Students reenact the 1965 march over the Edmund
Pettus Bridge that erupted in violence and helped
bring about the National Voting Rights Act. |
The
Past Walks with Us
By
Michael Penn MA'97
At
first, all they saw was red - the red of the flag,
and the red of their anger. They weren't surprised
to see it, really. As students of the American South,
they were well acquainted with the red field and blue
bars of the Confederate battle flag, and all too familiar
with its complicated symbolism. But they hadn't walked
into the little restaurant in the dusty town of Clarksdale,
Mississippi, looking for symbolism. They just wanted
lunch.
Tyina
Steptoe, Elizabeth Keeney, and Princess Kent - three
of the dozen or so UW-Madison students who came into
the café that day - took in the view and wondered
for a moment if it was appropriate for them to stay.
People who hang Confederate flags will often say that
it's merely about commemorating history; it's nothing
personal. But the students knew all about history,
and seeing the flag didn't feel like any history they'd
read in a book. It felt personal.
The
students were discovering that there is a difference
between learning history and feeling it. Their visit
to Clarksdale was about just that - about feeling
the intimate tug of human history. They were part
of Freedom Ride 2001, a unique UW class that, for
twelve days in June, traveled from Madison into the
Deep South on a chartered bus, completing a nearly
three-thousand-mile odyssey into the sights and sounds
of the civil-rights movement. Stopping at monuments
famous and forgotten, meeting people who were heroes
and heroines, the class sought to create a real-life
framework for the vivid history the students had learned
in more-traditional classes back on campus. And the
students discovered that, while we can't ever live
in history, we can't ever live outside of it, either.
As Danielle McGuire '97, MA'99, one of the course
organizers, put it, "The past walks with us at
all times."
Read
the full text
of Michael Penn's article.
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