Imagine

Like many of his friends, Everett Daily ‘10 used to call his buddies “niggas” all the time. No more. Not after last summer when he and a group of fellow Denison students learned what it meant to be treated like slaves. It doesn’t matter that the experience only lasted 45 minutes as part of a reenactment at the Civil War and Slavery Museum in Alabama. That was all it took to change the way Daily thought about the history of the word “nigger” and the power of language.

The museum was just one stop on a 10-day trip through the South as part of an educational program called “The Civil Rights Movement: History and Consequences,” offered by the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs. Yet, for all the activists they met, museums they visited, movies they watched, and books they read, it was those 45 minutes that changed these students the most. They shared their experience with Denison Magazine, in an effort to bring those lessons home.(warning: the following transcript contains violent scenes and offensive language.)

PART I: The Reenactment

Everett: We didn’t know it was going to happen. We thought we were just going to see a museum. So we got off the bus, and there were two black women there, calling us niggers, telling us to get on the wall. So we’re looking at each other. Some of us started laughing.

Ashlene: We were like, “Who are they talking to?”

Everett: We’re looking around, and we’re like, no they aren’t talking to us. And they were saying, “Get on the wall, nigger.” I didn’t know what was going on, and I didn’t think it was right. And I was standing there, and she kept saying, “Get on the wall, nigger.” She was calling me nigger.

Jesus: They made us walk with a bend in our knees and shuffle, and we weren’t allowed to look them in the eye.

Everett: They separated the men from the women. And then they put us in a little room. It was dark. They started making all kinds of noises like they were beating people. And they were screaming.

Ashlene: When she locked us in that little room, I noticed that two girls in our group were missing. The girl standing next to me said, “Where are Melissa and Wendy?” She whispered it to me. As soon as she said it, the door slammed, and a lady walked up behind her, and said, “If you say one more thing, I’m gonna cut your tongue out.”

Melissa: They took us through a different door, and I thought, I don’t have to go through this thing. I got out of it. But instead, she told us that they were taking the rest of the group to a small dark room and that we would have to scream whenever she screamed. We would have to call out people’s names. We were supposed to represent the people that the slaves had left behind, or the people who had died. The room we were in had KKK signs. There was fake blood all over the place, a black dummy that had been hanged. We were just sitting there for five minutes, just looking at all these things. Then we had to scream, to scare everybody else.

O’Shane: To make it easy for us to understand, the actors narrated everything that was taking place, saying, “Imagine being stripped away from your family. Imagine being captive on a ship you don’t know. Imagine being taken across the Atlantic.”

Ashlene: The dark room was supposed to represent slaves being held captive, still in Africa, before they were loaded on a ship. People died in those rooms. There were so many people in there, they suffocated.

Later, we were moved onto a boat simulation. We had to pack in really, really close–Pack it in! Pack it in!–and put our heads to our knees and fold up. They would rock the boat and you could hear the ocean. And they would narrate: “Imagine being in this place, sitting in human waste. The person chained next to you is dead and rotting. You don’t know where your family is.”

Once we got off the “boat,” we were taken to the line. Everyone was all standing together, and she asked us to pick people to sacrifice, “because we have too many niggers, we just have too many,” she said.

At one point, she took someone away from the group, down the hall. And you could hear screaming and banging on the door. And you thought: What is she doing to him? And she’d come back and say, “I cut his feet off.” Or, “They couldn’t choose, so we cut him in half.”

Chris: From there, she split us up again. She said, “I’m going to help you to freedom. Follow me, be quiet,” she said. “When you hear three knocks, run out and just keep running to freedom.”

Daphne: We ran. The “master” came out and caught us. I don’t know if it was Jesus or Bobby who said, “Just go, just go.” It was hard for me. My friends sent me to freedom, but they were captured. You’re looking back and you can’t take everybody with you, but it’s either you or them, and they’re telling you “go, go, go,” and the master is chaining them and taking them back–and you’re free.

Bobby: The actors started screaming and laughing at us. “These are some stupid niggers, right here. They really thought they were going to get their freedom.”

PART II: Lessons Learned

Ashlene: Even though it was only a reenactment, you could see the tears on people’s faces. Afterwards, we talked about how we felt, and why they did this, and how it relates to today. There was an actress playing the part of a slave woman. She had had 15 babies, and she was on her 16th baby, and the master was coming to take that child away from her. That was the point that I broke down.

I was thinking a lot about family lineage. How this woman lost 16 kids, and she’s not going to know if they grew up, if they became free, whether or not they had families of their own. Her entire family line is just cut right there.

Everett: What struck me about the reenactment was that when she called us niggers, I felt like a nigger. I had been fooled into thinking this word was something that it was not. I used the word all the time before I went on this trip. All the time. When she was calling us niggers, it just sounded so malicious. It actually hurt a little bit. I felt disrespected, and usually I wouldn’t. When I’m with my guys it doesn’t sound that way. In the reenactment, she said, “Niggers can’t learn nothing. You got to train them, and we’re going to train you so well that 400 years from now you’ll still be calling yourselves niggers and bitches and answering to it.” That’s true.

I told myself I was going to stop using the word, which I have. When I got back from the trip, I worked at summer camp and oversaw the youth interns and monitored the kids who were part of the camp. One of the interns always used the word, and he even called the kids niggers. So I told him, you can’t use profanity and “nigger” is included in that, and he didn’t understand why. So I had to explain to him where the word comes from and why we shouldn’t use it. He didn’t really agree. He heard me, but it wasn’t going to change his thinking. I feel like he’s aware now. At least he was thinking about it when I was present. It would have been nice if it would have changed his thinking, but it was just my job to give the knowledge to him.

Education is the only way to fix the problem. I’m hearing kids in my classes saying we have equal education everywhere and that there’s no more racism now that Obama’s president.

Chris: We learned that this was all a plan. This was a strategy that slave traders created. The word “nigger” was created for this purpose, and it was supposed to work for 300, 400, 500 years, to corrupt an entire community. This wasn’t just a bad word they used back then, this was a plan to make you say things and treat each other a certain way. It’s used to divide. It’s used maliciously. That’s how it was used and how it always will be. You can’t change the meaning of it.

Bobby: It’s difficult. We can’t just go home to our own neighborhoods and communities and try to make change. If we go home and try to change people, they’re gonna feel like we went to college, went on this trip, and then came back acting like we’re better than them. We’ll have a degree. We’ll have something they don’t have. I’ve tried talking to people about the situation and about black history, and I’ve found that people don’t want to hear about it. They don’t want to learn about it because there is so much that comes with it, and it uses so much energy, and it’s facing the truth, and they don’t want to deal with that. That’s why I struggle with how to bring change. I have all this information to give out, but the more I talk about it, the more crazy I seem to my friends back home, and the more people are going to distance themselves from me.

Jesus: I feel the same way. I’m from Chicago. When I finished the trip and went home, I was feeling really positive about being able to make change in my community, but when I got there it felt pretty impossible, because people didn’t want to hear it.

I have an uncle who lives in Los Angeles. He came to visit, and I tried talking to him, because in L.A., there’s a lot of hatred between Latinos and blacks. I told him what I went through on this trip and how I want to get rid of that anger. I wanted to try to improve things, but after I talked to him, I felt like it was impossible, because it’s been so long and it’s gotten so out of control that I started to doubt that change is possible.

Daphne: I’ve learned that certain students are receptive to the knowledge that I have to share, but the biggest shocker–what surprised me the most–was that the African American students I talked to at Denison weren’t interested in it. They said, “If I wanted to learn about that, I could have gone to a black studies class.” They’d say: “I don’t care, or I’m not a history major, or I’m not a black studies major, or I’m studying science; why is that important?” It’s nice for everyone else to know, but if African Americans don’t know their own history, then where do you start? That’s the problem I had at home, too. My older relatives say, “We lived through it, we don’t need to live through it again,” and I can understand why they feel that way, but at least share that information with the younger generations, so they can understand it too.

O’Shane: At Denison, it seems like everybody is content. The Civil Rights Movement, or events in the South, seem so far from here, so separate. I think people are reactive now, not proactive. They don’t want to make change because it doesn’t relate directly to their lives, and if they’re going along fine, then what’s the point? Everyone’s content, and they only react once they get offended.

Prior to this trip, when white people involved themselves in black peoples’ issues, I always felt like it wasn’t genuine, that it tainted the movement somehow. It felt like they were saying, “Oh, I feel sorry for them. Let me help,” instead of, “That’s wrong, and I’m going to fight with them until it gets fixed.” But when we went on the trip, I realized that there were white people on the Freedom Rides and in the marches, and not only were they involved, but they died for it.

Everett: If we all–even me, especially me–if we stop seeing people as white first or black first or Asian first or Hispanic first and just look at people as human beings, we’ll have a lot more empathy for each other.

Bobby: I think that education is the only way that you can fix the problem. I’m hearing kids in my classes say we have equal education everywhere and that there’s no more racism now that Obama’s president. In a way, you can’t blame them because they don’t know. There are white kids here that have never spoken to a black person before Denison, so all they know about black people is whatever they see on the news and in the media. But if everybody was to be educated about the truth, then I think that’s where you would start getting change. Education–not just through reading, but also through experience. I could read five books about the Freedom Riders, and I will never feel the way I felt when activists were telling me–throughout the trip–about their own personal experiences.

Ashlene: At one point during our trip, for example, we spent one night in Tunica, Mississippi. We were in the lobby of a casino and these older people–

Everett: –got up and walked away.

Ashlene: Yeah. I thought I was the only one who saw it. There was a group of us. We were laughing and joking and having a good time. I was watching these people because they were staring at us. We were there three minutes at the most, and they got up and moved to another part of the lobby. Literally moved to another part of the lobby.

Bobby: Racism still exists, it’s just hidden in code words, like, “Don’t change the way of life. This is how it is.”

Chris: At one point on the 10-day tour, our tour guides said, “We can’t take you down this street. If you go down there and ask questions, people will come out with bats, pipes, whatever, to scare you away.” Those kinds of people are not going to change. They’re going to pass away, and, hopefully, that racism is going to pass away with them.

David: Later, we were on the bus visiting the site where three civil rights workers were killed in the street. Some of us didn’t want to be there. One of the people who lived in the neighborhood told us that KKK members lived down the road. We were in the middle of the woods and there was no way to get out. That was really uncomfortable.

A lot of us are from the North, and there are parts of the South that are just different worlds to us. It was shocking and overwhelming. Even though we say, “We’re reminded that we’re black everyday,” in some parts of the South, there’s a lot more blatant racism.

Everett: After this trip, I know myself. I know what I’m capable of, and I know I’m capable of it because I’m black. That’s not to say I didn’t have value or that I didn’t value what it meant to be black before, but now I know I’m able to strive through something or succeed because of my history, because of what happened to my ancestors. It’s in me to survive. I thought it was just my personality, but no, it’s a whole race of black people.

If we don’t know our history, it’s easy for someone to tell us something, and we just believe it. “College ain’t for everybody,” someone might say. No. If you want college to be for you, then it’s for you. It might be harder because I don’t have the same training or education as a white person standing next to me. But that doesn’t mean that this person is any better than I am. If anything, because I’m black, I feel like I am more suited to go survive and be somebody.

Bobby: The most I got out of the trip is to value my life and my education–I really do know the importance of knowledge. If you don’t know the truth, you don’t know your own history. If you don’t know your own history, you could easily be guided in the wrong direction. The point is to know where you come from. Know where you stand now. Know where you’re going.