During the weeklong trip, our kids visited numerous important sites in civil rights history, including the Andersonville National Historic site and POW museum, which is dedicated to all prisoners of war in America’s past; the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and Parish where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached his first message of hope and brotherhood and was also a center point of the Montgomery bus boycott; the Southern Poverty Law Center Civil Rights Memorial, which has exhibits about martyrs of the civil rights movement and a Wall of Tolerance; the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute, which included documents and artifacts related to the history of Selma, Ala., the voting rights struggle, voting rights in America, and the civil rights movement, as well as visits to the historic Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, and a walk across the historic Edmund Pettus Bridge; Lowndes Interpretive Center, a site dedicated to those who peacefully marched from Selma to Montgomery to gain the right to vote; Martin Luther King Jr.’s National Historic Site, which includes of several buildings in Atlanta central to his life, including his boyhood home and the original Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King was baptized and both he and his father were pastors; and Habitat for Humanity International, a global nonprofit housing organization working in local communities throughout the United States and in 70 countries.
The ability to witness places where significant events in the civil rights movement took place was an important part of the trip, Marc Velasquez, another coworker who led the trip, explained.
“There’s something about being witness to history that allows you to feel it more and to feel the impact of it more and I think we wanted to get that our of the experience as well,” he said.
This trip has been in the making for around six years. Nikki had taken the same trip with several groups of college students at a previous job and was eager to return with members of the Mercy Home family.
“Koinonia is hallowed ground,” she said. “[It’s] a place where the grassroots of fighting against discrimination began. I feel like a lot happened here and there’s something special to me about just being on those grounds.”
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