Pilgrims on the Road to Freedom A report from two students about their Club trip to visit important sites from the Civil Rights Movement
DANA KING: This afternoon, we are going to hear from two amazing young women. Ashley Hayes, a senior at the university of Michigan, and Zaynab AbdulQadir-Morris, who is a graduate of UC Berkeley. These two exceptional women were part of the organization in the Bay Area called Cinnamongirl, Inc., which mentors and provides leadership opportunities to young women of color. Welcome Ashley and Zaynab. It’s so great to see you both again. I traveled with Ashley and Zaynab and about 30 other people as part of The Commonwealth Club group tour in early March to the U.S. South. We visited sites critical to the Civil Rights Movement and met some truly inspirational people. We s t a r t e d i n J a c k s o n , Mississippi, where we visited Medgar Evers’ home. We went to
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THE COMMO N WE AL TH
“Our trip started just two weeks after Ahmed Aubrey was murdered. We walked across the bridge in Selma the day Breonna Taylor was murdered.”
the Mississippi Delta and sat in the courtroom in Sumner, Mississippi, where Emmett Till’s murderers were acquitted. We went inside Little Rock High School and heard from Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, and into the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where we met with bomb survivor Reverend Carolyn McKinstry. In Memphis, we visited the [National] Civil Rights Museum and saw the room at the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stayed the night before he was killed. Then we walked across the E d mu nd Pe t t u s br id g e i n Selma, Alabama. We ended in Montgomery, where Rosa Parks and many other women inspired the Montgomery bus boycott and where we experienced the deeply moving National Memorial for Peace and Justice. There were,
of course, many things that we did and saw, including eating some rea lly great food and listening to some incredible blues music, but that gives you a sense geographically where we traveled. Our trip also started just two weeks after Ahmed Aubrey was murdered while jogging. We walked across the bridge in Selma the day that Breonna Taylor was murdered in her bed. And it was two months before the murder of George Floyd. So a lot happened on our journey and since our journey. I’d like to start it by turning it over to Zaynab. Z AY NA B A BDU LQA DIRMORRIS: Every time I’ve started to draw up my presentation for today, attempting to articulate what it was like to tour the American South, tour trauma, tour property, tour afterlife of injustice, I couldn’t help but be swallowed by
