We sat down with Dr. Jori Sechrist ’01, professor of sociology, and Dr. Robert Wallace, professor of sociology and criminology, who recently led McMurry students on a Civil Rights Tour through the American South.
The tour served as the culmination of a semester-long course, where students read, discussed, and reflected on the defining moments and figures of the Civil Rights Movement. From walking the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to standing inside the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, the tour experience offered students an immersion in history that challenged them emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. In this conversation, Dr. Sechrist and Dr. Wallace share what it’s like to walk students through some of the most pivotal—and painful—chapters of our nation’s history, explore why domestic travel holds as much power as study abroad, and share how the impact of the trip lingers long after the bus ride home.
What inspired you to take students on a Civil Rights Tour? How many have you led so far, and how many students have had the chance to join you on these journeys?
Dr. Sechrist: Dr. Wallace proposed this course and travel experience when I arrived at McMurry in 2014. I was interested in co-teaching the course with him to give students more experiential learning opportunities.
Dr. Wallace: Interestingly enough, part of my inspiration came from McMurry’s experimentation with teaching the core courses of Ethics, Persons and Communities, and Human Knowledge. Eventually, these general education requirements were reduced to one course referred to as Leadership, Excellence, and Virtue (LEV). Within LEV, I started offering a course, “Collective Conscience,” which led me to focus on the Civil Rights Movement through the activist John Lewis. Lewis was an interesting choice because he was a college student during the Civil Rights Movement. For instance, in 1960 he participated in the Nashville sit-ins, in 1961 he was an original Freedom Rider, in 1963 he was elected to chair the Student for Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the college student speaker at the March on Washington, and in 1965 he led the first march over Selma’s Edmund Pettis Bridge.
With this teaching framework in mind, moving from the classroom to a travel course visiting various civil rights sites was just a necessary step.
Dr. Sechrist: The more I prepared for our first trip, the more I learned about the grievances that inspired the actions that built the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Each historical equity issue from this movement – voter suppression and voting rights, segregation in education, police brutality – continues to be an issue we battle in the U.S. today. Taking students to the sites of some of the most difficult and hopeful moments of the Civil Rights Movement brings our country’s history closer to the students. We concluded our fourth tour in May.
Dr. Wallace: We first did a civil rights tour 2015 with five students. Our second trip was in 2017 with nine students. A third trip occurred in 2019 with nine students. Our recent 2025 trip had eight students.
Which sites and experiences were included in this year’s tour itinerary? What makes these particular places so crucial for students to visit? How did this tour differ from past tours?
Dr. Wallace: We intended to anchor things in Montgomery, AL. To get there was a 14-hour drive, so Jackson, MS, was the ideal first stop. Jackson has an amazing civil rights museum.
Dr. Sechrist: Yes, we started at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, which gives an excellent overview of the particularly salient issues in Mississippi with a bit of context from the eras of slavery and southern reconstruction. This year, we happened to be in the museum at the same time as a visit from Mississippi’s youngest freedom rider, Hezekiah Watkins, who was there for a brief talk. Some of our students were able to talk with him afterward.
On our next tour day, we visited Selma, AL, where we walked from the Brown Chapel AME church on the same route John Lewis and other Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members (SNCC) took to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday. This is always a moving walk through historic Selma, and this year, we met a man at the entrance to the bridge whose uncle was on that march in 1965.
Dr. Wallace: Once we got to Montgomery, suddenly we were experiencing the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, led by Martin Luther King. We visited the Rosa Parks Museum and King’s first pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist and the church’s parsonage. The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has created two remarkable Montgomery museums. One, referred to as the Legacy Museum, gives a comprehensive historical overview of slavery, racial violence, segregation, and mass incarceration. The other museum, which is located in an outdoor 6-acre site, focuses on racial lynchings. By the way, from 1877 to 1950, there were more than 4,400 Black individuals lynched. EJI has engraved their names on more than 800 steel monuments for each county where a lynching took place.
Dr. Sechrist: This year, we added a stop at the Frank M. Johnson Federal Courthouse, where we visited “America’s Courtroom,” where many of the legal cases during the 1960s were decided by the presiding judge Frank M. Johnson. While there, the students got to speak with a panel that included a federal magistrate judge, a federal defender, and a judicial legal clerk who worked at the courthouse. This was a great new experience for the students on our tour, who were all interested in some aspect of law or law enforcement for their careers.
Dr. Wallace: Judge Johnson was involved in pivotal civil rights decisions such as ending the segregation of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956, in 1961 he ended segregation of interstate bus travel, and in 1965 he authorized the Selma to Montgomery march. Martin Luther King is quoted as saying that Judge Johnson was “The man that I know in the United States who gives true meaning to the word justice.”
Dr. Sechrist: From Montgomery, we went to Birmingham, AL, where we visited the 16th Street Baptist Church, where four girls died in a bombing in 1963, Kelly Ingram Park, and the Civil Rights Institute. After Birmingham, we went to Memphis, TN, to go through the National Civil Rights Museum. This museum is in the historic Loraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. We ended the Little Rock, AR, trip by visiting Little Rock Central High School. Many museums we visit include similar information, but each city has its history and emphasizes different aspects of the movement that most impacted the communities we visit.
Were there moments on this trip that stood out for you, either emotionally or from a teaching perspective?
Dr. Wallace: In 2019, I was involved with a racial reconciliation ceremony of a 1922 Abilene lynching victim, Mr. Grover Everett. We had collected soil on the site of his murder. During the community ceremony, various individuals (including Mr. Everett’s descendants) deposited soil in a jar provided by the Equal Justice Initiative. Regarding the 2019 civil rights tour, we took the jar of soil to EJI. This year, when we toured EJI’s Legacy Museum, it was pretty emotional for me to stand in front of the jar of soil for Mr. Everett.
Dr. Sechrist: There are always parts of the trip that are emotional. Seeing the representation of lynching victims at the Memorial for Peace and Justice is one that stands out.
How did the students respond to the places you visited and the stories they encountered? Were there any significant conversations or reactions?
Dr. Sechrist: From a teaching perspective, several times on this trip stood out to me. The first was when our students learned more about Emmett Till’s murder at a museum. They continued to think about it after we left, researched it more, and found a movie online. By the end of the trip, all the students had watched Till. Most students thought they already knew a lot about the Civil Rights Movement, but going to each site on the tour, I heard at least one student say, “They never taught us that in school. Why didn’t they teach us that?”
How did you see students connecting throughout the tour? Did the shared experience bring them closer in ways that surprised you?
Dr. Wallace: The tour experience of traveling in a van together to visit civil rights sites is an amazing sociological experience. While we have been in a seminar/classroom setting and have some “book” knowledge and understanding of the Civil Rights Movement’s chronology, things click until we get on the road. This “clicking” continues and deepens the whole week, so by the time we return to Abilene, we have all bonded as friends and become more informed American citizens.
What kind of community forms among students during a trip like this? Do you notice changes in how they engage with one another or you as faculty?
Dr. Wallace: Yes, the students start with their own “factions,” but we are one by the end of the journey. As a faculty member, doing the civil rights tours allows me to bond with the students, unlike any classroom experience.
Dr. Sechrist: One of my favorite things about taking students on this trip is how they come out of their classroom shells and interact more with Dr. Wallace and me as “regular people.” We get to talk about meaningful things—not to remember them for a test, but because they are making a difference in how they are thinking and feeling.
McMurry offers several study abroad opportunities. Why is a domestic trip like this just as important?
Dr. Wallace: I understand the importance of international travel, but to truly understand your own country, you must examine our past, the pleasant and the not-so-pleasant. Traveling to various civil rights sites exposes us to our past and prepares us to move into the future. It is telling that the mission statement from the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis is “History moves us forward.”
Dr. Sechrist: I agree with Dr. Wallace. Sociology is all about taking what we think we know and digging deeper, applying a critical eye to what we see all the time. As I said before, most students thought they knew what they needed to know about the history of the Civil Rights Movement, but this trip let them dig deeper and connect with the stories that are less likely to be told in other educational settings. International travel introduces students to different cultures, but domestic travel allows students to see the complexities of their own country’s history, how that informs their present, and how it can help them shape their future.
What do you hope students took from this academic and personal experience?
Dr. Wallace: The answer to this question is connected to the previous answer. The students on the civil rights tour have a deeper academic experience; they are better positioned to know the American story.
Dr. Sechrist: I also hope the students are inspired by the efforts of the people they learned about. In our classes, we talk a lot about how social structures constrain our behaviors as individuals, and students sometimes think that what they do doesn’t matter because the system is stacked against them. But I hope that our students were inspired by all of the individuals’ stories we heard on the trip to know that they can be just as instrumental in social change as the people we learned about.
What continues to motivate you to lead this tour? Why did you feel it was important for students to experience this?
Dr. Wallace: Dr. Sechrist and I have always been inspired by the Chinese proverb, “Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I’ll understand.” This year, I found the following quote from Taylor Branch to be quite meaningful: “Almost as color defines vision itself, race shapes the cultural eye—what we do and do not notice, the reach of empathy and the alignment of response.” Traveling to various civil rights sites refocuses our cultural eye, so much so that what we notice, who we empathize with, and how we respond are all pronounced.