While some students perform musical theater excerpts, watch “The Simpsons,” or paint with Bob Ross, junior Wilson Cedillo stands in front of an Ernest Withers Civil Rights Era photograph, reflecting on the legacy of Reconstruction. Cedillo is traveling in a group of 22 juniors and seniors and accompanied by Upper School history teacher Andrew Bigelow and Upper School English teacher Theresa Collins on the annual Civil Rights Trip.

From Wednesday, May 1 to Saturday, May 4, the group visited historical sites in Jackson, Mississippi; Memphis, Tennessee; and the Mississippi Delta, all of which led them to connect the struggles of the past with those of the present.

Bigelow, who covers the Civil Rights Movement in the curricula of his US History course and the Civil Rights Movement elective, has taken nine different groups of students on the Civil Rights Trips since 2009. “One of my student’s parents was born and raised in Memphis,” Bigelow said, “and she’s the one who contacted me soon after I came to Parker in 2009 and said she would help me sponsor a trip to bring kids to Memphis to go to the new Civil Rights Movement and to study Memphis—the music, the culture, the history.”

During his second journey below the Mason-Dixon Line, and every year since, Bigelow went with Collins, who teaches a senior elective called, “Issues of Race, Class, Gender, and Sexual Orientation.” “We did it for a couple more years, focusing primarily on Memphis,” Bigelow said. “We realized that we really wanted to zone in on the whole civil rights history, and we wanted to go beyond Memphis. Ms. Collins and I got an enrichment grant to go to Alabama to travel all over Alabama, to go to all of the historical sites—the Edmund Pettis Bridge, the Selma marches, the Children’s Crusade, 16th Street Baptist Church—and then we ran into Mia Henry.”

Mia Henry, who serves as a guide, facilitator and founded the Kalamazoo, Michigan-based Freedom Lifted tour agency, has been helping Bigelow and Collins plan Civil Rights trips, which have been different every year. “We alternate every year between Alabama and Memphis and Mississippi,” Bigelow said. “Every year, we tweak it, redo it, and every year, more memorials open up, more and more historical sites open up.”

The historical sites that the group visited stimulated thoughts about the current political climate. “Taking a look back at the history of our nation and the struggle for civil rights, you can’t help but make comparisons to what is happening now,” Collins aid. “That specifically comes up when we’re speaking with elders from the movement, and students frequently ask people like Charles McLaurin and Hollis Watkins, who were both young people during the early days of the movement, about what’s changed and what’s stayed the same. The answers are quite striking and quite telling when someone like Charles McLaurin, who has been doing this work for his whole life, is able to say that, unfortunately, he is seeing a lot of the same behaviors and hearing a lot of the same rhetoric that’s divisive and hateful and racist.”

For Collins, it comes as a harsh fact to wrestle with. “It’s hard to hear that, but it is the reality,” Collins said. “Because these elders have seen it firsthand and because the students have studied the history and now have that point of comparison, it is inevitable that we’re seeing that repetition.”

Junior Wilson Cedillo, who went on the trip with Collins and Bigelow, made connections to Charlottesville and other race-related current events. “It shows that history is repeating itself,” Cedillo said. “The hatred toward people of different races is still present, and, with the current administration, it is more mainstream.”

In addition to encouraging Cedillo to made connections to the current political climate, the Civil Rights Trip forced him to think differently about the South. “Before, to me, it used to be a place of repression and hatred,” Cedillo said. “When I imagined the South, I pictured people with Confederate flags, but now it’s a place of resistance, of hope, and the South is much more progressive than it is given credit for.”

Although Cedillo considers the South more progressive than he previously thought, he and Collins—through the trip—now recognize how unprogressive American society is as a whole. “Every time I get to go on this trip I’m just continually struck by the contrast between the things that feel different in our society now and the things that feel a little too similar,” Collins said. “The overall gratitude I have at the opportunity to be in spaces where people have dedicated their entire lives to this struggle is an honor. It makes me think about what can my role be in my community, what can my role be in this school, and what my role can be as an American citizen in helping advance the cause of civil rights, human rights for each person.”