University of Richmond Athletics
Spiders on Civil Rights Trail: Day 1
10/13/2024 | General, Academic Services, Spider Performance
Five Spider student-athletes have embarked upon a fall break tour of key civil rights sites throughout Alabama and Tennessee as a part of the Richmond Athletics Civic Engagement and Co-Curricular Programming. Kirby Mooney and George Washington III from men's basketball, Ava Milisits and Sydney Moore from soccer, and Jordan Jaffe from baseball will share their experiences with daily recaps on RichmondSpiders.com.
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Day One: Ava Milisits
On our first day, we landed in Montgomery, Alabama, eager and excited to visit the many Civil Rights museums and sites in the state capital. Once we landed, we met our tour guide Jake Williams as we walked out of the Montgomery airport. A brilliant, bubbly, and sweet man, he immediately shared with us as he drove us on the highway to downtown Montgomery that he marched a few miles on the fourth day of the Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights March in March 1965 at just 12 years old. Born and raised in Lowndes County, Alabama, which today is still a predominantly Black county in the Black Belt region, Mr. Williams shared with us stories from his childhood, including how his county's school system did not fully integrate until the mid-1970s, occurring two decades after the Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision ruled in favor of school integration, and his experiences as a child picking cotton in a sharecropping family.Â
Mr. Williams drove us 30 minutes to downtown Montgomery, arriving at the Equal Justice Initiative's Legacy Museum. This museum was founded by Civil Rights and Social Justice Lawyer Bryan Stevenson, who is known for writing Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, which later turned into a movie adaption starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx in 2018. Entering the museum, I noticed that the format of the exhibits is similar to how the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture is structured. The museum, which was pretty packed, goes through four phases of the over 400 years of oppression towards Black Americans: Enslavement, Jim Crow, Racial Lynching, and our current epidemic of Mass Incarceration, known as modern-day slavery. The museum is filled with first-person letters, narratives, interactive screens, documentaries, videos, a wall of glass-encased dirt collected from over hundreds of lynching sites around America, and collections of photographs. The foundation of the museum are not only based on these four phases of oppression, but focuses on their mission to create restorative justice initiatives for all Americans wrongly or unfairly convicted and incarcerated to receive the proper resources for a fair trial, lawyer, and family and mental health support.Â
One of the most surprising facts I learned is that holding pens, which were jail cells where livestock and enslaved people were being held to live prior to slave auctions, were built under or connected to hotels and taverns, helping these businesses to economically profit from slavery as well. In addition, I learned that three out of every four white people who reside in Charleston owned at least one enslaved person from the time South Carolina was established as a colony to about the early 1800s. Mr. Williams shared with us while we were at The Legacy Museum that the term "dude" came from slavery. While walking around the Slavery exhibit phase of the museum, I was informed that Indigenous tribes in the South made deals with the Confederacy and that Slavery wasn't outlawed on Southeastern Indigenous lands until 1866, one year after the 13th Amendment to the Constitution came to be. Tribes such as the Cherokee and Choctaw owned enslaved persons.
The ending of this part of the museum includes an inspiring reflection room, where we all had the chance to click through an interactive screen and art exhibit to showcase the many accomplishments and contributions many generations have achieved through fighting, advocating, and working to create a more equitable future for the next generation to come. This exhibit represents how despite the violence Black Americans have continued to face, they still continue to prosper through their joy, creativity, and cultural contributions of the arts to society, sharing their stories of victimization via these respective mediums. The exhibit includes a permanent collection of paintings made by some of the most notable and influential Black artists of the 20th and early 21st centuries such as Faith Ringgold and Romare Bearden.
The museum was moving and powerful to be in. I learned so much and was inspired by the work Mr. Stevenson has done to make this a reality. We also visited the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, traveling to the site by the Museum's Boat Tour on the Alabama River, showcasing beautiful sculptures made by young Black artists. The park gave us the chance to walk through authentic enslaved cabins from different Southeastern region plantations and read excerpts from William Wells Brown's 1847 Slave Narrative. We learned about the many different slavery laws based on what state you lived in and how enslaved persons kept alive some of their traditions from West Africa.Â
As we drove back from the park, taking many group pictures in front of the National Monument to Freedom, a large orange wall with names of documented victims of enslavement and abuse in this country, Mr. Williams drove us around downtown Montgomery to different historic Black neighborhoods that were once thriving communities with markets, churches, banks, and schools. Unfortunately, urban renewal of expanding the interstate highway pushed out over 1,800 families in these neighborhoods, a systemic practice done across the country during the 1970s and early 1980s to many poor Black neighborhoods. While we drove through the neighborhoods to view the houses and communities that are remaining, we passed through Alabama State University, where singer Nat King Cole was born and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lived temporarily with his family when his house was bombed. We even saw the apartment Rosa Parks lived in when she resided in Montgomery. Her apartment is now a National Historic Site.
Everyone in this country should make a trip down to Montgomery, Alabama and gain perspective that this is living history, given the fact that the Civil Rights Movement recently ended 59 years ago. So far, it has truly been a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I wish that one day everyone learns in school what we had the privilege and opportunity of learning on this trip.Â
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