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As an assistant basketball coach at Oak Ridge (Tenn.) High School in 1965, IUSB's Les Lamon (far left) saw his team through the first desegregated state tournament in Tennessee history. In this file photo, Lamon is pictured with Oak Ridge team captain Willie Golden (second from left) and other team members in the chambers of Gov. Frank Clement (seated). |
Most of the participants in Indiana University South Bend's Freedom Summer
2000, a journey to America's South, weren't even alive four decades ago
when students David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeill and Ezell
Blair Jr. of North Carolina's A&T State University sat down at a
Woolworth's lunch counter to protest racial segregation. The "Greensboro Four," as those students will always be called, launched a wave of lunch counter sit-ins across the country. Their simple act helped propel the mid-20th century American civil rights movement and illustrated to a generation of college and university students their own powers to affect change through direct action protest. Sixteen graduate and undergraduate students from IUSB, IUPUI and IU Bloomington-many of whom may be familiar with the movement only through chapters in textbooks that chronicle the events of the 1960s-departed the Hoosier state May 14 for a two-week study tour of 10 southern cities that played key roles in the turbulence of the movement. The group will return this weekend. Because of time constraints, the tour didn't include Greensboro, N.C., but the IU students visited historic sit-in locations in downtown Nashville, Tenn. Freedom Summer participants also attended Sunday services at Martin
Luther King Jr.'s Dexter Ave. Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala.; traveled
through the Mississippi Delta; visited the Lorraine Motel in Memphis,
Tenn., the site where King was assassinated in 1968; and retraced on foot
the final-mile route of the famous Selma to Montgomery protest march. |
 Lamon  Harmon |
Journaling was a very important component of the experience, said Les Lamon, an IUSB history professor who planned the journey and accompanied the students. Also along on the first leg of the trip was South Bend Tribune managing editor Tim Harmon, who filed stories on the students' experiences. (See Webmastery on page 12 to access the Tribune stories on line.)Lamon, whose research has focused on the history of African Americans and race relations in the South, also brought a personal history to the experience. He was a first-year history teacher in 1965 at Oak Ridge (Tenn.) High, a part of the first public school system in the South to desegregate following the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka decision ruling segregated education unconstitutional. In 1965, Lamon was also an assistant basketball coach for a team that played in Tennessee's first desegregated state tournament. That experience had meant a basketball game at Clinton High School, which had been desegregated by eight students and then destroyed in 1958 in a fire-bombing that was racially inspired. "When we walked into the gym at the new Clinton High School that December night," Lamon wrote in the winter issue of IUSB's Vision, "I became a part of the civil rights 'movement' whether or not I knew it or intended for it to happen. The noise and abuse poured down on us. Racial epithets were plentiful, and I was spit on by one of the fans. "My experiences as a high school teacher and coach didn't make me what I would term a civil rights activist, but it jarred me to the point that my antennas never stopped vibrating on this issue."
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