By Rebecca Davis ’15
Members of the Siena College community had the opportunity to spend part of the summer commemorating the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer with a trip to the place where it began: Mississippi.
Professor of Sociology Paul Murray, Ph.D. led Siena students and high school students from Albany and Green Tech High Schools on tour of Mississippi. They spent more than a week visiting landmarks of the Civil Rights Movement and ended their trip in Jackson at the Freedom Summer 50th Anniversary Conference at Tougaloo College.
Abigail Bradley ’17 was the videographer for the trip and was grateful that she had an opportunity to experience this trip at the end of her first year in college. “This is just something I’m so passionate about,” Bradley said. She became involved in this project when she took Murray’s Civil Rights Movement course last spring.
When Freedom Summer began in 1964, its goal was to get the subjugated African American community in Mississippi to vote. This was a dangerous task and safe havens, known as freedom houses and freedom schools, were created to protect civil rights workers. Today, they have been converted into museums that the group visited.
Murray and the students also honored those who were murdered in the quest for civil rights by going to memorials. According to Murray, perhaps the most emotional excursion was the visit to the museum of Emmett Till and seeing the river where the 14-year-old boy’s body was found.
Murray, who spent time in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement, used his experiences to explain the region, and describe the changes and problems that are still present decades later. His goal during these types of trips is to get his students to truly understand the background of the movement so that they can continue to make positive changes towards equal rights.
“Understanding civil rights is not just Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks. It’s acknowledging the hundreds of thousands of local people, ordinary folks, who were willing to work and take risks for change,” Murray said.
As they learned during the conference at Tougaloo College, Mississippi still struggles with worker’s rights, voting rights, and education equality, which include many young African Americans being on the school to prison “pipeline” instead of having the opportunity to go to college.
“I’m more aware of injustices and I now have more knowledge of how to change things, even in everyday life,” Bradley said after returning from the trip. She is now creating a video that will educate others about the trip and the continuation of the Civil Rights Movement in today’s society.
