Kids Learn Activism and History at Tennessee ‘Civil Rights Camp’
“The students’ experience was part summer camp, part church retreat, part activist organizing conference and part history mini-course.”
A camp outside of Knoxville is providing a very particular kind of education:
From The Hechinger Report:
Mississippi teenagers Jashun Griffith and Trevion Williams know more than the basics about their state’s civil rights history, but they said they didn’t learn most of what they know in school.
Instead, they gleaned their knowledge of topics such as the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till and the March on Washington from reading books and searching the web. So when they heard about a week-long program in Tennessee’s Appalachian foothills that would teach them about the Civil Rights Movement of the past and how it connects to the social justice struggle of today, they were eager to attend.
Jashun and Trevion, both 13 and students at Crystal Springs Middle School, in Crystal Springs, Mississippi, about 30 miles south of Jackson, were among a dozen students and several chaperones who boarded buses in Jackson this summer and traveled to the Alex Haley Farm, outside of Knoxville, named for the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author who spurred legions of blacks to research their African roots after documenting his own.
They were among 450 students, teachers, preachers, child advocates and social justice activists from across the country who gathered for the Children’s Defense Fund’s 23rd Annual Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Child Advocacy Ministry. The theme of the five-day event was “Hope for Our Future: From Weeping to Working for Justice for Our Children.”
The students’ experience was part summer camp, part church retreat, part activist organizing conference and part history mini-course. Several referred to the event as “civil rights camp.”
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