Auburn University, July 21, 2003

U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., delivered a vivid account of his experience on the frontlines of the 1965 Bloody Sunday march for voting rights, speaking Monday at the Auburn University Hotel & Dixon Conference Center.

On that Sunday, March 7, 1965, about 600 civil rights protesters headed east on U.S. Route 80.

"We lined up in two's to march from Selma to Montgomery to dramatize to the nation and the world that people of color wanted to register to vote and become participants in the democratic process," Lewis said.

Just six blocks into the march on Selma's Pettus Bridge, a face-off with state troopers landed Lewis in the hospital.

"I was hit in the head by a state trooper with a night stick. I thought I was going to die. And to this day, I don't know how I made it back over that bridge," Lewis said.

Lewis was the keynote speaker for a two-week seminar, "Reasoning about Critical Issues of the Civil Rights Movement," which ends Friday.

Twelve high school teachers are participating in the seminar, which is part of "Persistent Issues in History," an on-going project to teach students to think about historical events as enduring societal questions.

"America is changed forever because some people, pockets of individuals who believed in the Constitution, who believed in allowing the spirit of history to use them, put themselves in the way. Sometimes you have to just get in the way. And we got in the way and allowed ourselves to be used by the spirit of history," Lewis said.

"As historians, teachers of history, you have an obligation, a mission and a mandate to tell our children that maybe, just maybe, our forefathers came in different ships, but we're all in the same boat now."

The Persistent Issues in History Workshop is co-directed by John Saye, an associate professor in AU College of Education's Department of Curriculum and Teaching, and Tom Brush of Indiana University. Saye helped develop an online database of interactive, multimedia teaching aids related to the civil rights, which is available to teachers enrolled in the PIH community.

"The whole idea of 'persistent issues' comes from our hope of getting teachers to identify essential societal questions that come up time and time again," Saye said.

The seminar will conclude with a trip to Montgomery to visit the Rosa Parks Museum, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Alabama Department of Archives and History. The participating teachers were selected from across the country, Saye said.

"Teaching in Oregon, to my students, the idea of struggling for civil rights is such a foreign concept. And as a teacher having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, I'm kind of in the same boat as my students. Though I know a little more than my 16-year-old students, I wanted to come here to see and learn firsthand," said June Satak, a modern American studies teacher from Corvallis, Ore.

Published by the Opelika-Auburn News, July 22, 2003
Contributed by Staff Writer Katie Poole