Reliving a Historic Legacy

Forty years ago this week, the University canceled classes, and three student-faculty demonstrations were held to honor civil rights leader Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been killed on April 4, 1968.

Four decades later, a group of 10 Harvard students spent their spring breaks traveling through Mississippi to explore the legacy of the civil rights movement, and to discover how much civil rights and student advocacy have changed since then.

“Honestly, it just looked like we haven’t come very far at all,” said trip participant Megha Majumdar ’10, pointing to enduring segregation and persistent poverty within the black communities of the region that the group visited.

One of 14 alternative spring break trips sponsored by the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA), “Civil Rights and Service” aimed to provide an opportunity for students to meet Mississippi leaders of the civil rights movement, as well as debate the role of student leadership in the context of current social issues, said Gene A. Corbin, executive director of PBHA and leader of the trip.

Participants in the group said they admired the strength and continued dedication of the civil rights leaders with whom they spoke.

“These were people who really cared about something, and they went and got involved in it, even if nobody else was doing it,” said Lumumba B. Seegars ’09, a co-leader of the trip and co-director of Students Taking on Poverty (STOP).

After flying into Memphis and visiting the Civil Rights Museum, the group stationed itself in Jackson, Mississippi. There, students spent their mornings listening to speakers and their afternoons volunteering with the after-school program at Stewpot Community Services.

Both Majumdar and Seegars noted that civil rights in the area still have a long way to go, citing the continued inequality and poverty within the region.

“A lot of [the children] had the idea that their friends...had plans to drop out eventually and become drug dealers,” Majumdar said. “Their families were broken and sometimes I just didn’t know how to respond to things like that.”

The trip participants also expressed disappointment in the decrease in student activism at Harvard today.

“We have to really challenge each other,” Seegars said. “There is inequality that we have to be serious about with ourselves. This is the place to do it.”

Despite the continued poverty and effectual segregation, Marshall L. Ganz ’64-’92, an alumnus who dropped out of Harvard to participate in the civil rights movement as part of the Mississippi Summer Project, said the state has come a long way.

“Every encounter between black and white was a ritual in subordination,” Ganz, who is now a lecturer in public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, said of the 1960s. “That’s gone. Now, of course, the political inequality is a whole lot different than it was.”