advisor for the MSUSpokesman, the student-run publication), the editor-in-chief cornered me before I could get a word out. She ran down the list of reporters, photographers, editors and videographers who were already in the field. She mapped out the march route. She whipped out her phone to show me photos of Morgan students who were then staging a sit-down in the middle of the road on the edge of campus. She told me to wait—she is very bossy—because she’d be back soon; she had to run out to get a quote from the university’s president.
Their coverage wasn’t amazing—video footage was shaky, someone forgot to get the name of a student organizer they hoped to quote, one student got so swept up in the moment she completely forgot her objective role and joined protesters in the sit-down—but they were learning-by-doing and they were hyped, excited to be covering real news alongside the national media and genuinely awed to watch history unfolding before them. The lessons they learned covering the Ferguson protests
would prove indispensable a few months later as Baltimore erupted in riots, looting and protests on the heels of Freddie Gray’s death.
The second sign of a culture-shift among our students came in April, when I spent a week with six of my urban, mostly-black Morgan journalism students and six rural mostly-white journalism students from West Virginia University on a reporting project in Selma, Alabama. Our mission:
To go to Selma’s Edmund Pettus
Bridge exactly one month after all the commemorative activities for the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday ended and check in with residents to see whether race relations and the quality of life has significantly improved on the heels of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Two weeks prior to this rather last-minute trip, I emailed the six students whom the faculty had selected announcing that they had been chosen to participate. They were thrilled—and it did not even dawn on them that on the basis of all their hard work reporting, we were “rewarding” them with even more reporting, that indeed this would likely be the most difficult reporting assignment they had gotten thus far.
One of my students had never been on a plane before. Another had never been in a cab. Few had traveled to the Deep South. None had done immersive, multimedia reporting on the scale we demanded of them. We crammed
the students into hotel rooms—two from WVU, two from
Morgan per room—paired them on reporting teams and shoved them out the door to see what they would find as they fanned out in Selma.
They profiled aging Bloody Sunday marchers, small business owners, country club members at the all-white club, Civil War reenactors who were in town that weekend celebrating a confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader, shopkeepers, schoolchildren, funeral parlor directors and the mayor (who reached out to us after word got out that our journalism students had flooded the town). They tweeted, Instagram-ed and stayed up to the wee hours every night in our hotel “situation room” fueled on bad coffee, Gatorade and donuts to build an impressive multimedia package of stories we called, Bridging Selma.
All this, during the same week that Baltimore devolved into chaos.
Morgan student Camille Harrison takes notes during a meeting at a church in Selma, Ala.
14