Eighth grade students at Ella Baker Global Studies and Humanities Magnet School are going on a civil rights tour in Georgia and Alabama in May. The kids, led by global studies teacher Sam Quincy, will fly to Atlanta and ride a bus to Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama over a five day trip. The civil rights tour includes sites and museums centered around the American civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s. 

The trip is making up for a spring 2020 civil rights tour that was canceled because of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Only 20 students who were selected from an application process could go on the canceled 2020 trip. Quincy’s 2023 tour is open to all 85 eighth grade students at no cost to their families. 

Travel is a major aspect of the magnet school, which gained magnet status in 2021. Ella Baker seventh graders will take a trip to Washington D.C. to supplement their U.S. history curriculum and the sixth graders will do an in-state overnight trip.

The civil rights tour, which is run through Education First Tours, will start on May 15 in Atlanta, where the kids will spend their first two nights before traveling by bus to Montgomery. On the ride to Montgomery, the kids will stop at the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site in Tuskegee, Alabama. Then the kids will take a walking tour of Montgomery, spend the night, and visit the Rosa Parks Museum the following day. Next they will drive to Birmingham, where they will see the 16th Street Baptist Church and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. From Birmingham, they’ll drive back to Atlanta for the National Center for Human and Civil Rights.

Quincy is tying the civil rights trip to the school’s namesake, civil rights activist Ella Baker. He said that he and his students discuss her work frequently, and the trip will be an opportunity to show the kids what she worked for. He’s also creating a parallel around the struggle for racial equality during the South African apartheid and the American civil rights movement to connect to the eighth graders’ global studies curriculum.

The eighth graders’ theme for their fourth quarter of school is “past, present and future.” Quincy is teaching about the civil rights movement prior to going on the trip and the students will journal about their experiences while traveling. After the trip, the students will reflect on what they saw and how to apply the lessons they learned to the future.

“We’re going down there with a lot of intention,” Quincy said. “They’ll be researching the past and potentially thinking ahead to think ‘okay, this is what I’ll be looking for, this is what I’m thinking about going into this.’”

Quincy’s current struggle is encouraging kids to go on the trip– about 60 of the 85 eighth graders are signed up, leaving about 25 undecided for various reasons. He worried that some of the undecided students didn’t understand the value of an opportunity like this trip. 

“I want to scream out, this is not normal. This is not common. This is not like ‘oh try it next year,’ because no high school is going to do this,” he said.

The tour is funded by a variety of sources, including a fundraiser that contributes to both the seventh and eighth grade trips. Families have no out-of-pocket costs and all meals are covered by the tour, although Quincy recommended that families send their kids with $40-$60 for anything extra that the students want.

Quincy himself has never been to Atlanta or Alabama, so the trip will be a learning experience for him as well. He noted that the tour will probably be many of the kids’ first flights. A big focus for Quincy is that the kids travel and learn with intention and respect.

“The eighth grade trip is about traveling with purpose,” he said. “Not just going and exploring and taking over, or finding out just for yourself selfishly, but really going out there and finding more out about yourself, some identity work and also history.”