Erie-area students walking in Black history as bus trip resumes after pandemic cancellations

It was 30 years ago that the Rev. Herlies Murphy of Community Missionary Baptist Church led nearly 100 young people from the Erie area to Alabama and Georgia on the first Walking in Black History trip.

"It's exciting, it's something good for the children and it's educational," Murphy said in an Erie Morning News article before that first bus tour.

"I think they'll come back with a higher esteem for themselves and for Black people as a whole," Murphy also said in the April 23, 1992, article.

This Monday, the latest busload of students will head south from Erie, led by Gary Horton, who took over in 1996 for Murphy, who died in 2012. This is the first in-person Walking in Black History since before the coronavirus pandemic.

"I didn't want that to be the end of it," Horton said.

From 2018:85 Erie students will 'walk', learn Black history on national tour

Horton, executive director of the Urban Erie Community Development Corp. that now sponsors the event, will lead at least 40 students, ages 11 to 18 years, and about a dozen chaperones on the 2022 tour. They will return on Saturday after visiting Birmingham, Selma, Montgomery and Tuskegee, Alabama, and Atlanta.

Horton said Murphy "felt Erie kids needed to be taken south to see the land and experience where history took place."

Stops on this year's trip will include Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where a bomb killed four young Black girls attending Sunday School in 1963; the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma; and the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, among other sites. Horton said the group also will walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where civil rights marchers were attacked in 1965 on what became known as "Bloody Sunday."

From 2015:5 things about the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches

Like Murphy, Horton sees the trip as an exciting and new learning experience for young people. He said it both highlights progress that has been made and counters the people who don't want the truth to be told.

"The struggle is still here," he said. "It's as important today as ever."

Horton said that "Black people" and "people of color dying at the hands of haters is not a new thing." But he said it's a fact young people and new Americans, especially, need to know about.

Megan Brundage:What I learned from Walking in Black History

The group that goes Walking in Black History typically includes both Black and white participants, Horton said. He's taken Christians and Muslims and this year has some new Americans originally from Nepal.

"I try to take a diverse group," he said.

Thanks to fundraisers and grants, there is no cost for the students to travel or stay in a hotel.

From 2017:Erie students return from Walking In Black History tour

In 2020, Horton arranged a virtual Walking in Black History, with people from some of the usual stops sharing presentations via Zoom. The event didn't take place in 2021 due to the pandemic.

To learn more, visit walkinginblackhistory.org.

Dana Massing can be reached at dmassing@timesnews.com. Follow her on Twitter @ETNmassing.

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Erie students walking in Black history as bus trip resumes