Students dive into Edmundite Civil Rights history
by Mark Tarnacki
Staff Writer

Twelve students experienced living history on a study trip to Selma, Alabama, this semester as part of an upper-level seminar called “The Society of Saint Edmund in the Era of Civil Rights” (HI 42), taught by archivist Liz Scott and history professor Susan Ouellette.

Students met people who were involved in events that the class had read about in books and seen in documentaries -- people who had walked and talked with modern American heroes such as Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis. They visited sites “that only a generation ago were battlegrounds in one of the most important struggles in the history of our country,” Scott said.

In Selma, they stayed in the Society’s Ujima House, site of a former Sisters of Saint Joseph convent. “We met with Father Maurice Ouellet and Bishop Moses Anderson, both Edmundites who were deeply involved in the civil rights movement,” Scott said. “We also spent an afternoon with Lawrence Huggins, a parishioner at the Society’s church in Selma and an activist involved in the Teachers March on Selma in 1965.”

The class is unique in its exploration of history through the use of primary source materials located in the Archives and via first-person accounts. With the urging of the Edmundite Superior General Michael Cronogue and an Edmundite Trust Fund Grant, students were able to retrace the steps of veterans of the Civil Rights Movement through their research.

Scott said this is the first time she’s helped teach a class, though she and Ouelette talked about the possibility for several years. Ouellette has taught research courses using primary sources before, but not sources from the college’s archives until now.

“Doing it this year was directly related to the collections we knew we were getting,” Scott said, noting that one reason she was hired years ago was to gather Edmundite materials together.

To further that cause, she recently received a $5,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Angela Irvine, the college’s government grant specialist, helped her apply for it.

“I think a highlight of the class for me has been the discussions about diversity at Saint Michael’s among students that have come up through the project,” Scott said, explaining how students are helping process records by going through boxes of documents to see what’s there, then organizing it. It gives them a chance to read letters and see other records, including photos, that provide a uniquely vivid image of the period.

Most of the students in the class are history or education majors. Their trip was Feb. 14-19. “I think just going to the South is eye-opening to anybody who’s never been, especially Selma,” Scott said, adding that Bishop Anderson’s surprise arrival from Detroit while the class was there “was great for students.”

“Even though he had come to give a retreat, he sat and talked to them for an hour about growing up in Selma being Catholic, his work in civil rights with Saint Michael’s students, and what he’d gotten out of going to Saint Michael’s,” she said.

Part of Scott’s work with the NEH grant will be bringing a collection of photos from Selma to Saint Michael’s and processing them. “There are some amazing images just of rural life in the south that the Edmundites just happened to take as they were doing their work in the mid-20th century,” she said, “People picking cotton and living in shacks. It dramatizes and puts a face on history, everything from people working on shrimp boats in the Gulf to people working in cotton fields in Selma, and all sorts of places in-between.” A few pictures have Martin Luther King in them, said Scott, who doesn’t know the full extent of the collection’s riches since she has not seen everything yet.

“It will be exciting to dive into it from an archivist’s point of view,” she said. “I think it’s a huge, great collection and a unique perspective. Church life was a huge part of people’s lives.”

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