“While my home erupts in anger, Selma quietly struggles,” one of them penned in a journal I brought along for them to record their reflections. “If only our work will positively impact the world, and end superficial hatred and fear.”
The most moving part of the journey occurred the moment we pulled the van up to the Edmund Pettus Bridge on that first day. These jaded students, steeped in civil rights history and often yawning as their parents and grandparents and teachers recited turning points in the fight, literally ran as they whipped out their cell phones to take selfies on the bridge as if to say: “I am here, I am a part of history, I am the struggle for change.”
“I probably would have never seen, heard or done any of the things I have over the course of our trip, had I not come along on this journey,” one of them later wrote in the journal. “I had the opportunity to meet, interview and be photographed with the youngest Freedom Fighter [an 8-year-old who marched across the bridge in 1965]. I hosted (basically) a community radio talk show and I made some lifelong friends from WVU and MSU. We were on the field reporting like we were seasoned journalists. This experience has confirmed what I already knew, this is what I want to do for life.”
This was in my mind as I watched some of those same students stroll up to collect their diplomas in May, yanking their heels impatiently from the grip of that thwarting Astroturf and marching proudly from cocoon of college to the harsh world of work. They are the struggle for change.
Student journalists from Morgan State University and West Virginia University cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where they documented changes to that city in the 50 years since "Bloody Sunday."
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