Sitting within the jury field of the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner, Miss., in 2023, Anne Wernau had a religious expertise. She was visiting the courthouse to be taught in regards to the 1955 kidnapping and homicide of a 14-year-old Black boy named Emmett Until by two white males.
After listening to particulars of the brutal killing, the media spectacle of the five-day trial, and the transient deliberation of the all-white jury that acquitted the murderers, Wernau and different guests absorbed what that they had simply discovered. They then took turns studying passages from the county’s official apology introduced to the Until household in 2007, when Tallahatchie County lastly broke its 50-year silence and took accountability for its function.
“We sat within the seats the jury sat in,” Wernau displays. “Most of us might barely get by studying our passages. However it was nearly like that little boy was there, saying, ‘I’m glad the reality is being instructed.’”
She and a buddy had been on a 10-day guided tour of 4 Southern states, visiting historic websites alongside the U.S. Civil Rights Path. A retired violence-prevention educator from East Lyme, Conn., Wernau, who’s white, had lived by the Civil Rights period and at all times thought of herself a supporter. However she additionally acknowledged she had little comprehension of what life as a Black individual in America was like then — or is like now.
“I spotted I wanted to know the reality about that period, to be on the bottom the place this all occurred, and to have the ability to really feel just a little of what folks residing at the moment felt,” she says. “It was religious. It was emotional. It was mental. It impacted me in completely each manner.”
Historical past Up Shut
Established in 2018, the U.S. Civil Rights Path contains greater than 130 websites — museums, church buildings, libraries, colleges, monuments, landmarks, lunch counters, streets, parks, and trails — throughout 15 states and the District of Columbia the place activists within the Nineteen Fifties and ’60s challenged racial segregation.
4 main museums alongside the path interpret the motion: the Nationwide Museum of African American Historical past and Tradition in Washington, D.C.; the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, Ala.; the Nationwide Middle for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta; and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, Miss.
Vacationers can create their very own itineraries with sources discovered on-line, beginning at www.civilrightstrail.com. (On a street journey? Obtain and hearken to America Civil Rights Path podcast.)
These are only a few of the landmarks you possibly can go to to be taught extra about among the troubling, highly effective, and significant intervals of our nation’s historical past.
