On the morning of Saturday, September 20, students registered in the honors course “Sounds of Silence” met with their instructors, Dr. Julie Chamberlain and Dr. Maria Vandergriff-Avery, in front of the Hedrick Administration Building in order to take a class trip to the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The course itself is designed to encourage students to reflect on how music has been used over the course of history as a voice for the oppressed. One of the largest topics covered in the class is the huge impact of music on the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which lead Chamberlain and Vandergriff-Avery to plan a day trip to the museum. During Fall Break in October, the class will make a larger trip to the city of Chicago, where they will learn more about music’s effect on social movements.
The International Civil Rights Center and Museum was built around the store once known as Woolworth’s, where four young black students began a nonviolent sit-in movement that would go down in history. Upon arriving at the museum, the students and their professors were greeted by their tour guide, a young man named Brandon Brockington, who was vivacious from the very start. The gallery was filled with shocking imagery and artifacts from the “Jim Crow” era of the United States. One glaring example of racial inequality that shocked the class was a two-sided Coca-Cola machine that charged more for people of color. Some students became emotional upon entering the original site of the Greensboro sit-ins, which has been preserved, lunch counter and chairs included. There they were shown a short video reenactment of the event that happened in the same room so many years ago.
The tour lasted an hour before Brockington brought the class into a final room filled with the faces of those people, of many different races and religions, who had helped in the fight for equal rights. He encouraged each and every person in the room to stand up for what they felt was right, and insisted that some of them might one day find themselves on the wall, hypothetically and, perhaps, literally, if they did so.
After the conclusion of the tour, when Dr. Vandergriff-Avery mentioned that she had heard a rumor that Brockington was a talented spoken word poet, he entertained the class with some of his poetry, gaining snaps and claps from the all those in the lobby of the museum. The class was in agreement that it was a fantastic end to an excellent, albeit heartbreaking, excursion.
