People are changed more by experience than by fact. I’ve always thought that to be true, but I believed it even more so recently while I was on a historical voyage.

Last month I had the opportunity to participate in a Sankofa Journey. Sankofa is a West African word that means, “looking backward to move forward.” The 72-hour bus journeys are used as a tool to teach the history of racism in the United States in the same way. On these journeys, people from two churches – usual one African American and one Caucasian – are paired as traveling partners. I was among 50 women who started on our journey from the city of Chicago, IL.

We plunged right into experiential learning the moment we boarded the bus. On the first night, we were inundated with videos that addressed topics of race and racism – from Amos and Andy (1993) to intense documentaries, such as the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL, which resulted in the deaths of four young girls. The videos continued through the night and when we woke up the next morning, much to our surprise, we found ourselves right in front the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church as the first stop in our journey. We were overcome with emotion. Just hours after learning the horrid details of the atrocity that took place in that very church, we found ourselves walking through the very rooms where those four young girls walked and died.

As compelling as that was, our trip only got progressively more intense from there. Our next stop took us to Selma, AL in front of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The Bridge was intended to be the site of a peaceful and symbolic march for voting rights and partially in honor of Jimmy Lee Jackson. Jackson was a civil rights demonstrator who was fatally shot by a state trooper in 1965 for trying to rescue his mother and grandfather from being clubbed to death at their hands. The march became known as “Bloody Sunday”. That day, realizing halfway through their journey that they would be beaten-up by police and white people who disagreed with their protest, those marchers chose to see there journey through to the end. Just like the freedom fighters and demonstrators did 40 years ago, we walked in pairs across the bridge, Unlike those marchers however, we did not have to face the dreadful circumstances that they faced upon reaching the other side.