A group of UW-Eau Claire students are packing for a trip and will head south over winter break.
The Civil Rights Pilgrimage will draw more than 100 students together for a 10 day bus trip from Jan. 3-13 to historic sites, said Jodi Thesing-Ritter, the associate dean of students and adviser to the project.
“The trip was the idea of a group of students who were resident assistants in Putnam Hall seven years ago,” she said.
A new team of students are selected in April each year to develop and coordinate the trip for that year, she said.
“They do research on all of the places and they develop the itinerary,” she said. “This year we have eight coordinators so they’ll be four on each bus.”
The pilgrimage gives students an in-depth, unique educational experience about the Civil Rights Movement. The trip begins in Atlanta — the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr. — and ends in Memphis, Tenn., the city where MLK was assassinated.
Throughout the trip, students listen to a speech by an original Freedom Rider, attend the Rosa Parks Museum, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the National Voting Rights Museum, and cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma along with many other opportunities.
There are opportunities for more tourist experiences, too, including the option of touring a CNN studio, visiting the World of Coca-Cola Museum, an aquarium, a Jimmy Carter museum, an airboat adventures swamp tour and a live jazz concert.
This is the third and final year journalism students are going on the trip, and to have their perspective has been a addition, Thesing-Ritter said.
“One of the things that we talk about on the trip is the role that media plays in social change,” she said. “To actually have journalists on the trip to engage in that conversation is wonderful.”
Associate professor of Communications Jan Larson said around 10 student journalists will join the pilgrimage to report under her supervision.
“We have students who are looking at businesses in particular communities,” she said. “We have students who are going to profile a music school in New Orleans.”
She said the students write multimedia and enterprise stories for Inside Eau Claire, the department’s capstone news website.
Larson said she looks forward to seeing the effect the trip has on what kind of journalism the students will pursue in the future.
Senior Kayla Peche, a journalism major, is going on the trip to report and said she looks forward to traveling to Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee, all places she’s never been before.
“I’m interested in getting a new world aspect of how it is down south and how much they have progressed since the Civil Rights Movement,” she said. “As a journalist, I’m hoping that it broadens my horizon and keeps me aware of the different cultures and different people from different locations.”
Peche said she is currently setting up interviews with teachers, students and administrators at a music center in the ninth ward of New Orleans, built after Hurricane Katrina to develop young musicians into professionals.
“We’ll keep a blog there and will be posting every day from the trip,” Larson said. “But the stories will not be done until after we get back.”