History of education spotlighted during Soul of Southside bus tour

By St. Clair Murraine
Outlook Staff Writer

A more fitting theme couldn’t have been given to the bus tour that took Soul of Southside Arts and Humanities Festival attendees along a route that spotlighted schools in the Black community.

It was billed as the “Freedom to Learn” bus tour.

For Brittany Ross, who has ties to Selma, Ala. which is known for the early years of the civil rights movement, the tour was a full-circle experience. She and the others on the yellow school bus took off from near Lake Anita, rolled by FAMU’s campus and every school on the Southside.

A stopover at Walker/Ford Center turned into an educational experience featuring a video that was produced with older residents of the area telling stories of their schooldays. The bus even slowed down at the residence of Eva Manning, while the tour guide told her story.  Manning was a renowned Southside educator who died in August 2020.

“It’s monumental and it’s very foundational,” said Ross, who graduated last summer from FSU with a doctorate degree in education policy and leadership. “I think it’s important to see where we started from. This tour has been showing from segregation and one-room schoolhouses and how it was illegal to be even educated at all. 

“It’s a full circle type of thing. It really turns on that light bulb.”

The bus tour was one of the early-morning events on the final day of the weeklong festival that was scheduled to wrap up at Lake Anita. However, a forecast for afternoon thunderstorms forced organizers to pivot and move the final concert to Florida High’s auditorium in Southwood.

The culminating concert was one of two, the first taking place last Friday night as the Sundown Music Showcase. The week of activities also included a fish fry, a night of jazz, a panel discussion on freedom and a community breakfast.

But it was the bus tour that grabbed the interest of Ross, who among other things writes policies for the Florida Department of Education.

“I wanted to take advantage of this weekend being Emancipation weekend,” she said. “When I looked on line and saw the Soul of Southside tour, I jumped on it immediately. I’m so glad I did.”

What she saw and heard during the tour has inspired her to want to “continue to write these policies and really shine the light on any inequality that might still be existing in education today,” she said.

The focus of the bus tour was inspired by what she and other festival volunteers discovered while recording history in the area, said Rachel Basan Porter, who was the tour guide.

“This time last year we saw the kids and the interest that they have,” she said. “We saw the interaction between elders and youth and we thought what better thing to do than have the youths start where they are. If we are asking the kids to get interested in history I think that is something that is very important. 

“Having children of color take an interest in history in their area, we wanted them to connect inter-generationally. There is history in these schools. The schools in this area started with a prayer; in the churches and have grown to become these great public institutions that are supported by the Leon County School system.”

The education bus tour also brought back some memories for Bre Kleiner, who is biracial. Growing up in Connecticut her family endured segregation and sometimes flagrant racism, she said.

“This is coming full circle for me because I do empathize with the Black experience, even though I have my own privilege being of mixed race,” Kleiner said during the stop at Walker/Ford. “My family has dealt with a lot of racism; just blatant … derogatory terms to the point that they were actually condemned for who they are.”