[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 46 (Tuesday, March 23, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E521-E523]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    LEARNING THE LESSONS OF HISTORY

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, March 23, 1999

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to congratulate Capuchino High 
School of San Bruno, California, for an extraordinary program they have 
instituted called ``Sojourn to the Past.'' Envisioned by Jeff 
Steinberg, a history teacher at Capuchino High School, this ten-day 
trip recently led eighty-five high school students through a history of 
the civil rights movement that was made very personal.
  The trip began in Washington, D.C., and ended in the National Civil 
Rights Museum in Memphis, in the hotel room where Martin Luther King, 
Jr., was martyred. Along the way the students met with several major 
figureheads of the civil rights movement, including Chris McNair, 
father of one of the Birmingham Four, Elizabeth Eckford, who de-
segregated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, and my own 
good friend, Congressman John

[[Page E522]]

Lewis, who introduced the students to his philosophy of non-violence.
  History came alive for these young people as they followed the trail 
of the most significant movement of the twentieth century. They found 
it impossible to take their own civil rights for granted when 
confronted with first-person accounts from those who risked their lives 
fighting to attain those very rights.
  But a sense of the reality of history was not the only thing the 
students took home. The testimonies of the people with whom they met 
emphasized forgiveness and tolerance, fairly foreign concepts to 
American high school culture. The idea of using non-violence and 
tolerance as a mode of dealing with day-to-day problems was initially 
received with suspicion but seemed to have hit home by the end of the 
trip.
  In a letter written to Congressman John Lewis, junior Kristin Agius 
wrote: ``Your message has made me rethink my idea of what it means to 
be important.  . . . I've come to the conclusion that a step forward, 
even a small step, is better than aspiring for something that will only 
benefit myself.''
  Mark Simon, a reported from The San Francisco Chronicle, accompanied 
the students on their journey to the past. I ask that Mr. Simon's 
excellent report on this outstanding educational experience be included 
in the Record.

                           Civil Rights Tour

           [From the San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 28, 1999]

               Day 1: Thursday, Feb. 11, Washington, D.C.

       They had flown east all day, leaving the morning light of 
     the Bay Area for the nighttime darkness of the nation's 
     capital. With barely a pause, they piled into two buses, went 
     to dinner, and then, as the hour neared 10 p.m., they went as 
     a group to the Lincoln Memorial, where they sat on the steps, 
     huddled together.
       Then they listened to a recording of the Rev. Martin Luther 
     King Jr.'s conscience-rousing sermon to the 1963 March on 
     Washington, in which he told an assembled multitude of 
     250,000 that he had a dream of true equality and justice for 
     a nation riven by hatred and racism.
       And so it began.
       Eighty-five students from Capuchino High School in San 
     Bruno, the most diverse in the San Mateo Union High School 
     District, had embarked on a 10-day journey called ``Sojourn 
     to the Past.'' It was organized by Jeff Steinberg, a history 
     teacher gifted with energy and devotion to match his vision.
       The students went wherever the civil rights movement had 
     gone, seeing the people who had been there, hearing tales of 
     heroism and sacrifice and walking in the footsteps of 
     greatness large and small.
       This was a spirituay journey--a journey of forgiveness and 
     tolerance, of faith and hope, a journey to the past and for 
     the future.
       It was to be an education. There were lessons to be 
     learned.


                              FORGIVENESS

       It was a sustaining theme of the trip. Everywhere the 
     students went, they met historic figures who had been 
     mistreated, neglected, imprisoned and beaten.
       And to a person, these people had found within themselves 
     the capacity to forgive.
       At the Jewish Community Center in Washington, D.C., they 
     met Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine, who integrated 
     the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in 
     1957, amid violence, daily torture and taunts.
       Short, balding, bespectacled and a little portly, Green was 
     good-humored, upbeat and remarkably short on the details of 
     his year at Central, something that clearly frustrated the 
     students.
       But his message was that the students should keep looking 
     forward, not back.
       ``Life is not like a VCR. There's no reverse,'' he said.
       In Birmingham, Ala., they met with Chris McNair, a county 
     commissioner and father of one of the four little girls 
     killed in a Birmingham church bombing in 1963.
       ``I'm a happy man, in spite of the things that happened to 
     me,'' he said in a deep, rough voice.
       ``You're precious to me,'' he said. ``In this world, 
     justice means so much. I hope you can reach a point where you 
     can get out of the hate mode. In that mode, you're the one 
     who truly suffers.''
       When the trip was over, and the students had been to the 
     deepest South and the deepest parts of their soul, African 
     American senior Ke'Shonda Williams said she had learned 
     something from the spirit of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
       ``(King) never had hate in his heart for anybody. He found 
     the goodness in his heart to forgive people. If someone did 
     something wrong to me, I just couldn't forgive them for it. I 
     haven't been through half the things he'd been through. If he 
     could forgive them and move on, I think I should be able to 
     forgive. I'm going to try.''
       The student's capacity for forgiveness was put to its 
     hardest test in Montgomery, Ala., in the office of George 
     Wallace Jr., associate commissioner of the Alabama Public 
     Service Commission, and son and namesake of the famous 
     governor.
       Wallace has just moved into his office, and the floor, 
     chairs and tables were covered with yet-to-be-hanged pictures 
     and memorabilia.
       Dressed in a pinstripe suit, his voice soft and his words 
     thoughtfully chosen, Wallace told the students about his 
     father.
       In his most famous speech, his inaugural address in 1963, 
     Governor Wallace declared ``Segregation now, segregation 
     tomorrow, segregation forever.''
       That was urged upon him by his political advisers, said his 
     son.
       ``His choice was not to use the word segregation. His 
     choice initially was to use the word freedom,'' Wallace said.
       His father made peace with the state's African Americans--a 
     peace brought by a Christian revelation--and sought their 
     forgiveness. He also sought their votes, and won re-election 
     in 1972 with a substantial bloc of black votes.
       ``I hope you'll look at his life in totality. . . . I know 
     he deeply regretted some of the things he said. If he was a 
     leader in the Old South, he sought to be a leader in the New 
     South,'' he said.
       Anne Kelly, a white junior, stormed from the room, angry 
     tears in her eyes.
       On another day, Anne also had tears in her eyes while 
     discussing her own Methodist Church's refusal to sanction 
     same-sex marriages.
       ``Would Jesus have turned his back on these people? You 
     don't need to like it, but you need to tolerate it. That's 
     what tolerance is about,'' she said.
       On this day, she had found Wallace wanting.
       ``He couldn't admit there was no justification for what 
     (his father) did. He never said opportunism is wrong. In 
     order for an apology to mean something, you have to accept 
     responsibility for what you did,'' she said.
       During the trip, students were required to write letters to 
     the people they met that day. Jennifer Lynch, a white junior, 
     wrote Wallace that she had tried to remain open-minded.
       ``I think it did become apparent that your father had 
     become a changed man,'' she said.


                               Tolerance

       They went to Little Rock's Central High School, a brick, 
     fortress-like building with white-topped towers.
       There, they heard from Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan 
     Massery, who are locked together forever in one of the most 
     famous photographs of the 1950s.
       Eckford, a slender black girl in dark glasses, can be seen 
     walking alone through a hostile crowd. Behind her is Hazel 
     Bryan, her face contorted as she shouts an epithet at 
     Eckford.
       Five years later, Bryan, now Hazel Massery, apologized. 
     Forty years later, the two are close friends.
       On this day, they were on stage together to, as Massery put 
     it, ``make sense of the experience.''
       In a carefully prepared and delivered presentation, they 
     took turns telling of their experiences.
       As Eckford described her year at Central, her voice choked 
     repeatedly and she often wiped tears from her face.
       Finally, the time came for questions.
       No, Eckford said, she would not do it again, if she had the 
     chance.
       Then, Darnell Ene, an African American junior, rose and 
     asked what word Massery was saying in the picture.
       In fact, it's fairly obvious what she was saying--it's a 
     word so sensitive that it is simply called the ``n'' word.
       Before Darnell could finish his question, Eckford, her 
     voice heavy with pain, cried out, ``No, no!''
       Massery said, ``I choose not to repeat that.''
       Said Eckford: ``Hate speech is always hurtful. There is 
     nothing you can learn by repeating it.''
       But later, Darnell said he know what word Massery had used.
       ``I wanted to know what was in her mind,'' he said, ``I 
     wanted to know what was going through her mind when she did 
     it, what forced her into it, what was pushing her into doing 
     it.''
       And when the trip was over, Mamoud Kamel, a junior whose 
     family came to the United States from Egypt five years ago, 
     found himself rethinking his own habits.
       Mamoud said it is common practice among high school 
     students to use the word ``nigga,'' a slang form of the 
     notorious racial slur.
       It's used frequently in rap music, and young people, at 
     least at Capuchino, have come to accept it as slang and to 
     distinguish between the harsher form of the word.
       ``That's the way we all talk right now, but I'm going to 
     stop saying this word,'' he said.


                              NONVIOLENCE

       This one may be the hardest for the students.
       They met often with people who had been beaten and then 
     stepped up for more.
       In Atlanta, in a theater at the Martin Luther King Jr. 
     visitors' center, they met with Representative John Lewis, D-
     Ga.
       Lewis is one of the icons of the civil rights movement--
     former head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 
     arrested more than 40 times in nonviolent demonstrations, the 
     youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington and leader 
     of the first march from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery, the state 
     capital.
       That march, on March 7, 1965, made national headlines when 
     state troopers savagely beat the marchers as they crossed the 
     Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

[[Page E523]]

       Two weeks later, King led a second march that successfully 
     reached Montgomery.
       Lewis, who suffered a broken skull in the first march, was 
     asked if he'd ever felt the urge to strike back.
       ``I never had any desire or urge to strike back in any 
     sense. I believe in nonviolence, not just as a technique, not 
     just as a tactic, but as a way of life and a way of living,'' 
     he said.
       In the back of the theater sat Darnell Ene, his fists 
     clenched as Lewis described the Selma beating.
       ``It's not right,'' he said later. ``You shouldn't do that 
     kind of stuff, and to make things worse, (the marchers were) 
     doing it nonviolently. They had a perfect reason to turn 
     violent, but they didn't. That shows signs of strength.''
       It's a strength Darnell and his friend Chris Ramirez, a 
     Latino junior, said they don't have.
       Darnell said he tries to walk away from disputes, but he 
     doesn't shrink from physical violence if he's pushed to it.
       ``I don't like backing down,'' Chris said. ``I can't back 
     down.''
       The most spontaneous outburst by the students came in Selma 
     for a woman who did not back down.
       In the rear room of Lannie's, a locally famous diner where 
     the students were served fried chicken, fried catfish and 
     fried pork chops, they met Annie Lee Cooper.
       Cooper was a part of a group that in 1964 tried to enter a 
     local courthouse to register to vote.
       Her path was blocked by Sheriff Jim Clark, an enthusiastic 
     and violent racist, who struck her.
       Cooper, no devotee of nonviolence, hit the sheriff across 
     the side of the face, and a melee ensured that ended only 
     after Clark clubbed Cooper on the head with a nightstick and 
     two other police officers wrestled her into handcuffs.
       When the students heard the story, they jumped to their 
     feet and applauded at length.
       The applause was led by the otherwise quiet Michael 
     Mosqueda, a Latino junior, who said later that Cooper was a 
     hero.
       ``She didn't just take it and take it,'' he said.
       But for Will Hannan, a white junior, and for others, the 
     message of nonviolence rang truest.
       ``You don't need to arm people with weapons, you need to 
     arm people with a certain philosophy, and if they really 
     intend to be warriors in the nonviolent battle, they need to 
     live nonviolence as a way of life,'' he said.


                                 FAITH

       Everywhere the students went, they went to church.
       They visited Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where King 
     had been pastor at the time of his death; Dexter Avenue 
     Baptist Church in Montgomery, a stone's throw from the state 
     capitol, where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of 
     the Confederacy and where King has his first pastorship; 
     and the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where 
     the four girls were killed.
       In the basement of the church, where the girls had been 
     going to Sunday school when 12 sticks of dynamite exploded, 
     the students heard from Lola Hendricks.
       She had marched in Birmingham, and her 8-year-old daughter 
     spent five days in jail during the ``Children's Crusade,'' in 
     which the black youth of Birmingham were sent out against the 
     white establishment's fire hoses and police dogs.
       Hendricks was asked if she was scared. No, she said.
       ``I felt the way we were being treated in the South, we 
     might as well be dead. So we had no fear,'' she told the 
     students.
       And she knew God was with them, she said. He knew what they 
     had been through.
       The students heard testimony--in the back room of a diner 
     in Selma, in church basements and in community theaters, and 
     in the offices of elected officials in Montgomery--that God 
     has played a hand in the civil rights movement, protecting 
     those who were marching, reassuring, those who were in doubt 
     and bringing light to those who had been on the wrong side of 
     the issue.
       ``In struggle, you need something to believe, a hope and a 
     faith to believe in,'' said Katie Gutierrez, a Latina junior 
     and herself a devout Christian. ``With all the hatred, you 
     need love somewhere, and God is love.''


                        THE PAST AND THE FUTURE

       On the sixth day of the trip, history teacher Steinberg 
     rose early to appear on a local TV morning show in 
     Montgomery. He said he hoped the trip would have a meaningful 
     impact on the students.
       ``Maybe they become more compassionate and tolerant, and 
     maybe they get inspired to do better in school. * * * I 
     think the kids are going to come back changed people,'' he 
     said.
       They probably will. But not all of them will. And not all 
     of them will right away.
       Near the end of the trip, Monique Jackson, an African 
     American senior, said she didn't come back changed, but she 
     came back better informed and touched by the realization that 
     everywhere she went, Martin Luther King Jr. had been there.
       ``The struggle back then is what led us up to now. * * * 
     It's not really that bad now. You can't stop a racist from 
     being a racist, so what can you do? In these days, nobody 
     goes around hosing people down. Yes, there is still race 
     discrimination, sex discrimination. You just have to deal 
     with it as it comes.''
       In a letter to Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine, 
     Kristin Davis, a white junior, wrote: ``I believe in your 
     philosophy that you cannot live in the past. Those 
     experiences help shape your future, but you can't let them 
     run your life.''
       African American junior Aisha Schexnayder wrote to Green: 
     ``I've been through a lot in my life, but I can't see myself 
     going through all of that and still be able to crack a 
     smile.'' In a letter to John Lewis, white junior Kristin 
     Agius wrote: ``Your message has made me rethink my idea of 
     what it means to be important and what it means to make a 
     difference. I've come to the conclusion that a step forward, 
     even a small step, is better than aspiring for something that 
     will only benefit myself.''
       As she contemplated the Montgomery's Civil Rights Memorial, 
     a setting of granite, smoothly flowing waters and a roll call 
     of civil rights martyrs, Clarissa Pritchett, an African 
     American junior, said: ``All the people worked so hard to get 
     us where we are today, and I worry that we're going to leave 
     it undone.''
       Theresa Calpotura, a junior of Filipino descent, said she 
     would return from the trip determined to overcome her innate 
     shyness and to work on matters of racial and social 
     inequality.
       ``You have to start with yourself before you can change 
     anything else, and that's what this trip did for me,'' she 
     said. ``You have to know that tolerance is important. It's 
     basically the glue of our society.''
       Theresa's close friend, Ronita Jit, a junior of Indian 
     descent, said she would return determined to start an 
     organization on campus that would include all races, and give 
     them the chance to connect across cultural lines.
       ``It just confirmed my determination,'' she said. ``I want 
     (us) to spend time with each other and get to know each 
     other. I know these things are far-fetched, but I'm going to 
     try.''
       One of those who said she'll join Ronita's effort was 
     LaDreena Maye, an African American junior whose shyness 
     belies a depth of thought and feeling.
       She wants to be a doctor, and she found inspiration to push 
     for her goal from those with whom the students met. She also 
     learned about those who did nothing while injustices and 
     cruelty were taking place.
       ``When I see something going on, I'll probably want to be 
     more quick to address it now, instead of just sitting and 
     letting it pass by,'' she said.
       ``I guess that now from the trip--knowing what we know--
     that there is a bit of an obligation. I think we should all 
     want to come back and educate people about some of the things 
     we've learned on the trip. . . . I think something needs to 
     be done.''

                 DAY 10: Saturday, February 20, Memphis

       The buses rolled up to the Lorraine Motel and into a time 
     warp.
       Parked in front were a white Dodge Royal with massive, 
     olive-green tail fins and a white Cadillac convertible.
       There was a plaque, bearing a quote from Genesis: ``Behold, 
     here cometh the dreamer. . . . Let us slay him and see what 
     becomes of his dreams.''
       As the students stood outside the motel, Steinberg played 
     an excerpt from King's final speech, delivered with a 
     mystical passion the night before he was killed.
       ``Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity 
     has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just 
     want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up the 
     mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised 
     Land.''
       The students then took a guided tour of the adjacent 
     National Civil Rights Museum, an interactive experience with 
     vivid displays that create a sense of time and place.
       It was like watching their trip unfold before them on fast-
     forward--except that the tour ended outside Room 306 of the 
     Lorraine Motel.
       The covers of one bed are slightly rumpled. A plate of 
     catfish is set on the bed. Cigarette butts are crushed out in 
     an ashtray.
       It was as though Martin Luther King Jr. might step back 
     through the door in just a moment.
       Students who had been stoic throughout the trip stared into 
     the room as if stricken.
       Some cried quietly.
       Then, they went to a conference room upstairs and had 
     lunch.
       Afterward, they stood, one at a time, and talked about what 
     the trip meant to them.
       Many cried. Some had to leave the room.
       Then they stood together and held hands and sang one chorus 
     of ``We Shall Overcome'' before heading home.

     

                          ____________________