Reprinted from The Gamecock, Friday, April 15, 2005

One class can make a big difference

By Adam Beam

Leon Litwack spoke at USC on Tuesday, and I surprised myself by being disappointed I couldn't go. He's one of the top civil rights historians in the country, and I've read parts of his book and many of his articles, and that fact surprised me, too.

I think it's hard to learn anything in college. I think we come here just to put off adulthood. Sure, we take classes and learn more about the things we already know, but we rarely have those earth-shattering academic discoveries in college that change your life, like memorizing the multiplication tables.

But then I met Patricia Sullivan. Since most of you don't know her, I'll take the time to introduce her. She's an African-American studies professor at USC. She writes books and presents papers and does other professorly things. But she also teaches the Black Experience in the U.S. class, which is how I met her.

Until I met Patricia Sullivan my idea about the civil rights era went something like this: A long, long, long time ago there was this thing called slavery where white people owned black people and took care of them but didn't pay them. Southerners didn't like the way they were being treated by the government so they decided to leave, and people made a HUGE deal about that so they had this war and they lost. After the war black people were free and had different churches and schools and water fountains until Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came along and changed it. Now everything is fine.

All my South Carolina public education went down the drain with my first reading assignment for Sullivan's class. I read first-person accounts from former slaves being interviewed by college students in the 1930s. Grown men talking like little children because that's how they were brought up to think. I read about a boy who would sometimes sleep in the woods for days because white men on a fishing trip occupied the bridge he had to cross. I saw pictures of burning, naked black men surrounded by white men, women and children dressed in their Sunday best, smiling for the camera. I learned about Emmitt Till, a 14-year-old boy who winked at a white woman in a gas station in Mississippi and ended up getting his face smashed in and his body tied to a cotton fan and thrown into the river. They caught the guys who did it, but an all-white jury acquitted them. I read about JA Delaine and Levi Pearson, men who watched their kids walk to school down dirt roads, being passed by white school children in yellow school busses. So they got a bus and asked the school board for money to put gas in it and were chased out of town.

In Sullivan's class I sat around a conference table with about 15 other students. We would meet once a week and for two and a half hours we would debate the civil rights era and how it changed America. We had serious discussions about race and, I won't lie to you, it wasn't always pleasant. We argued, we got emotional, we learned. I can honestly say it's the only class that's changed me.
I didn't know it changed me until this past summer while I was working for The Item newspaper in Sumter. It was my first week there, and I was working the weekend shift. I had to drive to Summerton and cover a parade celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that ended school segregation. Viola Pearson, Levi Person's widow, was the grand marshal. I got to talk to her, and I felt like I was interviewing Michael Jordan.

As the parade started down the street, I walked alongside the float carrying Mrs. Pearson, taking notes for my article. But the real story was on the streets. I stopped under the awning of a hardware store and watched the parade with a black woman who never thought she would see a day like this. I asked her a dumb "how do you feel" question and she answered me in tears. After that, I just shut up and tried to soak it all in. I felt like I was observing history.

I learned all of this because Sullivan's class was the only class available for me to take the first semester of my junior year. While the first civil rights class I took was for convenience, the next two that I took were on purpose. Who says you can't learn anything in college?