Students learn from history-makers of the Civil Rights Movement
For the past eight years, Stetson University College of Law students participating in Professor Robert Bickel’s Constitutional Law and the Civil Rights Movement course have had an opportunity to visit the historic sites and history-makers who shaped the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.
Professor Robert Bickel and class met this summer at the site of the new Civil Rights brick pathway on Stetson’s Gulfport campus.
Students journey to Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee to meet with still-living veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, which challenged racial segregation throughout the south and brought about the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act.
“Every Civil Rights Movement veteran we visited emphasized that our generation is responsible for the future meaning of their efforts during the civil rights struggle,” said Stetson University undergraduate student Alicja Duda, a member of Stetson’s Social Justice Lecture Series Committee. “Just as they fought for a more just world for our generation, so we are called to make our own contribution to a more just world, now, and for future generations.”
Days before heading out on this year’s travel course, students paused to place a brick on a new Civil Rights pathway on Stetson’s Gulfport campus. The brick path commemorates the Civil Rights Movement veterans whom students have met and learned from during the travel course.
“Throughout the travel course, we speak to the people who bore witness both to the great injustice and the great awakening of American society,” said alumna Maria Bogomaz JD ’12. “Experiencing this history helped me develop a personal relationship with social justice law that dictates every aspect of my career on a daily basis.”
“This experience has renewed in me a sense of direction and a confirmation of my ultimate purpose,” said alumna Traci Blake BA ’06, JD ’12.
For more information about Stetson’s Constitutional Law and the Civil Rights Movement course, visit the complete course description.
Post date: July 25, 2013
Media contact: Kate Bradshaw
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