Olivia Eburne Blog post for the week of 4/20

Blog post for the week 4/20

Hey y’all! I’m in the south again, as I mentioned last post (the survival of an early day, etc.) and I thought, “Why not write a post about this trip to Alabama?” 

So I will. It will be this post. So there.

 Y’all are now going to learn about my second adventure to the South. This was an April vacation trip for 8^th graders where we went and toured civil rights landmarks in Birmingham, Selma, Montgomery, Tuskegee, and Atlanta.  In all we saw five cities, five museums, four churches, four national park sites, three cultural institutes, two world headquarters, and a state house.

Day one: The first thing was that we had to get up early, but you heard about that.

We first visited 16th Street Baptist Church, which was the rallying point for many marches and speeches.  We also learned of the 1963 bombing that took the lives of four young girls, carried out by the local KKK.  Our speaker, Mr. Washington, was 18 years old during the height of the movement. We then went to the  Southern Museum of Flight  and closed out the day at Kelly Ingram Park.

Day two:  We visited the Slavery Museum and the National Voting Rights Museum. We experienced a slavery simulation with Sam, our tour guide. No history lesson could teach you the emotional impact we felt while we endured this treatment.

We retraced some of the footsteps of the Selma to Montgomery march,  beginning  by crossing the historic Edmund Pettus Bridge. We also visited MLK Junior’s first church, and had  a tour of the State house.

Day three:  We had a tour of Tuskegee University  as well as the George Washington Carver Museum. The third part was my favorite part, it was a tour of Moton Air Field, home of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African-American group of air force fighters. They shot down over 100 German aircraft and never lost a single friendly bomber to enemy fire.

After that we went to Atlanta and toured CNN headquarters, which was quite cool, and we got to meet Carl Azuz, who write and anchors CNN Student News, which we watch a lot at school.

The last day we sent to the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.  After the museum, we went to the tombs of Dr. and Mrs. King as well as the Ebenezer Street Baptist Church where Martin Luther King Sr. preached.

Whew!