Key points:
- United Methodist churches, conferences and universities are promoting advocacy against racism and encouraging reflection on the ongoing struggles for racial justice by sponsoring pilgrimages to civil rights sites.
- The tours are inspired by the denomination’s Dismantling Racism campaign, launched by the United Methodist Council of Bishops in 2020.
- “There’s no way I could explain what I saw,” participant Walter Thomas said. “I’m an old person, and I thought I was pretty smart. But I learned a lot of things through this tour that I did not know….”
United Methodist-sponsored groups are making pilgrimages to iconic sites in America’s civil rights history to learn about the blood-stained roots of the nation’s anti-racism movement.
The tours, a recent trend inspired by the denomination’s 5-year-old Dismantling Racism campaign, are intended to educate participants, promote advocacy against racism, and encourage reflection on the ongoing struggles for racial justice. The United Methodist Council of Bishops launched the churchwide campaign in 2020 to respond to frequent police killings of African Americans, including George Floyd that year, and the Black Lives Matter movement that was spreading across the U.S.
Forty-two members of four annual conferences — Susquehanna, Western Pennsylvania, Upper New York and West Virginia — visited 14 Southern locations together by bus July 12-19, a trek that took them from Virginia to Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee.
They saw themselves as “not sightseers but spiritual pilgrims,” recalled the Rev. Michelle Bodle, visiting “sacred sites of the Civil Rights Movement and hearing firsthand stories from those who lived through it, with each stop deepening the call to continue the work for justice.” Bodle wrote about the experience in “Pilgrimage of Justice: A Journey Through the Civil Rights Movement,” an article for the Susquehanna Conference.
At the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, the group spent time at the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, which remembers enslaved African Americans who helped build the university. In Atlanta, they visited the King Center, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King are buried amid the center’s memorial library, archives and museum. In Albany, Georgia, they learned about the courageous young people of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the music of the Freedom Singers, who inspired marchers in the Civil Rights Movement.
In Alabama, the pilgrims learned the emotional saga of the Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights. And they walked across the famed Edmund Pettus Bridge, where police attacked peaceful marchers March 7, 1965, on what is known as Bloody Sunday. The group concluded that experience by celebrating Holy Communion. They also visited the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, its Legacy Museum and surrounding gardens, all of which share the tragic legacy of slavery, lynching and other violence of the slave trade and Jim Crow era.
The group heard from several speakers, including activist and author Anthony Ray Hinton, who spent 28 years on death row for a wrongful conviction before he was exonerated in 2015 through the Equality Justice Initiative’s legal efforts. And they heard from other presenters at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, where four young girls were murdered in an infamous 1963 bombing.
“Seeing the things that we saw, walking around those spaces where the stories unfolded, talking to some of the people who were involved — it was heartbreaking and grief-filled,” recalled Western Pennsylvania Conference Bishop Sandra Steiner Ball, a tour participant. “The past calls us to question how we truly see and treat people (and) how we continue to need to be transformed today.”
Before the journey, she led a conference-wide book study of “While the World Watched: A Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age During the Civil Rights Movement.”The author, Carolyn Maull McKinstry, who survived the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in which her young friends were killed, also addressed the group.
Tour participants were encouraged to share their experiences once they returned home. The Rev. Kim Foos, pastor of Fells United Methodist Church in Rostraver Township, Pa., is doing that at her church, sharing what she experienced and learned on the Civil Rights Journey over four weeks in October.
In mid-March, Mississippi Conference Bishop Sharma D. Lewis Logan led that conference’s “No Stone Unturned for Justice” five-day civil rights tour, as members visited most of the same museums, memorials, institutes, historic homes and churches as the later Susquehanna Conference-led tour. But their immersive journey began at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, before continuing through Alabama, with stops in Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery, and concluding in Atlanta.
Bishop Lewis Logan called the tour, organized by Educational Opportunities, a time “for us to dig a little deeper as a conference, and maybe in our families, too, to learn what … God is saying to us now in 2025.”
Such tours typically include daily times for reflection with questions, discourse and community-building activities. The Mississippi Conference advocacy task force created a daily devotional and worship guide using Scripture, song, prayer and readings. Members discussed daily what they saw, heard and learned, and what assumptions of theirs were challenged.
While they were encouraged to share with others at home what they witnessed and felt, at least one participant, Walter Thomas, expressed difficulty in that expectation after viewing exhibits and presentations on the horrors of human slavery and the brutality of mob lynchings.
“There’s no way I could explain what I saw,” he said in the post-tour video. “I’m an old person, and I thought I was pretty smart. But I learned a lot of things through this tour that I did not know. … How can I go back and tell somebody what I saw and expect them to understand what I’m saying? They need to see what I saw.”
Bishop Lewis Logan emphasized the importance of people of all races learning and valuing such poignant history that many have forgotten — especially young people.
“We have the End Racism for Good initiative in the Mississippi Conference, and I want to continue to build our relationships,” the bishop said. “So, this was another opportunity for us to travel through history together, to worship, dialogue and heal together, and also to open it up to the youth who came on the tour with their parents.”
The tour’s redemptive theme was drawn from Ezekiel 11:19: “I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them. I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.” It echoed “God’s call for justice, healing and reconciliation in a fractured world; a promise of new life and hope, even in the midst of struggle and pain.”
Other conferences have led civil rights tours in recent years. West Ohio sponsored the “Micah 6:8: Love Your Neighbor Tour” in 2024. The Northern Illinois, Great Plains, North Georgia and Louisiana conferences led tours in 2023. And North Alabama led one in 2022. The Michigan and Mountain Sky conferences led tours in previous years.
About the U.S. Civil Rights Trail
Many civil rights tour groups journey to historic locations on the U.S. Civil Rights Trail, an assortment of mostly Southern churches, courthouses, schools, museums, memorials and other landmarks that remember the roots of racism and honor the activism that challenged it. Since 2018, the trail has documented, preserved and promoted important sites in 15 states, commemorating infamous racial atrocities, famed protest events and integration victories.
Celebrated sites include the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama; Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas; the former Woolworth’s restaurant in Greensboro, North Carolina, where sit-in protests began; and three places significant in the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — in Atlanta, where he was raised; Mobile, Alabama, where he began his civil rights work; and Memphis, Tennessee, where he was assassinated. The Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama, including the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, is an especially popular and inspiring destination.
The U.S. Civil Rights Trail provides ways for church groups, families, educators and others to experience this living heritage firsthand. For details, visit www.civilrightstrail.com.
Districts in several conferences also have led tours. In Western North Carolina, the Blue Ridge District led two civil rights pilgrimages to Alabama for clergy and laity in 2022 and 2023, according to the Rev. Lisa Moore, a member of the conference’s Justice and Reconciliation Team.
“It was a journey of the heart as much as the mind,” Moore said. “The experience of seeing hundreds of jars of sand at the Legacy Museum, which represented ground that African Americans had been unjustly hanged on, will stay with me always. It is a call to action and remembrance — a reminder that my people’s suffering is not distant; it reverberates through generations, shaping identities and communities.”
Many churches across the connection also have led tours, lasting up to six days, some including participants from predominantly Black and white congregations to offer racial diversity in their interactions and insights.
Trinity United Methodist Church in Kansas City, Missouri, plans a Civil Rights Pilgrimage Oct. 19-25. First United Methodist Church of San Diego has led Sankofa Pilgrimages annually to different parts of the country since 2023. Those have included the five-day “Midwest Migration: A Movement Towards Justice” tour inJune, which took pilgrims to St. Louis, Springfield, Illinois, and Chicago. A Sankofa Pilgrimage in 2027 will go to the West African country of Ghana.
And three historically related Washington, D.C., churches — Foundry United Methodist, Asbury United Methodist and John Wesley African Methodist Episcopal — shared a cross-racial tour in June as part of their ongoing efforts to reconnect and reconcile after nearly two centuries of racial separation.
Some churches intentionally include teenagers on their civil rights tours to benefit their education and development. Meanwhile, universities with United Methodist ties are offering the experience to their young adult students.
McMurry University in Abilene, Texas, led a tour through the South in May, visiting important sites in the Civil Rights Movement and museums that tell the stories of key people and events. Students and faculty discussed the value of the tour and later produced a video titled “Why We Walk: Leading Students Through the Civil Rights South.”
In March 2024, the Wesley Foundation of Texas Southern University took 27 pilgrims — mostly students from Texas Southern, Prairie View A&M University and Houston Community College — on a civil rights tour of sites in Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee. Besides the typical civil rights sites, the group visited the Atlanta University Center, including United Methodist-related Gammon Theological Seminary, to learn about civil rights achievements that happened at those historically Black higher learning institutions.
They embarked on the tour after a worship service that featured a foot washing and a sermon about “the importance of receiving the baton as the next generation charged with knowing and sharing the stories and struggles of those who came before them,” recalled foundation director the Rev. Tabitha Mock. She credited foundation board members and supportive pastors with organizing the journey.
“I saw God move on several occasions during this trip,” Mock wrote in an article about the tour. “I felt the trip was causing them to think: ‘How we can continue this progress in peaceful Christian-like ways and not give up on being the change we want to see in the world.’”
More United Methodist-sponsored civil rights history tours may continue to pose that question to pilgrims in the coming years.
The Academy for Spiritual Formation, a spiritual nurture ministry of The Upper Room, based in Nashville, will lead “The Long Road Toward Justice and Beloved Community: A Civil Rights Pilgrimage” Feb. 23-28. Visiting “places that hold sacred stories of Black resilience, survival and tenacious hope,” the tour will also offer times for communal prayer, contemplation and group reflection to provide “a deeper understanding that cannot be found in books and documentaries.” The application deadline is Dec. 5.
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And the Methodist Foundation for Arkansas plans a “Civil Rights Journey for Laity,” scheduled for April 21-25. The foundation will subsidize half of each participant’s cost as part of its commitment to the Arkansas Conference’s Dismantling Racism Initiative.
With the denomination’s ongoing emphasis against racism, civil rights tours will likely continue, with new pilgrims participating for the first time while others return to learn more.
“As future journeys are planned and offered, may all who hear these stories be inspired to take part in the ongoing work of seeking justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God,” Bodle wrote in her Susquehanna Conference article.
She ended with words she found engraved on a memorial at the Charles M. Sherrod Civil Rights Park in Albany, Georgia: “May God grant you the power to continue.”
Coleman is a UM News correspondent and part-time pastor. More information on church civil rights tours can be found in United Methodist Churches Journey in Many Directions to End Racism (United Methodist Insight, July 17).
News media contact: Julie Dwyer, news editor, [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.
