July 16, 2001

Teachers, Students from Alabama, England Meet for Course on the U.S. Civil Rights Movement

Story:

A group of 15 Birmingham schoolteachers, 14 college students and three scholars from Liverpool, England will spend three weeks together in Birmingham July 16 to August 3 learning about the American civil rights movement and its lasting effects on the nation’s culture, its music and its schools.

Scheduled guest speakers will include Autherine Lucy Foster, who, in 1956, became the first black student admitted to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Participants will also meet a panel of local residents who fought in the civil rights movement as teenagers.

WHEN:

Orientation will be held July 16-17.
Classes run through August 3.

WHERE:

University of Alabama at Birmingham
UAB School of Education
901 13th Street South

WHAT:

The program is called “Birmingham’s Civil Rights Movement” and is sponsored by UAB, the Birmingham Public Schools and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. Teachers and students taking part in this accredited summer program will meet civil rights scholars and ordinary people who fought in the movement.

The group will also tour historic sites, including the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery and the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, the site of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march.

WHY:

The course is offered through a partnership between UAB and the University of Liverpool, which has a similar study abroad program called “Liverpool’s Black Roots.” That course examines the port city’s link to the transatlantic slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries and how the past has shaped Liverpool today. Several instructors from UAB and Birmingham Public Schools have participated in the Liverpool program since the partnership began in 1998. This is the Birmingham program’s second year. Last year, 25 educators and students took the course.