I value this trip because as children of color we should be educated on our history, and the people, including foot soldiers, who sacrificed their lives for us to get the privileges and rights we have today. Although some of us take these rights for granted, even a decade ago things weren’t the same. Experiencing Alabama will be much different from just reading textbooks and listening to lectures in history class. Getting to go to analyze places like Birmingham, where the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed in 1963, will be life-changing. Visiting Tuskegee University, which Booker T. Washington founded to encourage the industrial education of African American sharecroppers, will excite me. I can’t wait to stand where all these events I’ve read about actually took place and be able to make my own inferences on them, independent of others’ perspectives. We also are going to meet with a number of activists who were and are involved in the Movement. I can’t wait to see it all through the eyes of those who risked their lives for future generations. While the trip is the program’s climax, throughout the year we do other activities to contextualize what we will see in Alabama. For example, we have already visited the African Burial Grounds and Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts and are about to visit New York Historical Society.

Going on this trip will mold our views on current events and issues like hate crimes, the racially-biased justice system, and the ongoing struggle to make the Fourteenth Amendment a reality. I think that the responsibility is on us to change the world for the better and fix society’s standards and representation of African Americans. It’s hard to believe that today a lot of police brutality is still directed at children and that society sometimes tells us being black is ugly or bad. I strongly believe that to fix society, those of us who know the value of education need to share it with others so we as a people can rise up and earn the equality that people over time have died fighting for. I find it vital as someone who knows the value of education to spread that knowledge. Knowledge Is Power. For those who say this is impossible, almost like a dream, remember what Langston Hughes said, “Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.”