Here is a slide show I made to highlight recent trips we have made at William Woods University. In recent years, we have travelled the map, journeying to Peru, the American south, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Italy and Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Next up: France and a return trip to Pine Ridge.
(My video of JoAnne speaking to our group in 2009)
In 2009, I took a group of students to the American South as we traveled the path of the civil rights movement. We worshipped at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta (home church of Martin Luther King), visited the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Alabama and ended our trip visiting The Lorraine Motel and the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. Along the way on this memorable road trip, we made an unforgettable stop in Selma, Alabama, a small town that was historically important to the story of America.
When I stepped out of the van, just outside of the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma, I was greeted by JoAnne Bland: “You must be Travis. Get over here and give me a hug; that’s how we do it in the South.” JoAnne then welcomed our group and led us on an inspirational walking tour of the town she calls home.
Selma, Alabama was the site of what is known as “Bloody Sunday”. On March 7, 1965, state troopers brutally attacked 500 to 600 civil rights demonstrators. The televised images were horrific. Men and women, young and old, were beaten back with tear gas, billy clubs and dogs. JoAnne Bland was there at that time, an eyewitness to history, an active participant in America’s struggle to right its wrongs and redeem its past. Only eleven years old at the time, she has the distinction of being the youngest person arrested and jailed during the civil rights demonstrations.
One of the more memorable moments on our visit occurred when JoAnne took our group to a piece of pavement behind a Head Start building. The place was non-descript, uninteresting to the uninformed. She ordered us all to pick up a rock and place the rock in our open palm. We did. She then began to look at each of our rocks and tell us stories. “Let me see your rock…..that rock in your hand is Bob Mants….” “Now let me see your rock, that one is Lynda Lowery, She was 14 years old on that bridge on March 7th. 14. She received wounds that required 26 stitches and then, still, three weeks later walked every step of the way from Selma to Montgomery.”
She went on to tell us, “I saved that cement so you could hold that history.” And then she proceeded to tell us why that cement pavement was so important. It marked out the place where the demonstrators gathered to begin their march. She then urged us to take back our little rock or pebble to Missouri and remember the fight and the struggle, telling us:
“When you see injustice committed against anyone, no matter who they are, and you feel like you can’t do anything, go pick up that rock and take from it the strength that ordinary people stood on that rock, ordinary people just like yourself, stood on that rock and walked right up to that bridge and made history that not only changed Selma, but this entire nation. And get up off your behinds, and do something. Can you do that?”
On Monday night, January 16th and the occasion of Martin Luther King Day, JoAnne Bland will be our guest at William Woods University and will tell stories of America’s struggle for justice and equality. As part of the President’s Concert & Lecture series, JoAnne’s talk will connect us to the past that paved a way for the future. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held in Cutlip Auditorium and begins at 7 pm.
In March a group of us traveled to Italy where we toured Rome, Assisi, Florence, Bologna and Venice. Here are some pics from the mother land.
A few weeks ago, I took a group of students to Europe for a history of the Holocaust tour. Our travelogue can be found at www.watw2010.wordpress.com In the weeks to come, I will add some of my photographs and reflections of our trip to Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic.
In the Jewish Cemetery of Warsaw, Poland there is a memorial sculpture to Janusz Korczak. He is shown holding a small child and leading a procession of other children behind him. Dr. Korczak was a pediatrician and children’s author and a leading pedagogue. He also oversaw an orphanage that was forced to relocate to the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, after the Nazis assumed control over the city. In August of 1942, the Nazis came to deport the children and orphanage staff to the Treblinka extermination camp. Dr. Korczak was offered sanctuary outside the Jewish ghetto but he refused. He insisted that he accompany the children. He, along with the children and staff, died in the gas chambers of Treblinka.
Korzcak is remembered in The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilman.
One day, around 5th August, when I had taken a brief rest from work and was walking down Gęsia Street, I happened to see Janusz Korczak and his orphans leaving the ghetto. The evacuation of the Jewish orphanage run by Janusz Korczak had been ordered for that morning. The children were to have been taken away alone. He had the chance to save himself, and it was only with difficulty that he persuaded the Germans to take him too. He had spent long years of his life with children and now, on this last journey, he could not leave them alone. He wanted to ease things for them. He told the orphans they were going out in to the country, so
they ought to be cheerful. At last they would be able to exchange the horrible suffocating city walls for meadows of flowers, streams where they could bathe, woods full of berries and mushrooms. He told them to wear their best clothes, and so they came out into the yard, two by two, nicely dressed and in a happy mood. The little column was led by an SS man who loved children, as Germans do, even those he was about to see on their way into the next world. He took a special liking to a boy of twelve, a violinist who had his instrument under his arm. The SS man told him to go to the head of the procession of children and play – and so they set off. When I met them in Gęsia Street, the smiling children were singing in chorus, the little violinist was playing for them and Korczak was carrying two of the smallest infants, who were beaming too, and telling them some amusing story. I am sure that even in the gas chamber, as the Zyklon B gas was stifling childish throats and striking terror instead of hope into the orphans’ hearts, the Old Doctor must have whispered with one last effort, ‘it’s all right, children, it will be all right’. So that at least he could spare his little charges the fear of passing from life to death."
A journal of reflections on things seen and unseen, wimsical and wise, ordinary and odd, magical and mundane
