Civil Rights Bus Tour Visiting Selma, Lorraine Motel

During Cedarville's Fall Break weekend, October 16-20, a number of students, faculty and staff will travel by bus to some of the major sites of the civil rights movement.

The 15th annual bus tour will travel more than 2,000 miles over five days and visit historical landmarks, including the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, site of the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” voting march, and 16th Avenue Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where four young girls were killed in a 1963 bombing.

The trip includes a stop in Memphis, Tennessee, where the group will visit the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

Students can take this trip for course credit through the department of history and government by completing assigned readings before the tour and attending lectures from trip leaders at each of the locations.

— Matthew Bennett

“The Civil Rights Bus Tour is an important way that we at Cedarville are intentionally making room to take a somber view of our nation’s sinful history of racial brokenness,” said Dr. Matthew Bennett, assistant professor of missions and theology at Cedarville University.

Dr. Anthony Moore, Cedarville University's director of intercultural leadership, will lead the trip, along with Bennett, Dr. Murray Murdoch, senior professor of history, and Dr. John Mark Yeats, church historian and theology professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, are slated to lead the trip.

“The trip pushes us to consider how the Gospel creates an otherwise-uncommon unity and affords us confidence in the present to work toward a reconciliation that Christ’s completed work has already guaranteed,” Bennett said.

Located in southwest Ohio, Cedarville University is an accredited, Christ-centered, Baptist institution with an enrollment of 4,193 undergraduate, graduate and online students in more than 150 areas of study. Founded in 1887, Cedarville is recognized nationally for its authentic Christian community, rigorous academic programs, including its master of ministry program, strong graduation and retention rates, accredited professional and health science offerings and high student engagement ranking. For more information about the University, visit www.cedarville.edu.