The criminal-justice program coordinator at the Kansas City, Mo., institution wanted her students to see what she had witnessed the previous summer while visiting her daughter. The two had toured the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., the site of a horrific terrorist act committed at the height of the civil-rights movement. Four young girls were murdered when the church was bombed in 1963.
“When I first saw the church, I was in awe, but I was conflicted,” she says. “I was in awe of the contributions that African Americans and others had made to this important part of history, but I was sad that we lived in a country where we legalized separation and tolerated violence.”
She went back to MCC, the oldest public college in Kansas City, and the oldest community college in Missouri, determined to convince the institution’s leaders and the Black community in the city that students needed to see the actual locations where the fight for equal rights for Black Americans was waged. It was one thing to read about the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where famed civil-rights activist John Lewis and other peaceful demonstrators were brutally beaten by state troopers, or learn about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or the integration of schools in Little Rock, Ark. It would be much more powerful for students to see these places.
Curls began to look for financial support. Leaders at the community college liked the idea, but the budget was already accounted for by the time she arrived back on campus in the fall. Curls would need to find the funding for that first trip on her own. She turned to Black church leaders in Kansas City to help underwrite a field trip that would double as a class.
Within months, leaders at Metropolitan Baptist Church in Kansas City and Metropolitan Community College officials signed off on what would become “History 199B: Special Topics in History.” That’s the official title of the class, but to those in MCCs orbit, it’s called “the Pilgrimage.”
Each year in April, close to two dozen MCC students, faculty members, local church leaders, and professionals from Kansas City take a four-day bus tour of civil-rights museums and historical sites. The trip provides experiential education for the attendees, immersing them in the history of the civil-rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s.
During the past 22 years, the Pilgrimage has brought students to the places where the fight for racial justice has been waged: Memphis, Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma, Memphis, Atlanta, and even places outside of the South, like Underground Railroad stops in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
This video is available in Spanish. Use the closed-captions settings in the control bar to translate.
After that first year, in 2002, MCC has picked up most of the cost. The two-credit class costs students $695 to enroll, more than double the $242 it cost to take a typical two-credit class at the college. However, a handful of students can receive assistance in the form of scholarships provided through foundational support. In the last 22 years, more than 250 students have taken the trip.
“It is like an intellectual Freedom Ride,” says Lyle Gibson, who teaches history at MCC and has helped Curls run the trip since 2005.
Curls teaches lessons at each site in a way one might expect from the criminal-justice professor. She focuses on the laws that made the discrimination, violence, and segregation possible. These are historical sites, but they are also something more sinister.
“These sites are crime scenes. The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was the scene of a bombing. Jackson [Mississippi] was where Medgar Evers was killed. When you go to Memphis, you see where King was killed,” Curls says. By visiting these places, “you are going to the scene of a killing, police brutality, or places where laws were created to support these behaviors that are criminal,” she says. “We had policy and laws that created practices that in turn created a crime scene.”
When Gibson joined the trip in 2005, he brought another element to the Pilgrimage — a deep understanding of history.
“I saw a real need to bring in the African American-history aspect to the trip,” Curls says. Lyle, she adds, “offers a historical aspect and shows the intersection between the history of racism and how and why the legal apparatus was constructed.”
It isn’t enough, according to Curls, to examine the apparatus of Jim Crow. Students need to understand why the white majority created this system, and what emotions and motivations drove them to create separate and unequal societies and then use violence to maintain that system.
“Once you put it into context, it doesn’t negate what happened, but it helps explain why people committed these acts,” she says.
Gibson says of his students, “We have a responsibility to teach them how this construct of racial segregation was put together, and why this construct was put together.”
The work of Curls and Gibson hasn’t gone unnoticed. In 2021, Gibson was recognized by the American Association of Community Colleges with a Dale P. Parnell Distinguished Faculty award in 2021. The honor is bestowed on faculty members whose efforts to educate students go beyond the classroom. The following year, Curls received the same award for organizing the Pilgrimage.
“The best thing you can have is a colleague who is just as committed and learned and wants to give to students all that he wants to give,” Curls says of her colleague Gibson.
These two Black academics’ commitment to teaching the history of civil rights was forged by their personal histories.
Curls’s father helped found Freedom, Inc., a Black-led political club that successfully persuaded Kansas City to expand the number of city-council seats, a move credited with opening up access to political power to Black residents. Politics became sort of a family business. Her brother served in the Missouri House of Representatives and state Senate. Her niece, Monica Curls, serves on the Kansas City Public Schools board, and her sister-in-law, Melba Curls, is a former Kansas City City Council member.
Gibson’s journey toward teaching history took a more circuitous route. His love for the subject was born more than 6,000 miles away from MCC, while he was serving in the U.S. Air Force and stationed in Greece.
“Every day you wake up and see ruins,” he recalls. “It made me want to learn more about Greek history, European history, African history, and my own history.”
This interest drove him back to college after his tenure in the military. He studied at Kansas City Kansas Community College, earned a B.A. in history from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, and an M.A. in history from the University of Missouri at Kansas City. All the while, questions about his family’s journey lingered. “I was sitting down with my mom and had this “Roots” moment,” Gibson said, referring to the 1970s television miniseries that traces the origin of author Alex Haley’s maternal heritage. “I wanted to know more about my own family, and by extension, the history of the region.”
Gibson’s family on both his mother’s side and his father’s traces back to Arkansas. He began studying the area, and decided to focus on a single family — his own. That research turned into a 2003 book: Black Tie, White Tie: Chronicle of an American Family 1739-1940.
He has since also turned to documentary filmmaking, with a series of films that explore race.
This past spring, the Pilgrimage brought Gibson back to his family’s roots in Arkansas. He, Curls, and more than a dozen students traveled to Little Rock Central High School, where in 1957, nine Black students had to be escorted past an angry white mob by the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army to integrate what had been an all-white school. When Gibson and his students gazed at the massive, Neo-Gothic Revival and Art Deco high school, they felt the weight of the struggle that had taken place there almost 67 years earlier.
“It’s one thing when you read about places like Little Rock, and it’s another thing to see where these students once stood under threat of violence just to attend school,” Gibson says.
This year’s trip also included a visit to the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit organization started by the well-known social-justice advocate and public-interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson, and to the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968.
This video is available in Spanish. Use the closed-captions settings in the control bar to translate.
Next April, Curls and Gibson will take students to the Carolinas to learn about the Woolworth lunch-counter sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C.; the Wilmington coup of 1898, where a white supremacist mob overthrew the integrated, elected local government and murdered Black residents; and to Charleston, S.C., home to both the International African American Museum and Emanuel AME Church, where a white supremacist killed nine parishioners.
The Pilgrimage leaves a lasting, deep impression on the participants.
“I have seen so many emotions on the faces of the students,” Curls says. “Some cry. Others ask, ‘How can one group of people do this to another group of people?’”
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