Two students embark on nine-day civil rights pilgrimage
Utah State University students Lauren Mata and Juan Jarlin de Leon couldn’t be there to support Rosa Parks when she refused to relinquish her bus seat because of her race.
They weren’t around to participate in the subsequent bus boycotts, to fight for the Little Rock Nine to attend Central High School or to hear Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream for a better future.
Beginning Feb. 27, however, they will embark on a pilgrimage that will take them to all those sites and more. Mata and de Leon, along with 50 other students from the University of Washington and Bellevue College, will spend nine days in the Deep South visiting historic locations from the civil rights movement.
Jason Gilmore, assistant professor of global communications at USU, is one of the original founders of the pilgrimage.
“It was inspired by a trip that myself, the guy who runs the show up at Washington and two of my friends did,” Gilmore said. “We went on this weird road trip that was supposed to be about baseball games and zip lines and rafting. But we ended up in Selma, Alabama and then we ended up in Birmingham. We didn’t go to any baseball games. Instead, we started looking up other civil rights locations throughout the south. We found our way through Mississippi, through Alabama, from Selma to Birmingham, to all of these amazing locations. Coming back, we said to each other that this can’t be something that just the four of us experience.”
Following their road trip, Gilmore and his colleagues established a massive intercollegiate pilgrimage for a multiracial, multigenerational, multinational group of students with different sexual orientations and from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds.
“We’re trying to take as diverse a crowd as possible into a trip that dives deep into the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s,” Gilmore said.
Gilmore has completed the trip four times, but this will only be his second time taking students. Mata and de Leon were chosen from 23 applicants in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Mata, a senior majoring in history, first heard about the pilgrimage last year in Gilmore’s Intercultural Communications class.
“I knew that they were going out on this experience, so then I went to their group talk,” she said. “I was blown away. When I saw the application opportunity, I knew I had to do it.”
The pilgrimage is both emotionally and historically intense, keeping students busy from around 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. each day. Mata is most looking forward to visiting Little Rock, Arkansas.
“I didn’t know very much about the Little Rock Nine going into this experience,” Mata said, “but I’m really looking forward to going there. Just the dedication they had, and the strength, in the face of such discrimination. It’s just absolutely inspiring.”
De Leon, a junior studying global communications, is most eager to see the cultural change in Mississippi.
“Based on all the descriptions and stories I have read and heard about this place,” he said, “I have created in my head an image of a very terrifying state where discrimination and segregation was the worst during the 50s and 60s. I want to be able to see and witness for myself the change society has undergone there in terms of race. I want to compare what I have read to the reality of what I will live and see while I’m there.”
Mata, de Leon and Gilmore intend to use their pilgrimage as a vehicle to voice support for further social justice improvement. Individuals, Gilmore said, can make an enormous impact in the social justice arena by simply letting others voice their perspectives.
“I think that’s the core thing,” Gilmore said. “The idea that everyone has to be allowed to speak their truth. Whether you disagree with it, agree with it, it doesn’t matter. Allow them to get to the end of their ability to speak their truth, instead of reacting to it. And then trust in the fact that they will give you the same space to speak your truth. And really, at the end of the day, when we can feel unfettered in giving our side of things, we end up realizing how common we really are.”
As individual and influential as the pilgrimage will be for Mata and de Leon, Gilmore said that it has been his vision from the beginning to include the entire Utah State University community. Starting on Friday, interested students can follow their journey on Facebook, Instagram or Utah Public Radio’s “Stories from the Road.”
“This needs to be an experience that not just the three of us have, but one that we can share as widely as possible with Utah State, and with Utah communities,” Gilmore said.
-h.mickeyd@gmail.com
@h_mickeyd