama in the 1960s was history’s heart for civil rights and often painful change.

It took nearly a week to take it all in, from Birmingham to Selma to Montgomery. The trip began at the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, and six days later, ended there.

 At 10:22 a.m. on Sept. 15, 1963, dynamite killed four girls – three of them 14 years old, the other 11.  It was planted under church steps by four members of the Ku Klux Klan. The church has been a rallying point for civil rights activities. The city had got the nickname of “Bombingham,” and the heinous crime has been called the tipping point of the civil rights movement.

Some points to visit were actual historical sites, while others were memorials and museums.

The group toured Kelly Ingram Park, Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, National Voting Rights Museum, the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Slavery and Civil War Museum, Rosa Parks Museum, the Viola Liuzzo Memorial, Civil Rights Memorial, Peace and Justice Memorial, George Washington Carver Museum, the Tuskegee Airmen Museum and other sites.

“This is not just something in the classroom, not just something we talk about, so the civil rights struggle doesn’t really resonate the same way as it does when they are on the ground where it happened,” Kuhlman said. “To be able to better understand that and come away with a better perspective of what many in the country went through, that was the purpose.”

The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma was one such place. In March 1965, demonstrators were crossing the bridge on the 50-mile walk to Selma for voting rights for blacks. Selma police were waiting for them on the east side of the bridge and sent 17 to the hospital.

In the days afterward, two whites were murdered. One was a Boston pastor, James Reeb, and the other was Liuzzo, who was shot on Route 80 between Selma and Montgomery as she rode with a black worker on their way back from the airport.

Jo Ann Bland, 65, was an 11-year-old girl in 1965 when she was among those on the bridge that day. On the day the WT contingent was there, Bland was scheduled to speak to a tour group that never showed.

“She talked to students who were there, and when we came in, they told us who was speaking and one by one, we filtered in there and listened to her talk about her experience there,” said Dr. Wade Shaffer, provost/vice-president of academic affairs.

“That was the one of the things I hoped to get, to talk with someone who had actually lived through history,” Villa said. “That’s what’s impactful.”

Then there was the Peace and Justice Center near the state capitol in Montgomery. It opened last year and is dedicated to the victims of white supremacy. It is grim, stark and a reckoning of one of the nation’s most overlooked atrocities – the decades of lynching of blacks.

One of the exhibits has the names of those lynched by counties in the country. It starts at eye level, but by the end, it’s raised many feet up in the air with a view like those looking at a man lynched and dead in a tree.

“Very powerful,” Shaffer said. “Looking at it by county, there were several instances where 20 African-Americans were killed on a single day. ‘OK, what happened,’ and I’d pull out my phone, type in the county and year and there would be an article posted on the massacre and I’d never heard about it.

“For someone who studies and teaches history for a living to not know about this was shocking. If 20 were killed today, it would be huge.”

Shaffer called the students “responsible and responsive.” Kuhlman added “respectful.”

Dr. Kristina Drumheller, head of the history department, wanted empathy and understanding of systemic racism to be part of the trip – with an eye on the future.

“It makes me realize how much we still have to work on,” Villa said. “It’s not as bad as it was, but that’s not the right mindset. Is it as good as it could be? Even in the ‘60s, it was better than in the 1800s, but that doesn’t make racism or segregation OK.

“We still have problems with race in society today. Some things I haven’t noticed because I’m a little desensitized to it, things not blatant, but looking back, it was not OK. This makes me want to make others realize it’s not OK and you can speak out.”

 Do you know of a student, faculty member, project, an alumnus or any other story idea for “WT: The Heart and Soul of the Texas Panhandle?” If so, email Jon Mark Beilue at jbeilue@wtamu.edu.

—WTAMU—