Teachers, Liverpool Scholars Study Civil Rights Movement

A group of Alabama schoolteachers, college students and scholars from Liverpool, England will spend three weeks together in Birmingham July 16 through August 3 learning about the American civil rights movement and its lasting effects on the nation’s culture, its music and its schools.

Posted on July 2, 2001 at 10:10 a.m.

BIRMINGHAM, AL — A group of Alabama schoolteachers, college students and scholars from Liverpool, England will spend three weeks together in Birmingham July 16 through August 3 learning about the American civil rights movement and its lasting effects on the nation’s culture, its music and its schools.

The program is called “Birmingham’s Civil Rights Movement” and is sponsored by the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), the Birmingham City Schools and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. Teachers and students taking part in this accredited summer program will look at the civil rights movement through the lens of the historic struggle by African-Americans for equality and an equal education in the United States. This is the second year for the program. Last year nearly 30 teachers, scholars and students from England and Birmingham participated in the program.

Class discussions will be led by civil rights scholars and by ordinary people who fought in the movement. Participants also will tour historic sites, including the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery; and the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, the site of what is known as “Bloody Sunday.”

The course is offered through a partnership between UAB and the University of Liverpool, which has a similar study abroad program called “Liverpool’s Black Roots.” That course examines the port city’s link to the transatlantic slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries and how the past has shaped Liverpool today. Several instructors from UAB and Birmingham City Schools have participated in the Liverpool program since the partnership began in 1998.

“I hope that all of the students come away from the course realizing that they have heard the stories of and about martyrs,” said Frank Romanowicz, the UAB Study abroad coordinator. “They are the stories about those who died because of who and what they were and those who gave blood, sweat and tears in the struggle.”

Participants also will visit the Tuskegee home of Booker T. Washington and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic site in Atlanta. In addition, the teachers and students will learn about the music that sprang out of the movement, including the spirituals and the protest songs.

The cost for the course is $450, plus tuition and other fees. For more information on enrollment, call Frank Romanowicz, UAB International Programs, at (205) 934-5025 or email at frankr@uab.edu.