On Sunday, I watched on television as John Lewis’s body was carried across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, Alabama, as part of a six-day celebration of his life.
A nearly silent crowd stood watching as Lewis’s casket, draped in a crisp American flag, was carried up and over the bridge in a horse-drawn cart. A path of deep red rose petals lined the road, in homage to the blood spilled there by Lewis and others in 1965.
With the 2020 election looming, this route would certainly tie together the past and the present. Voting rights are still under attack today, after all, especially given the extra challenges brought by the pandemic.
As I watched the procession on my television screen, my twenty-one-year-old daughter looked on before quietly mentioning that she didn’t really know much about Lewis. I stopped to realize that I don’t either, even though I consider myself—and her—to be deeply interested in racial justice and the civil rights movement in the United States.
I would like to change that.
This got me thinking. My two youngest kids attend the Minneapolis Public Schools. On July 30, Minnesota’s governor, Democrat Tim Walz, is expected to announce how and when schools can reopen in the state as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on.
Large school districts like those in Minneapolis and St. Paul will almost certainly begin the year with online-only instruction.
Cities like Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin, have already declared that the upcoming school year will begin with virtual instruction, and teachers in the Chicago Public Schools are pushing for the same thing to happen.
And so, with another round of distance learning ahead of us, I would like to take my kids on a civil rights road trip. We can do it on the cheap, by camping and staying with relatives, and my husband and I can both get work done remotely.
We are also fortunate to be in good health and, so far, no one close to us has come down with COVID-19. And honestly, the distance learning our kids experienced earlier this year was pretty soul crushing. It wasn’t for a lack of effort on the part of their teachers, who did a heroic job in a moment of crisis.
Online learning, absent any real human connection, feels like digital paper shuffling. My son, who is in high school, is dismayed at having to keep missing his friends, sports teams, and any semblance of a schedule or routine that makes sense to him.
If we could actually take this trip while our kids keep up with schoolwork from a distance, we would of course have to do so with the pandemic in mind. We’d stay out of hotels, grab takeout or cook our meals at a campsite, and wear masks everywhere we go. Many states (including Mississippi and Alabama) have called for travelers to quarantine. We would need to respect that.
But perhaps, with proper precautions, we can seize this moment and turn it into a real history lesson.
We could start our journey in Minneapolis by stopping to observe the Arthur Lee monument near our home. Back in 1931, Lee and his family, who were Black, bought a house in South Minneapolis. They managed to stay there for two years, despite being harassed by mobs of white people who didn’t want the Lees in their neighborhood.
From there, we could venture south and follow the official Civil Rights Trail. This trail, put together by state tourism departments, starts in Missouri, where both the Dred Scott and Shelley v. Kraemer cases were decided. In Shelley, the Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that racial covenants that keep Black people and other people of color out of certain “white” neighborhoods were illegal. The Shelley House is now a national historic landmark.
We could then head to Arkansas and Mississippi, where an abundance of pivotal sites exist, from Little Rock to Jackson. But Alabama is where we would really strike gold. Rolling along Highway 80 from Selma to Montgomery in our dusty minivan, we would be immersed in an incredibly historic route.
Most of these sites include outdoor trails or monuments, and most are still open because of that, while indoor interpretive centers and museums would likely be closed.
The Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail is run by the National Park Service. It follows the 1965 freedom march, led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and people like Lewis, in pursuit of equal voting rights.
With the 2020 election looming, this route would certainly tie together the past and the present. Voting rights are still under attack today, after all, especially given the extra challenges brought by the pandemic.
The thought of this gives me hope. My kids go to public school; they don’t get field trip opportunities like this. This would be a once-in-a-lifetime chance, albeit one that would have to include some serious pandemic precautions and a profound respect for the people whose communities we would be travelling through.
I want to take this trip, for their sake and mine. Portland, Oregon, is burning and Seattle is engulfed in riots, in protest against the federal agents Trump has unleashed as a desperate attempt to shore up his sinking reelection hopes.
Minneapolis, my city, is spinning. George Floyd was killed here, but our streets are eerily quiet these days, or quieter than Portland and Seattle at least. We are dealing with a sharp rise in gun violence and false starts regarding defunding the police department, which seemed so possible in the days following Floyd’s murder.
History is alive. It is surrounding us. Lewis may be gone, but we can keep his memory alive by visiting the streets he walked and seeing the Edmund Pettus Bridge for ourselves. Maybe by the time we get there, we will be able to witness the bridge that was named for a Ku Klux Klan leader get a new title: The John Lewis Bridge.