RFA students learn about civil rights on Mississippi tripRFA students learn about civil rights on Mississippi trip
Two Rome Free Academy students are learning about the civil rights movement this week from some people who lived it, in the southern state of Mississippi.Kiara Sligh, 16, a junior at RFA, is the daughter of Cornell and Lori Parrish, 7998 Northwood Drive. Michelle Daniels, 17, also a junior at RFA, is the daughter of Michael and Delores Daniels, 1002 Valentine Ave.
The two were selected, based on essays they wrote, to join an annual trip to the south led by state Sen. Nancy Larraine Hoffmann, who has been a participant in the civil rights movement. The two RFA juniors are among a group of 16 students from Hoffmann's 48th state Senate district. The other students are from Corcoran, Fayetteville-Manlius, Jamesville-DeWitt, Henninger, Fowler and Stockbridge Valley high schools.
The group left Sunday and will return Monday. On their itinerary: the national Civil Rights Museum in the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tenn.; the home of Medgar Evers who once led Mississippi's National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in Jackson, Miss.; the site of an NAACP boycott of white businesses in Port Gibson, Miss.; and the home of Charles Evers, brother of Medgar Evers and another former leader of the NAACP, in Fayette, Miss.
Sligh and Daniels said, in telephone interviews from Natchez, Miss., Thursday, that they have absorbed lots of lessons from their stops, and from the people they have met.
Sligh said the people she has met have "taught me to appreciate what we have. Not all blacks used to be able to go to school," and some could not even read and write. "If people had not fought and risked their lives for us, I might not have" the opportunities available now.
Daniels said the trip has shown her that she "can't take things for granted," like drinking water from any fountain, taking any seat on a bus, even going to school. "These people are not Martin Luther King, but they sat in sit-ins or participated in boycotts, and risked their lives for the right to vote or eat in a restaurant."