Why we need to go to Northern Ireland

A sign on the street in Birmingham, Alabama

One piece of feedback on the first draft of our grant proposal to go to Northern Ireland was that we could learn what we needed from books and videos and the internet. Why did we need to actually go there?

That was a question I had not previously considered. It seemed obvious to me that one needs to walk the streets of a place in order to teach its history. But I hadn't really put my finger on why that was. After a few years teaching the U.S. Civil Rights Era, I had a very meaningful visit to Alabama. After a few years teaching the Holocaust, I had a powerful trip to Poland. I realized that, if I could say what was important to me about those earlier historically-steeped journeys, this would be a way to understand my need to be in a place that I teach, and a way to explain it to others.

So here are a few things I have learned by actually standing in the places where history happened. 

Montgomery, Alabama: Before I went, I became very interested in Vernon Johns--the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church immediately before King was there--who is profiled in the first chapter of Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters: America in the King Years. I was using Johns with my "social action project" students as an example of a social activist who used sarcasm and verbal confrontation as a means to speak truth to power. Johns was known for sermons with titles such as "segregation in the afterlife." If I had never gone to Dexter Avenue, I might never have realized that the Alabama statehouse stands at the end of the same street. So the very politicians who were maintaining Alabama's Jim Crow policies had to pass Johns' church on their way to work, and would have seen the sign announcing those sermons every working day.

Selma, Alabama: To understand Selma's place in the Civil Rights movement--beyond just the famous marches--it helps to stand on the steps of the Brown Chapel AME Church and look out at the large block of housing project buildings that face it. As I stood there with a group of fellow teachers on a Teaching American History grant, the docent from the Voting Rights Museum pointed out to us that the church was the perfect center for civil rights activism because it faced a densely populated living area for Selma's Black population. In this way, the impressive marches that set off from there were able to engage the curiosity and participation of the local residents who saw the excitement and new power taking place right at their doorstep. As in Montgomery, geography and architecture were forces as much as speeches and actions. This is something you can only fully appreciate by being there.

The Rema Cemetery in the Kazimierz neighborhood of Krakow, Poland: The legend goes that the Nazis used the tombstones of this little cemetery for shooting practice until they shot at the grave of the important Rabbi known as the Rema and the bullets bounced back at them. Terrified, they never entered the cemetery grounds again. If you walk through this cemetery today, you can examine many tombstones that are indeed riddled with bullets, as well as completely smashed ones that have since been used to fill in cracks in the brick walls. The Rema's grave remains unscathed.

The Lodz Jewish Cemetery in Poland: Well preserved because it was in the ghetto, I have read that this cemetery is still the largest Jewish one in Europe. The beauty and opulence of the graves serves as a testament to the importance of Jews in the history of Lodz before the Holocaust. Especially striking is the tall monument at the grave of Izrael Poznanski, a 19th century Jewish industrial magnate whose palace--now a museum about the history of Lodz--is also a striking feature of this city, and one that can only be fully appreciated by seeing it with your own eyes, a startling baroque palace three blocks long suddenly appearing in the middle of a city of grey industrial buildings.

I believe there is a certain energy left over in a place, made up of all of the people whose life experiences have sustained it, whether those experiences were full of joy or pain, both of which are present everywhere. 

When we walk along the Derry streets where the incidents we now know as Bloody Sunday took place, guided by the son of the victim Patrick Doherty, I know that we will feel something that no book or film or website can quite give us, and I know that we will carry that back with us, as teachers, to our classrooms and to our students.

My students checking out the monument which marks Poznanski's grave in Lodz, Poland