“Enlightening,” “transformative” and “eye-opening” – all words used by students to describe the Alabama Experience, a four-day trip that left Victor Mendoza (Form VI) feeling like “a completely different person.” This year, the trip comprised 20 upperclassmen, along with seven faculty chaperones, who spent three days in Montgomery, Alabama, and one day in Atlanta, Georgia.
Some students signed up after hearing testimonials from their teachers or friends. A few had family in the South and hoped to interrogate their personal relationships with the region’s history. Others were enticed by the experiential factor – the possibility of connecting real-life people and places with information gleaned in classrooms. “With a lot of African-American history, I only see percentages and numbers, and I wanted to learn about more in-depth stories,” says Morgon Washington-Patterson (Form V).
The first full day began with an exploration of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum, which many students maintain was the most powerful portion of the trip. EJI itself, a legal organization that “provides legal representation to people who have been illegally convicted, unfairly sentenced, or abused in state jails and prisons,” was founded in 1989 by Brian Stevenson. (Stevenson is the author of “Just Mercy,” Fieldston’s 2021 community read).
The museum, which opened twenty years later, leads visitors through the chronological history of the transatlantic slave trade, enslavement in the Americas, reconstruction, lynchings, the Jim Crow South, the Civil Rights movement and modern mass incarceration. Short films, letters, newspapers, artworks and interactive exhibits craft an immersive multimedia experience. Two walls are lined with glass jars filled with multicolored dirt, each sample taken from a distinct lynching site. Holographic children call out for their mother from behind the iron bars of a jail cell. A phone booth places visitors face-to-face with prisoners sharing their real stories. As it silently emphasizes the evolution of the same institutions over centuries, Ariana Sidman (Form V), says the museum effectively elucidates “how the current prison system is a new reiteration of lynching, just under a different façade.”
Later that day, students walked to EJI’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the nation’s first comprehensive memorial dedicated to honoring Black Americans who were lynched, and finally, engaged in conversation with Alicia D’Addario, a senior attorney at EJI.
The student-proclaimed “unforgettable” next day was spent at Tuskegee, a historically Black university founded by activist, educator and entrepreneur Booker T. Washington. After a short campus tour and lecture, students visited the school’s Legacy Museum, which honors Henrietta Lacks (whose “HeLa” cancer cells, without her consent, became one of the most important cell lines in medical research) and the victims of The United States Public Health Service Untreated Syphilis Study in the Negro Male (often referred to as the “Tuskegee Syphilis Study”).
Music reverberated through the university cafeteria at lunch, where the majority of Tuskegee students were dancing and singing karaoke (alongside a few Fieldston students and teachers). The expedition was capped by a pitch from the admissions office and a splurge at the university’s swag store.
Ultimately, Tuskegee left a strong impression on students of all races. For Ava Love (Form V), investigating the college galvanized her to organize future Fieldston tours of other historically black colleges and universities. “Especially going to a predominantly white school, we don’t really talk about HBCUs except for Howard and Spelman,” she says. Remarking on Tuskegee’s affordability, she adds, “Yes, you want to get into a good college, but at the same time, student debt is real. No one is trying to start off life owing a bunch of money. That really stood out to me – I’ve never experienced something like it before.” To white students, who otherwise may have never visited an HBCU, the day was striking for different reasons. “It was really cool to see an all-Black space and be in it, just as an observer,” says Santo Raggiri (Form V), who noted a feeling of “hyper-visibility.”
Both Raggiri and Sidman felt the experience offered “insight towards empathy.” “I felt very awkward and uncomfortable,” says Sidman. “But it also made me realize that this is what people of color experience on a daily basis in America.”
In the following days, participants visited the Mothers of Gynecology Memorial, the Southern Poverty Law Center Civil Rights Memorial and the King Center Memorial. They also spoke with lawyer Jackie Aranda Osorno from Public Justice, and watched Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock preach at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Each activity was carefully connected to the rest – for example, Osorno’s work is closely tied to the systems of modern mass incarceration that EJI battles. She specifically challenges the existence of modern “debtor’s prisons” (the practice of jailing poor individuals for their failure to pay legal fines), a concept that shocked both students and teachers. “I never heard about those before, and I think their existence should be much more widely illuminated,” says Lemariam Wondimu (Form V). “If other people also don’t know about them, that’s pretty concerning.”
In the end, the trip’s material successfully struck a balance between heavy and hopeful. “The planning was very intentional,” says Mendoza. “We saw very explicit things on the first day, but then we went to an HBCU, and saw the Civil Rights Museum and then revisited another museum.” To communally process the content, the full group and/or affinity groups met at the end of each day.
Many students affirmed that the trip challenged their preconceived notions about the South. Although it is often perceived as a region fraught with racism, its population also constitutes the majority of Black Americans. “For some reason, I thought of the South as the place where white supremacy is most rampant, but I probably neglected the fact that the South is where most Black people are,” says Raggiri. “That’s just as much a part of what the South is, and the history of that region in America.” Many observed the pervasiveness of Southern hospitality, alongside a lack of “open carrying,” “Confederate flags” and “microaggressions.” Perceptions of the North shifted too. “Slavery in the North was also very prevalent in the 17th and 18th centuries, which I didn’t know before,” says Logan Farmer (Form V). “I thought the problem was just the South, and I was wrong about that.” The trip specifically inspired her to learn more about prison abolition movements and areas of New York built by enslaved people, such as Wall Street and Broadway.
Beyond academics, many enjoyed the opportunities to socialize on the trip. Students were offered time to independently explore Montgomery and even ride a Ferris wheel in Atlanta. “In the small group, you actually end up meeting and learning more about the people you don’t know at school,” says Raggiri. “You have just as much fun and you find your people.” The cuisine was also popular – countless plates of fried chicken, candied yams and collard greens were consumed and compared. Fieldston intentionally patronized local Black-owned restaurants such as Pannie-George’s Kitchen, Dreamland BBQ, Martha’s Place Buffet, Paschal’s Restaurant and Two Urban Licks. “Southern food is where it’s at,” says Love, who claims she ate a quart of mac n’ cheese.
Moving forward, the trip will inform many students’ worldviews. Farmer, for example, plans to revisit the EJI museum with her family in the spring. She found close connections to her classes – in church, she listened to the same spirituals she is reading about in African American Literature, and at EJI, she gained significant systemic context about the ghettoization of Black Americans explored in Contemporary Black Society.
The content also connects to many other students’ classes, such as Silence and Noise, Soundtrack for a Revolution, U.S. History, The Prison Complex, Educational Inequity and Modern Latin America.
Overall, the museums and memorials clearly defined the distinction between doing nightly assignments from a textbook, and actually visiting the South. “The educational value is tremendous,” says Raggiri. “You learn a lot of things hands-on, you speak to a lot of people who do great work, if you’re interested in that. Even though the content is very much related to what we’re learning in classes, I came out knowing far more about this topic than I would have if I had just taken a class or read a book about it.”
All participants highly recommend the trip to other Fieldston students. “I feel like a lot of people didn’t sign up for the trip because they thought their identifiers didn’t match up with its purpose,” said Wondimu. “But anyone can learn about the history of the South and the country.” Love agrees, “It’s especially important if your identifiers don’t align with the trip because you’re able to educate yourself on how people in this country have been oppressed – especially if you’re the ones who are typically the oppressors.” Some, such as Washington-Patterson, even propose it should become mandatory – though it’s critical for students to embark with deep respect for the content as well as the effort invested into organizing the trip.
“This trip should be very, very encouraged if this school is really committed to producing students that can go to their universities with a good understanding of the history of America,” says Mendoza. “Everything that we learned is so intersectional. City kids should know about the South.”
Source: Star Blakney (Form VI)
