By Alyssa Allemand
Edgewood History Professor Andy Witt and students in the course “Freedom Rides: The Civil Rights and Black Power Years” took a trip April 5-8 to visit various people and locations related to the civil rights movement.
The group, made up of Witt and his five students, visited Detroit, Mich., Marion, Ind., Chicago, Ill., and Milwaukee. The students in the course are John Darcy, Bonni Briggs, Riyaaq Ahmed, Aaron Svetly, and Emily Baumel.
“The class is called ‘Freedom Rides,’” said Briggs, an Edgewood senior and history major, “but it’s really about the African-American freedom struggle as a whole, all the way from the antebellum period through the Civil Rights/Black Power movement.
“We’ve focused a lot on local activism and how that plays into the greater historical narrative of the freedom struggle.”
Chicago: DuSable Museum of African American History
Their first stop on Saturday, April 8, was Chicago to visit the DuSable Museum of African American History.
According to Briggs, this museum included an exhibit on WWI veterans, a robot of Chicago’s first black mayor Harold Washington, and a showcase of items from the times of slavery and the civil rights movement.
“I was really struck by the fact they had a legit KKK uniform on display,” Briggs said. “As a queer woman, seeing that white figure out of the corner of my eye sent a bolt of terror through me. I can only imagine how it would feel to see it as a person of color, with all of the historical and intergenerational trauma the uniform evokes.”
Detroit visits
After about a four-hour drive, the cohort stopped in Detroit. Witt and students went on a tour of important civil rights-related sites that was guided by Wayne State University’s Associate Professor of African American Studies David Goldberg.
They stopped in Dearborn to check out the Heidelburg Project. According to its website, this project “is an outdoor art environment in the heart of an urban area and a Detroit-based community organization with a mission to improve the lives of people and neighborhoods through art.”
“David said that the project was first started to attract public attention so drug dealers couldn’t hang around in the area,” Briggs said. “Looking around at all those painted clocks and discarded toys really made me think about how our society discards people—pushes them out of time—and how we reclaim space for ourselves.”
Then they went to Ossian Sweet’s house. Sweet was a black physician that purchased a home in an all-white Detroit neighborhood in 1925 and was targeted. The National Park Service website says, “Today the Ossian Sweet House continues to illustrate the role of ‘ordinary’ places in the extraordinary history of American race relations.”
The group visited Belle Isle, which is the location of a race riot that took place in 1943.
“One of the big themes that we all noticed during the trip was the lack of public recognition of these important civil rights sites,” Briggs said. She said that Ossian Sweet’s house was “in decrepit conditions” and there was no kind of acknowledgement of the Belle Isle race riot.
Marion: 1930s lynching
On Sunday, Witt and students arrived in Marion, Ind. They met with Rusty Hawkins, professor of history at Indiana Wesleyan University, to hear about the history of Marion.
The group sat down with local activist Tori Williams as well who works to advocate for the recognition of the lynching of two men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, that happened in 1930. Shipp and Smith were accused of raping a white woman and after being arrested, a mob broke into the jail, dragged them out to the courtyard, and lynched them. Another man, James Cameron, was arrested with the others for this same crime, but “for some unknown reason he was not killed,” Briggs said.
Speaking to the memorialization of the lynchings, Briggs said, “It seems like after a memorial event in 2005 where the families of the victims got together to hug it out, nobody wants to talk about it.”
Back to Chicago
After Detroit, the group came back up to Chicago. Chris Ramsey, adjunct professor of history at Loyola University Chicago, gave Witt and students a driving tour of some key spots in the city related to civil rights.
“We visited Marquette Park, the end spot of Martin Luther King Jr.’s housing marches in the city in 1966, protesting housing discrimination,” Briggs said. “MLK said the racism and hatred he’d faced in Chicago was the worst he’d seen.”
Milwaukee: 1967 housing marches
On Monday, students drove to Milwaukee “where Andy [Witt] himself drove … around the city to talk about their housing marches,” Briggs said.
They followed the route of the 1967 marches, which were led by Father James Groppi, a white Catholic priest “who was super active and supportive of the local activists and leader of the NAACP Youth Council,” according to Briggs.
At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Archives, the group looked at boxes of hate mail that was sent to Father James Groppi. There was a lot of it, Briggs said.
“There were Catholics and ex-Catholics and white people and black people and all of them were enraged at the audacity of a white man who was just trying to do what he thought was right for his community.”
Witt and students visited with Groppi’s widow, Peggy Rozga, who is an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha and was also a participant in the Milwaukee housing marches in 1967 and 1968. She discussed her involvement with the marches, the hatred participants faced, and the ways she witnessed people heal “and try to make up for their mistakes,” Briggs said.
Student reflections
Edgewood senior John Darcy, a history major, said that “going to Detroit and Marion were especially powerful since [his] view on those two places has been so framed and shaped by popular culture and years of news cycles.”
Briggs said that a trip like this makes her think. “How do we remember these events and the people that suffered through them? How do we shape history without concrete recognition of its existence? Who gets memorialized and who doesn’t?”
Funding
Witt said the History Department is always the biggest supporter of his initiatives.” Funding was also provided by Edgewood’s COR program. Much of the cost was covered by the students themselves, according to Witt.
The first Freedoms Rides course was offered in 2009 and has since taken place in 2012, 2015, and now in 2019. Witt has worked with all these contacts throughout these past trips.
Witt’s motive behind the course is in his own background as a specialist in African American history. He said he believes that “people and students aren’t well-versed in the African American Freedom Struggle, particularly as it played out in the North,” which is why the trip focuses on Northern communities.
He also credited his mentor, Tim Tyson, a former professor at UW-Madison. Tyson offered a similar kind of Freedom Rides course in the early 2000s.
“We live in a society that is ripe with racism,” Witt said. “I can talk about this stuff until I’m blue in the face in a classroom setting, but I think people learn better by getting out and hearing from activists and seeing these places and what they’re still going through, and hopefully have a better understanding of how the past is linked with the present.”
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