While many high school students spent their recent spring break at the beaches or theme parks, 20 Sarasota and Manatee high school students traveled to Alabama.
Their journey was the culmination of a six-month long program in civil rights education.
WUSF's Cathy Carter spoke with Ambar Galva Perez and Lubens Pierre, two of the students in the 'Bending the Arc' program.
Ambar, your group visited 21 historic sites from Montgomery, to Selma and Birmingham. Tell us a little bit about what you experienced on the trip.
I would say that one of the most impactful things that I've learned and seen was at the Equal Justice Initiative sites. At one of the memorials, they showed coffins that were supposed to represent people that were victims of lynching, and we also went to the Freedom Sculpture Park. When I saw the statues of slaves, I felt like they were really looking into me. You know, that I was being held to an expectation. OK, I'm learning all of this. What am I going to do with it?
How about you, Lubens, now that you've been home a couple of weeks, what has stayed with you about your trip to Alabama?
At this one museum, I think it was called the EJI legacy Museum, one of the scenes was a sort of slave encampment where all of the slaves were holograms. One of these captured slaves was singing about how she didn't want to live. It kind of resonated with me on how terrible the situation was for them. And they had like a model train, where they were playing a video of how the slaves would be rounded up and put inside of train cars. It kind of felt like sitting inside of it and seeing how cramped it was. It kind of baffled me on how some people could be so cruel to just shove a bunch of people inside of just a tiny space, like trying to fit 15 people inside a closet.
And not only did you visit historic sites, you actually met some people who were involved in civil rights, and they invited you into their homes. Tell us about that.
Yes, one of the houses belonged to Miss Barbara Shores. She spoke to us about her father, Arthur Shores. He was an attorney that helped out in the civil rights movement, and she spoke to us about how her house was bombed by the KKK, and also about her father's achievements and how much he had to sacrifice, which was the safety of his family for this movement.
Lubens, I understand your immersion program ends with a capstone project. Tell us about yours.
It's kind of like how you would use these two AI voices, one representing the people who are asking questions, and the other representing, well — in this case of me — who's going to be answering said questions and diving deeper. I'm going to be showing clips of certain areas that I took photos of and videos of, and it's essentially going to be me explaining the history behind it. My favorite one would be, like, why did you just take a picture of this random tree? And it's going to be the yellow magnolia tree, which, when I looked it up, meant a symbol of new beginnings.
You’re both young, sophomores in high school. Some of the progress made in the civil rights movement a couple of generations back are now, some would say, eroding. Ambar, how do you see your generation in picking up the mantle for civil rights advancement?
I would say that on social media, I see that people are going to protests and they are speaking out about the situations that are going on here in the United States. But sometimes I feel like when I stop looking at my screen, and when I talk to other students at my school, I think that Bending the Arc really helped me regain some faith. I don't think it's good to be so pessimistic, and I want to be that person that leads, that does something that gives other students motivation to make change.
Bending the Arc: A Student Celebration takes place Sunday at 3 p.m. at Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota.
