More than 220 K-12 educators from across the country applied to participate in Auburn University’s Bloody Sunday, Selma and the Long Civil Rights Movement program this year. The first workshop was held late last month, and the second workshop began last Sunday.
Educators first meet at Selma University last Sunday and will continue meeting through Friday. They have been visiting a number of civil rights monuments in Perry, Dallas and Montgomery counties this week, including the following:
- Marion, Alabama: Zion United Methodist Church, Lincoln School, Old Perry County Jail, Mack’s Diner, gravesite of Jimmie Lee Jackson, Culture Guild
- Selma, Alabama: R.B. Hudson High School, Clarke Elementary School, George Washington Carver Housing, African American History Museum, Concordia College, Selma Brick Factory, Edistone Hotel, Water Street
- Montgomery, Alabama: Equal Justice Initiative, Freedom Riders Museum, among other sites
In addition to local landmarks, educators will view the sites of the Bloody Sunday protests, including the Brown Chapel AME Church and Edmund Pettus Bridge. Bloody Sunday was on March 7, 1965. This was when civil rights leader John Lewis led roughly 600 marchers across Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to protest the death of local activist Jimmie Lee Jackson and lack of voting rights in the area. Alabama State Troopers and local police ended up clashing with protestors, resulting in dozens of injuries.
Elijah Gaddis is an associate professor of history at Auburn University. Gaddis also helped organize this workshop. He said Bloody Sunday is one of the most important events in America’s history, and this event helps put the day in context.
“Bloody Sunday is one of those events in American history that is, I think for many, seared into our consciousness,” he said. “Even if we don’t know the day, or even the year, we do know those images… What we want to do is give the background for that and, really, to think about the ways in which that one day was rooted not just in weeks and not just in months, but really years and decades of struggle.”
The workshop will teach educators the history surrounding Alabama’s Bloody Sunday protests, including the initial march planning and mass meeting at Zion Methodist in Marion. However, the workshop takes visitors far beyond the 1960s, introducing Selma and its origins as a slave-trading center. Gaddis said this workshop looks to expose educators to two different concepts. The first is what he and many educators call “The Long Civil Rights Movement.”
“A lot of us when we think of that phrase civil rights movement immediately jump to the [1960s], maybe the 50s,” he said. “The struggle for civil rights began much earlier. We begin this program by thinking about the 19th century and thinking of struggles for things like education in Black populations in Alabama. We also want people to think about how the civil rights movement continued after the 1960s, and how some of those same struggles for voting rights [or] education have continued in places like Selma and continue to this day.”
Gaddis said he hopes educators also learn that history is something anyone can see in the landscape and buildings around them.
“As a historian, we really emphasize this idea of primary sources [and] of going back to the original sources from a time period,” he said. “I think we often only think about that as written sources, but we really want to get across that there are lots of different primary sources. One of the most, and often overlooked, is the landscape around us [and] the world that we’re surrounded by. We want to give people the tools to read history from the world around them.”
However, it is not just visitors who positively benefit from this workshop. Gaddis said this program will shine a light on Alabama’s Black Belt.
“We focus on Selma for a day or two a year when we have Jubilee, the commemoration of the Bloody Sunday bridge crossing,” he said. “But I would join so many other local activists and politicians and historians in calling for us to pay attention to Selma more often and to remember the really important history that is centered in this place and, indeed, the really important history that's still unfolding in Selma today.”
While the workshop includes a lot of walking and bus tours, it also features oral history interviews and group sessions with local civil rights leaders, activists and historians.
This is Auburn University’s second Bloody Sunday, Selma and the Long Civil Rights Movement program. The first was held late last month. Gaddis said the program received good attendance, with K-12 educators from all across the U.S. visiting.
“A lot of the folks we have are high school teachers who teach history, but we’re also really excited for participants who will be coming from non-traditional, or perhaps unexpected, teaching backgrounds," he said. "We’ll expect participants who are teaching things like film and media arts like dance, even math. They’re really thinking about the ways in which these lessons can apply to their classrooms, their schools and their communities.”
Though registration for this particular workshop is closed, other talks and events will be open to educators and any local visitors interested. More information can be found at www.blackbelteducation.org.
