Correspondent photos / Sean Barron Penny Wells, Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past executive director, conducts a lesson on the Rev. James J. Reeb next to his plaque in Selma, Alabama, earlier this week during the annual Sojourn to the Past civil rights bus trip through parts of the South. Nine students from the Youngstown City Schools are on the journey, along with groups from the San Francisco Bay area.

MONTGOMERY, Ala.

As he walked through the beginning portion of the Legacy Museum on which either side of the path were sculpted heads of black men, women and children protruding from sand that bore the physical and emotional scars of enslavement, Sonny Senvisky was awash in emotions.

“I felt shocked, even though I saw it before. I felt surprise, pain, disappointment and sadness through the whole thing,” Senvisky, a Chaney High School junior, said earlier this week. “Slavery is a depressing part of history, to think about people being damaged and hurt.”

Senvisky is among 13 Youngstown City School District students and adults who have embarked on a weeklong Sojourn to the Past bus journey to key civil rights sites in the South. They joined several other student and adult groups from the San Francisco Bay area and other parts of California for the journey to learn in depth about much of the nation’s civil rights history during and before the Jim Crow era — and how to apply lessons from that often dark period of history to their lives. Sojourn to the Past’s primary goals include instilling in participants greater tolerance for those who are different from them, working to combat racism, sexism and bigotry, developing sharper critical-thinking abilities and applying the value of forgiveness, empathy and compassion to their lives and communities.

Senvisky’s plans after high school have yet to come into sharper focus, though his main interests lie in video production, with a possible ambition of being a film director. Having been part of Sojourn to the Past this year and last also will leave the added bonus of sparking further creative ideas and inspiring him in that process, he added.

For many on the journey, the Legacy Museum represents an emotional pinnacle via using interactive media, first-person accounts and art to tell the story of slavery in America. The dimly lit, chilly and haunting spaces take visitors through this nation’s dark history, room by interactive room, largely by tying together the effects of the transatlantic and domestic slave trades from several centuries ago to societal problems of today, such as mass incarceration and barriers to the voting booth.

More than 12 million Africans were separated from their families in the transatlantic slave trade and of those, an estimated 2 million of them died before reaching their destinations, resulting in the Atlantic Ocean being their watery gravesite.

During the domestic slave trade between 1808 and 1865, more than 430,000 people had been kidnapped and sold by 1860, according to the Legacy Museum.

Perhaps one of the most haunting museum exhibits is a series of shelves on which sit about 800 jars of dirt, each of which was collected at the site where a black person had been lynched. One of the jars contains dirt that Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past students brought a few years ago from Sandusky, where a young man named William Taylor was lynched Sept. 4, 1878.

More than 6,500 documented racial lynchings from white mobs occurred between 1865 and 1950 in the U.S., according to the museum. Many of them were public spectacles, and in some cases, the details of the crimes were printed on postcards that were distributed, collected and sold as souvenirs.

The exhibits also make connections between chattel slavery, built on myths and falsehoods regarding black people, and such attitudes that persist today and fuel many injustices that continue against blacks, including harsher sentences and a higher likelihood of being victims of police killings. For example, the so-called “war on drugs” in the 1990s perpetuated the false narrative that many young blacks were “super predators,” which led to prison overcrowding and a disproportionately high number of black defendants receiving the harshest sentences.

VISIT TO SELMA

Before the California contingent arrived, the local students and adults took a bus to Selma, where Penny Wells, Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past’s executive director, took them to a plaque bearing the name of the Rev. James J. Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister from Roxbury, Massachusetts, who was among the hundreds of people of goodwill from across the nation who had answered Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call in March 1965 to assist with the Selma campaign. After having dined at a black-owned restaurant, Klansmen attacked Reeb and two other Unitarians with him, the Revs. Clark Olsen and Orloff Miller, resulting in Reeb’s death a day later from having been struck in the head with a large club.

The group also visited Brown’s Chapel, a Romanesque-style church built in 1908 that marked where the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery March for voting rights originated. From there, Wells led them to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which they crossed while walking in pairs in a manner reminiscent of the original marchers. The historic 54-mile, five-day march ended near the state capital, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to a jubilant crowd of about 25,000.

En route back to Montgomery, the students and adults stopped at a site along Highway 80 in Lowndes County where an activist named Viola G. Liuzzo was killed after a carload of Klansmen ran her vehicle off the road and shot her to death at age 39.

After having seen footage on TV of Alabama state troopers attacking peaceful marchers on the bridge with barbed clubs, tear gas and on horseback March 7, 1965, a day infamously known as “Bloody Sunday,” Liuzzo, a staunch activist who was studying nursing at Wayne State University, left her Detroit home and five small children in her station wagon. She drove 800 miles to Selma to assist in the campaign, which included registering people at the church, preparing food and transporting marchers back to Selma after the historic event.

While at the chained-in marker bearing Liuzzo’s name at the desolate and isolated spot, the Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past participants learned part of her story and paid their respects before boarding the bus for Montgomery.