Africans Inspired By Civil Rights Tour

There may be much that we as African Americans have
to learn about Africa but when it comes to civil rights the
shoe is on the on the other foot. African exchange students
are touring the country studying the civil rights movement
with hopes of returning to their homelands and putting their
own movement together. Africa may be the cradle of mankind
but when it comes to civil rights the struggle is just starting.


College student Tabitha Njeri Nyoro wants more political and social empowerment and access to education for women in her native Kenya.

Her dreams of social justice were just that until this week's bus tour of historic civil rights movement sites lit a fire in her heart to do more than just talk about it.

"I should be the change I want to see in the world," Nyoro, who studies education at Catholic University of Eastern Africa, said Tuesday at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s tomb. "People like Martin Luther King didn't sit back and wait for the change to come."
There is probably much for us to learn about our
african roots but when it comes to civil rights the
shoe is on the other foot. African exchange students
are studying the civil rights movement with hopes
of taking what they've learned back to their home-
lands. Africa may be the cradle of mankind but it
has a long way to go in its civil rights struggle.


Nyoro, 23, is one of 19 African exchange students from Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa traveling from Fayetteville, Ark., to Washington studying the civil rights movement, American social justice, leadership and community development.

The seven-day tour is scheduled to wrap up in Washington on Thursday after a stop at the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, N.C., to learn more about the student sit-in movement.
They are following routes taken by the Freedom Riders, student activists who traveled South in the early 1960s to challenge segregation.

The group visited Atlanta's King Center after stops at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham earlier Tuesday. Previous stops included the National Civil Rights Museum and Davies Manor Plantation in Memphis and Central High School in Little Rock.
The Memphis museum is home to the Lorraine Motel where King was assassinated in 1968 and Central High was the site 50 years ago of a historic school integration battle.

The tour is part of an international exchange program sponsored by the U.S. State Department and the Academy of Educational Development.
Spring International Language Center at the University of Arkansas coordinated the tour designed to give student leaders participating in the exchange program at the school's Fayetteville campus a sense of place in their study of the movement and the South.

"Sometimes the significance of events becomes much clearer when you are in the physical space where it happened," said Alannah Massey, a program assistant. Within just a few days, we would have visited Martin Luther King's birth and death places. The significance certainly hasn't been lost on anyone."
Their stop Tuesday at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the site of a 1963 racially motivated bombing that killed four young girls, left Nigerian Fatima Mohammed, 24, traumatized.





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