The Past Walks with Us

By Michael Penn MA'97

In the months before the Freedom Ride class rolled away, Tim Tyson was preoccupied with a distinct memory of Duck Hill, Mississippi.

A speck of a town off Interstate 55 in the center of the state, Duck Hill would probably be forgotten if not for its infamy as the site of one of the most brutal racial murders in the United States. There, in 1937, a mob of four hundred men, women, and children dragged two African-American men, whom they suspected of murdering a white man, into the woods outside of town. The mob chained the two men to trees and proceeded to brutalize them, burning their bodies, fingers, and ears with a blowtorch. The mob shot and killed one of the men. They piled branches and wood underneath the feet of the other man, doused the pile with gasoline, set it aflame, and watched him burn to death.

Tyson, a professor of Afro-American studies and history, had discussed the horrifying events of Duck Hill in classes before, and the story always had a profound impact Ñ but never more so than in 1996, when Tyson took a group of students on an impromptu field trip through Mississippi to see some of the sites they had been studying.

Duck Hill wasn't even on the agenda. But as Tyson and his students drove up Interstate 55, they saw an exit sign that read "Duck Hill." The van, which had to that point been full of jovial banter, fell into silence. Tyson says that he has never forgotten the power of that moment, when the group was struck by the sudden reality of Duck Hill's existence. And at that moment, the idea for the Freedom Ride course was born.

One of the students on that trip was Danielle McGuire, who now coordinates community-building activities for University Health Services (UHS). "That trip changed my life," she says. She knew immediately that she wanted other students to have that experience. Last fall, she was presented with an opportunity to make it happen.

For a few years prior to the Freedom Ride, Stephanie King of UHS and Susan Dibbell '84 of the Morgridge Center for Public Service had been exploring innovative ways to introduce students to the value of diversity. King had been on a civil-rights tour with students from another school, and they thought the idea would work especially well at UW-Madison. They sought the help of UHS colleagues Katherine Loving MS'95 and McGuire, forming a planning team that eventually involved the Afro-American studies department, the Morgridge Center, and the College of Letters and Science. Grant applications were filed, and before anyone knew it, the trip had funding, through the university's Anonymous Fund.

The group began to build a format for the course, which was to be held during the UW's three-week summer session. Tyson called upon Craig Werner and Steven Kantrowitz, a professor of history with expertise in the development of American slavery, to share teaching duties. When the course was posted, the organizers were overwhelmed by the response. They asked students to write essays, which helped them winnow the pool of interested participants down to a bus-manageable size.

The popularity of the course may not sound surprising until you hear what was expected of students. The travel itinerary, which was preceded by four full days of coursework, barely left time to catch one's breath. It was choked to the last minute with presentations, visits, and discussions. Even transit times on the bus were filled with videos and lectures. Despite all this, students were expected to keep up with readings in three assigned books, to log their experiences in a daily journal, and to assemble enough material for a final paper after they returned.

And that doesn't begin to account for the emotional toll of traveling through a region so replete with stories heroic and tragic. The professors wanted students to have Duck Hill moments Ñ to come face-to-face with the difficult realities of racial prejudice then and now. "We're going to a very different place than the one we've been studying," Tyson told the class before the bus left. "The history is gone; we can't get it back. But it deepens our understanding to see that these places are real."

The agenda included stops in Birmingham, site of countless marches and protests; Selma, where state troopers shot canisters of tear gas at peaceful marchers as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge; Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where Vernon Dahmer, Sr., was murdered for asserting his right to cast a vote in his own country; and New Orleans, where the students would delve into the complicated story of Southern slavery. Lest they be tempted to write off racism as native only to the South, the class heard Patrick Jones MA'96, a doctoral student in history, lecture about civil-rights struggles in Milwaukee. From start to finish, each day brimmed with experiences that, as in Clarksdale, weren't always the stuff of awe and wonderment.

After one of those difficult days, Amanda Gengler, a graduating senior, told me that she felt consumed by how much evil the trip brought us close to. "I feel like it's in my skin, and I can't scrub it out," she said.

Charles Hughes, a junior in Afro-American studies, echoed many others when he said, "This is by far the hardest, most rewarding thing I've ever done."

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