The start.

It all seemed very simple. It was just a job. A job that I was being asked to shoot for work. The trip was the Civil Rights Pilgrimage (CRP) for the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire. It is a trip that is taken twice a year by 80 students at a time, once in January (during winter break) and again in March (for spring break).  At first, I didn’t know if I was going to be able to go, but when I really stopped to think about the possibilities of seeing Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas, and Tennessee, the opportunity to travel was just too compelling. The hardest part of any decision is the decision to act. Action is easy. It is just logistics, and anything can be figured out with enough time.   So I rearranged my schedule with the appropriate adjustments and made it happen.

The job.

Capture images of the UWEC students as they visit sites of historic importance to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Tell the story of the students and bring the content back for the university.

I have to say that until we departed on the bus. That I had honestly thought the experience would be as easy as that, just a job.  History has never pulled me, like it pulls some. But people…. People are another story.  And that is how through this trip, I was able to connect with the history and with the present.

The people.

People are absolutely fascinating. There is so much dimension, life, emotion, and perspective to found. Every single person I’ve ever met has taught me something, something about themselves and something about myself.  The many people of the CRP who I met throughout the trip taught me so much.  There are times in my life that I think I am knowledgeable on a subject and then face the reality that there is so much I don’t know and have yet to learn.

The background.

I remember when I was a child in a Wisconsin elementary school and was learning about slavery, racism and Martin Luther King Jr. The concept of it all seemed so foreign to me as I sat there in my almost entirely white school.  My first truly diverse multicultural experience was when I joined the military. Since then I had lived in various west coast cities in southern California and Washington State whose populations were far more diverse than anything I had seen. But it wasn’t until I visited the South, that I experienced a whole entirely new way of seeing the United States.

The history.

The Civil Rights Movement was such a powerful and amazing social movement. There was so many people that fought for what they believed in: a nation filled with equal treatment and opportunity. The emotions that I felt as the trip delved deeper and deeper in to the struggles of the past, were overwhelming. The movement that supported nonviolence, seemed to be such an impossible challenge.

The impact.

I remember a particularly intense moment that struck me while we were going through the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. It was an interactive exhibit that had film footage of the Bloody Sunday March in Selma, Alabama, as the lawmen billy club and tear gas the protestors.  I had experienced the tear gas chamber during Navy boot camp, your first reaction is to wipe at your nose and eyes to stop the pain and crying, coughing, drooling and skin irritation.  I just can’t understand the need to do that to nonviolent protest, a group of people who were simply walking for a cause. As I watched the video and remembered my experience, I began to cry, heartbroken for the paint that these protestors endured.

The present.

The other shock that I left the trip with was the disappointment that there is are so many human rights of today that are still needing support and someone to fight. Just because the movement is over doesn’t me that there all injustice has stopped. And it was leaving the trip that I have since began my journey to support those rights. Awareness and education is the first step.

-a wanderer-