DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
09 January 2009
Students’ Tour of Civil Rights Landmarks Is ‘Life-Changing’
Operation Understanding DC focuses on Jewish and African-American students
Washington — Every summer, about 30 African-American and Jewish secondary school students board a bus and embark on a journey intended to help them become leaders in the fight against racism. Their three-week tour, the centerpiece of a yearlong training program called Operation Understanding DC (OUDC), takes them from Washington to New York and then south to landmark sites of the civil rights movement.
Among the stops are Greensboro, North Carolina, site of the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins; Selma, Alabama, the starting point for three famous civil rights marches; and Memphis, Tennessee, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968.
“We change the lives of our students,” said OUDC Executive Director Rachael Feldman. “Students leave the program understanding that every single one of us is a voice and we need to use it to make the world a little better.”
Those taking the trip have spent the first part of the year learning about the histories and cultures of African Americans and Jews while getting to know each other as individuals. But it’s on the summer trip that they bond and have many of their most intense experiences — experiences they will later draw upon in making presentations and conducting workshops aimed at reducing prejudice.
OUDC seeks to create a new generation of leaders through a combination of education and life-changing experiences. It aims to preserve the historic alliance between African Americans and American Jews, who in the last century cooperated in the founding of such organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League, and also worked together in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Inspired in the early 1990s by a similar program in Philadelphia, OUDC accepts up to 32 African-American and Jewish secondary school students representing a mix of schools and economic backgrounds from throughout the Washington, D.C., area. OUDC looks for future leaders — young people who display curiosity, maturity, commitment to their community and excellent communication skills.
“Our students spend a little time walking in other people’s shoes, and I think that makes them much better citizens when they graduate from the program and enter university and eventually professional life,” Feldman said. “They start to think early on about their place in the world and how they can make a difference in the world.”
Bianca Davies, a graduate of the 2007 OUDC class, said the program, especially the summer trip, was a life-changing experience that “opened my eyes to so many things.”
“It really helped me in the process of finding who I was,” said Davies, who is African American. “I thought I knew a lot about African-American history, but when going through the program I realized, like, wow! — I know nothing.”
Davies said her most cherished experiences were in Selma, Alabama, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where on March 7, 1965 — so-called “Bloody Sunday” — state and local police attacked peaceful demonstrators with clubs, tear gas and bull whips; and in the Lorraine Motel Museum in Memphis, where the OUDC group met with Reverend Billy Kyles, who was with Martin Luther King when he was assassinated.
On the Edmund Pettus Bridge “I was just filled with so many emotions I literally started crying,” Davies said. “I couldn’t stop crying. ... I really need to cherish life, and I really need to be who I can be to the fullest because those people fought for me to not be where they were — to not endure the struggles they endured.”
Now enrolled at Spelman College in Atlanta, Davies has applied for a diversity leadership internship that focuses on community outreach. She plans to make diversity education her life’s work. “I really want to go out there and teach others how important diversity is and to eradicate all these stereotypes that we have about one another,” Davies said.
Sam Dreiman, a graduate of the 10th OUDC class, also considered the summer trip the highlight of the program, particularly the Alabama segment.
“OUDC opened my eyes to social injustices,” said Dreiman, now a senior at the University of Virginia. He is studying for a degree in public policy, in part because of the OUDC experience. He plans to work on international development and humanitarian issues.
The tour of Selma is led by Joanne Bland, who at 11 years old marched on Bloody Sunday and witnessed the brutality of the police. Bland “talks to the kids about seeing her sister getting clubbed by a state trooper and seeing the blood, and she really talks about how horrible it was,” Feldman said.
“You can read things in a book or hear someone speak, but when you are standing at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge and it’s quiet and you realize what it must have been like to be there on Bloody Sunday — it just becomes so real.”
“I don’t think any of our students would say we have moved into a post-racial age,” Feldman said. “I do think they see things shifting in this country. I don’t think any of them feel like we’re where we need to be, but they feel like everything they started working on when they were in high school through this program is starting to come to fruition.”
See Diversity: Offering a Place for Everyone and Black History Month. Also see Free At Last - The U.S. Civil Rights Movement.
More information about OUDC is available on its Web site.
