Deborah Berry

October 23, 2015

Summer of MLK@MLK

Every event has to happen somewhere and at some time. Often when and where something happens says a lot about the event. A black person getting on a bus and sitting in the first seat they see is nothing to remark upon in most places in the U.S. today. But during the early part of the 1900’s, this was unacceptable and was a cause for intervention by the bus driver or the police if the person refused to move. In the mid 1900’s, people of African descent decided they had had enough and started to protest against this and other unfair treatment. Led by a charismatic pastor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK), the Civil Rights Movement was born.

This summer I worked with MapStory.org which is a website that allows users to tell stories on a map. My task was to supervise a group of high school and college students as they did research about the events of the Civil Rights Movement. Our project was to start to tell the story of the Civil Rights Movement in a spatio-temporal representation on a map. The students gathered data about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches, the sit-ins, and the Freedom Rides. However, don’t go looking for it just yet. Sometimes, things don’t always go as planned!! Interactive websites occasionally have technical difficulties.

When it comes to interning, there were advantages and disadvantages to being an older Frances Perkins Scholar. One advantage was that I was able to maintain a level of decorum that may not have existed otherwise. However, I had to really struggle to not treat the students like they were my children; to not judge them and critique their words and actions. My supervisor was very glad to have an intern with the experience needed to manage the students but being so much older than them and my supervisor made me a little bit of an outsider.