On a gray morning in March 1965, nearly 600 marchers set out from a small church in Selma, Ala., bound for the state capital in Montgomery over 50 miles away.
Their path out of town was blocked by state troopers and vigilantes, and a riot quickly ensued, with those who peacefully marched for their cause bearing the brunt of the violence.
Exactly 40 years after the violence of that day — known in history textbooks as "Bloody Sunday" — Candace Lewis felt the impact of that day with every step she took across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
"Even though it was just a bridge, you felt all the people who died, the souls, you felt power," said Lewis, a West Springfield High student and an African-American. "I thought ‘I’m doing this for a purpose, what’s my purpose in life?’"
Lewis was one of 21 West Springfield students who journeyed to Selma as part of a five-day, civil rights field trip earlier this month. The students are members of teacher Jim Percoco’s Applied History class, an elective that seeks to connect its students with history through field trips, research projects and internships at historical sites such as Washington’s Fords Theater and Gunston Hall.
Percoco has been leading students on a civil rights field trip for five years, usually during Black History Month in February, as the centerpiece of the class.
"It’s getting in touch with the past in a way it’s not possible to do in a class or in a textbook," he said. The trip is the culmination of a six-week unit on the civil rights movement, during which students read, among other books, "Walking with the Wind," the memoirs of U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Georgia).
That book tells the story of the events leading up to March 1965, when John Lewis led a group of marchers out of Selma to Montgomery to deliver a petition to Gov. George Wallace for equal voting rights. Lewis sustained a cracked scull and a concussion when the state troopers waded into the group with clubs and began felling marchers. The group never made it to Montgomery.
"I remember when Mr. Percoco handed out the John Lewis book and everybody gave him the weirdest look, like ‘This is the biggest book ever,’" said student Enzo Ochoa. "To read it is one thing, but like that saying goes, the mind believes what the eyes see," said Ochoa. "You knew so much about it, and you’re standing as it happened, because you knew when you marched the bridge, that’s what they did. I guess you’re reliving history."
A few weeks after the events of "Bloody Sunday," under the protection of federally-approved National Guardsmen, a group numbering in the thousands made the 54-mile trip to Montgomery. Shortly thereafter, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act.
To commemorate that event, on March 7, 2005, Lewis led another march from Selma to Montgomery, and the West Springfield High students were there.
THE FIRST STOP on the trip for the students, and the 10 parents and chaperones who joined them, was Birmingham, Ala., where they visited the Civil Rights Institute and the site of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where a bombing in September 1963 killed four black girls, ages 11-14. Then, they traveled to Montgomery, to visit the Rosa Parks Museum and Institute — named for one of the seminal figures in the "Montgomery Bus Boycott" of 1955, the parsonage of Martin Luther King Jr., and the National Civil Rights Memorial, which features the names of martyrs killed in the movement from 1954 to 1968, including King.
The trip arrived in Selma in time to take part in the 40th anniversary of the events of "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965. During their two days in Selma, the students got the chance to talk to Lewis, along with residents of Selma who took part in the 1965 march.
"You could put names with faces and see that real people suffered, it wasn’t just in the history books," said student Samantha Baer.
They also visited with Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Charles Moore, whose photography of many of the events in the civil rights movement provided national awareness of the violence.
The conversation with Moore brought full circle the students’ experiences of reading the book "Sons of Mississippi" by Paul Hendrickson, which uses one of Moore’s photographs as a jumping-off point for a discussion of the civil rights movement. Moore, now 70 years old, told them he had received death threats throughout the 1960s for being a white Southerner who supported the movement.
"We talk a lot in class about how it was the people who made the movement, but it became really obvious when we got to go out and meet those people," said student Bryan Lees.
FOLLOWING SELMA, the class headed to Memphis, Tenn., where it toured the National Civil Rights Museum, built on the site of the old Lorraine Hotel, where King was assassinated in April 1968. The tour culminated on the balcony where King was shot, and his hotel room is still intact.
Although it was a class trip, Percoco said he assigned no homework during or after the trip, since "by the time they get down there, they’re familiar with it all."
After a few minutes speaking with the students, it becomes obvious their homework has already been completed, even internalized, since they returned from Selma.
"I think we can find inspiration from people like Reverend (Ralph) Abernathy and Reverend (Fred) Shuttleworth, but we need to keep going and feed off that energy and not consider it to be our past, but it’s our present still too," said Lees.
"You don’t have to be superhuman to have an effect on society and change the world. It sort of made me stop and think about my life and how I can get out there and do more things," said Sarah Milam.
Lewis said she believed that all African-American children should walk the bridge at Selma, so they could also be put in touch with their history.
"It hurts because a lot of African-American kids don’t understand their history, what people have done so they could have a future, so they could go out there and make something of themselves," she said.
"My parents have talked to me about Dr. King and all the people, but being down there to see the people living history, it was breathtaking. It was hard to take it all in. It has changed my life."