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The Past Walks with Us

By Michael Penn MA'97

At first, all they saw was red - the red of the flag, and the red of their anger. They weren't surprised to see it, really. As students of the American South, they were well acquainted with the red field and blue bars of the Confederate battle flag, and all too familiar with its complicated symbolism. But they hadn't walked into the little restaurant in the dusty town of Clarksdale, Mississippi, looking for symbolism. They just wanted lunch.

Tyina Steptoe, Elizabeth Keeney, and Princess Kent - three of the dozen or so UW-Madison students who came into the café that day - took in the view and wondered for a moment if it was appropriate for them to stay. People who hang Confederate flags will often say that it's merely about commemorating history; it's nothing personal. But the students knew all about history, and seeing the flag didn't feel like any history they'd read in a book. It felt personal.
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The students were discovering that there is a difference between learning history and feeling it. Their visit to Clarksdale was about just that - about feeling the intimate tug of human history. They were part of Freedom Ride 2001, a unique UW class that, for twelve days in June, traveled from Madison into the Deep South on a chartered bus, completing a nearly three-thousand-mile odyssey into the sights and sounds of the civil-rights movement. Stopping at monuments famous and forgotten, meeting people who were heroes and heroines, the class sought to create a real-life framework for the vivid history the students had learned in more-traditional classes back on campus. And the students discovered that, while we can't ever live in history, we can't ever live outside of it, either. As Danielle McGuire '97, MA'99, one of the course organizers, put it, "The past walks with us at all times."