For twelve days in June 2001, a class of thirty-four UW-Madison students traveled from Madison into the Deep South on a chartered bus, completing a nearly three-thousand-mile odyssey into the sights and sounds of the civil-rights movement. Stopping at monuments famous and forgotten, meeting people who were heroes and heroines, the class sought to create a real-life context for learning about the people and events of history.

Called the Freedom Ride 2001 — a name chosen in homage to the original Freedom Riders who in the early 1960s rode buses to flout laws that prohibited racially mixed groups from traveling together — the course was organized and sponsored by University Health Services, the Afro-American studies department, the Morgridge Center for Public Service and the College of Letters and Science, The university’s Anonymous Fund provided grant money to cover trip expenses.

The course was offered during UW-Madison's three-week summer session. Preceded by four full days of coursework, the trip itinerary included stops in ten different cities that were important during the time of civil-rights struggles. At most sites, students met with "footsoldiers" — people who participated in marches, protests and other events of the movement. Students also read several texts and listened to lectures and video accounts of history while on the bus.

Chief among students' assignments was to keep a daily journal during the trip, in which each recorded the personal, emotional and intellectual challenges that they faced while confronting history. This site contains just a few of those entries, which the students have chosen to share here as part of their commitment to pass on what they have learned.

The path of the Freedom Ride:

• Chicago
  Students met Diane Nash, who in 1961 led a group of student activists to Alabama in order to sustain the Freedom Rides after the initial group of riders encountered mob violence in Birmingham, Alabama. Nash and other student freedom riders traveled on buses from Montgomery to Jackson, Mississippi, where they were swiftly arrested and imprisoned. Nash played a key role in other efforts to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
  
  
• Nashville, Tennessee
  Students met Isaac Freeman of the Fairfield Four, who is regarded as one of the finest bass voices in the history of gospel music. The Fairfield Four stands at a crossroads of American experience — that extraordinary juncture rooted in gospel and branching into musical expression ranging from blues to R&B, soul to rock and roll, and beyond. During the 1940s, the Fairfield Four were among the top-ranked gospel quartets.
  
  
• Birmingham, Alabama
  Students got a taste of the spirit that kept the civil rights movement alive at a church service and evening performance by the Birmingham Freedom Singers at the Body of Christ Deliverance Ministry. Students also toured Kelly Ingram Park, the site of many marches and protests and now a memorial to those who died in the movement, including the four young girls killed in a Ku Klux Klan church bombing.
  
  
• Selma, Alabama
  Students toured the National Voting Rights Museum and reenacted a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge that sparked the Voting Rights Act.
  
  
• Hattiesburg, Mississippi
  Students took part in a symposium hosted by students and faculty from the University of Southern Mississippi. Participants included Daisy Harris Wade and her son, Anthony Harris, as well as relatives of Vernon Dahmer, Sr., a Hattiesburg civil rights figure who was killed by Klan members in 1966.
  
  
• New Orleans
  Students met with Black Arts Movement activist Kalamu Ya Salaam and took a walking tour of old slave markets with a local historian. They finished the day at the Destrehan Plantation, site of an 1811 slave revolt.
  
  
• Clarksdale, Mississippi
  Students spent an afternoon in the city, home to the Delta Blues Museum and the cradle of Mississippi Delta blues music,
  
  
• Oxford, Mississippi
  Memphis music writer and critic John Floyd introduced students to the development of Memphis music before and during civil rights. Later, students met with local civil rights activists, including former members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
  
  
• Memphis
  Students listened to the soul sounds of Al Green at the Full Tabernacle Church, followed by a tour of Soulsville, home of Stax Records, one of the most popular soul music record labels ever and home to musicians such as Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Carla & Rufus Thomas, Booker T. & the MGs and Isaac Hayes.
  
  
• New Market, Tennessee
  Students listened to members of the Highlander Research and Education Center talk about their work fighting poverty and bigotry in the American South since 1932.

For a more detailed account of the trip, see the cover story in the Fall '01 issue of "On Wisconsin" Magazine, published by the Wisconsin Alumni Association, or read the full story online on their website.