On Saturday, July 24, Penny Wells is taking a group of eighteen on a journey to the Civil rights sites in the South.

They will be leaving at 3:30 am from the Uptown Branch of Premier Bank to the Pittsburg Airport. From there, they will fly to Birmingham. Once they land, the group will board a bus and drive to Montogermy to start their journey.

The first stop will be at the Legacy Museum, which is sometimes referred to as the Lynching Museum.

In 2019 Students collected a jar of dirt from a site of a lynching of William Taylor over 100 years ago in Sandusky, Ohio. The 2021 group will be looking for that jar while at the museum.

They will sit on the capitol steps to read and reflect on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech delivered at the end of the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965.

They will touch the names of individuals on the Civil Rights Memorial who were killed due to racial hatred. They will add their names to the Wall of Tolerance, promising to work for social justice.

They will walk across the Edmond Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama just as the marchers did on "Bloody Sunday", when state troops attacked them. They will view the Civil Rights mural commissioned by Mahoning Valley Sojourn students and erected with money raised in Youngstown, Ohio in 2020.

In Birmingham, they will visit the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church where the "Children's March" began and then walk across the street to the Kelly Ingram Park, where the children were arrested, attacked by police dogs and sprayed with powerful fire hoses. Janice Wesley Kelsey, who participated in the Children's March, and spent several days in jail, will speak to the group about her experiences. They will hear the lesson of the "Four Little Girls" who died when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed by the Klan and meet the family of Lisa McNair, one of the girls who was murdered. They will also meet Sarah Collins Rudolph, who survived the bombing but lost most of her sight in the blast.

In Mississippi, they will sit in the driveway where Medgar Evers was shot and died. They will meet investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell, who is responsible for helping to bring to justice the murders of Medgar Evers and several other Civil Rights murders.

In Little Rock, Arkansas, the students will listen to Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, describe her horrific experiences when she went to Central High School on the first day of integration in 1957. The journey ends in Memphis, Tennessee, at the Lorraine Hotel, where Dr. King was assassinated.

This is a traveling classroom, which means this is a working journey. Students will all receive an independent history credit.