Nine Youngstown high school students to participate in Sojourn to the Past trip

Staff report

YOUNGSTOWN

Nine Youngstown high-school students will fly Friday to Atlanta, where they will join students from California to participate in Sojourn to the Past, a weeklong journey to civil-rights sites in three southern states.

The local students, accompanied by Penny Wells, director of Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past, the Rev. Lewis Macklin and Derrick McDowell, will travel by bus to Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham, Ala.; Memphis, Tenn., and Little Rock, Ark.

Sojourn is a history-immersion, life-changing leadership development experience during which students will meet veterans of the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, including Minnijean Brown Trickey and Elizabeth Eckford of the Little Rock Nine; the Rev. Clark Olsen, who was with James Reeb when he was killed in Selma two days after Bloody Sunday; and the daughter of Medgar Evers, the civil-rights leader from Mississippi who was assassinated by a segregationist.

They also will learn the lessons of the civil-rights movement: compassion, nonviolence, tolerance, justice, hope, forgiveness, civic responsibility and not being a silent witness, Wells said.

Since November, students have been meeting weekly to prepare for the journey by reading “Walking With the Wind,” a book written by U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, and learning the movement’s history.

Also, Sojourn students will have lessons before meeting speakers or visiting historical sites; and they have homework daily, including reading articles, answering questions, writing letters to speakers and recording their thoughts in a journal.

They have workshops on the principles of nonviolence and institutionalized racism. They learn that during the civil-rights movement, people were willing to suffer, even die trying to gain equal rights. In Birmingham, Youngstown students will meet to develop an action plan to implement in their home schools and community, Wells said.