Sankofa Trip

The Sankofa Trip is a three-day journey through Black history that changes how Austin understands the relationship between the past and her own life. Traveling with a group of Black and white students, she encounters both a plantation tour that presents slavery through comforting distortions and a lynching museum whose photographs make racial violence impossible to treat as distant or abstract. The trip’s significance lies not only in what it shows her, but in the commitment it produces: after returning home, Austin begins to speak and act more directly against racial injustice.

Journey and Participants

That spring, Austin’s roommate invited her on the Sankofa Trip, organized as a journey through the South in partnership with another student. About twenty pairs took part, most consisting of one Black student and one white student. They traveled overnight from Chicago to Louisiana, arriving first at a plantation. The journey’s paired structure put students with different racial positions in the same itinerary, but did not guarantee that they would interpret what they saw in the same way. That gap would become especially clear when the group tried to discuss the tour.

The Plantation and the Bus Conversation

The students expected to encounter the harsh realities of slavery at the plantation. Instead, the guides described enslaved people as “happy slaves” who sang while working, claimed that their conditions were better than those of most other enslaved people, and asserted that their fingers did not bleed despite the large quantities of cotton they picked. The presentation, Austin recalls, was marked by misconceptions and inaccuracies. At the tour’s conclusion, visitors were invited to pick cotton themselves. The image of Black students taking part in that activity condensed the dissonance between the plantation’s presentation and the history the students had come to confront.

Once back on the bus, the group’s conversation moved beyond polite exchanges. Students took turns speaking into a microphone at the front. Black students were furious at the tour’s romanticization of slavery; white students listened, but seemed unmoved as they weighed the students’ objections against the plantation guides’ authority. Some responded by asking whether other groups had also experienced trauma, invoking the Holocaust and the potato famine. The Black students tried to correct the tour’s distortions, but the discussion did not quickly resolve the divide. Instead, the plantation stop made visible how appeals to other histories could redirect attention from the particular claims the Black students were making.

The Lynching Museum

The next stop deepened that divide’s emotional stakes. The group entered a museum containing a single exhibit on lynching. Its walls displayed photographs of Black people hanging from ropes, including a mother and son over a bridge and burned bodies above dying fires. Other images showed white children looking at mutilated bodies while their parents pointed them out. The exhibit also included newspaper notices advertising lynchings as community events and a postcard depicting a mutilated man still hanging from a rope; on its reverse, a handwritten note read, “Sorry we missed you at the barbecue.”

The students walked through the exhibit in silence, barely able to breathe or speak. When they returned to the bus, they could hear only sniffles. Austin describes the photographs as collapsing the distance between the people pictured and the students looking at them: the history felt present rather than safely confined to another time. This encounter made the museum more than a second educational stop. It gave the group’s discussion a human and emotional reality that the plantation’s account had obscured.

Commitment and Afterlife

On the bus, one white student acknowledged that she did not know what to do with what she had learned. She said she could not remove the students’ pain, but could see it and could work so that their children would not experience the same racism. She then declared, “Doing nothing is no longer an option for me.” Austin says those words changed the atmosphere. The student’s response did not excuse the history or claim to repair it; its importance was the recognition of pain joined to a commitment to act. Austin realized that the words applied to her as well, and describes something powerful and unmistakable shifting inside her.

The Sankofa Trip also transformed Austin’s relation to historical memory. The black-and-white photographs she had grown used to became associated with real places she had walked through. She felt drawn to the legacy of those who had resisted, while recognizing that Christianity had also been used to uphold the evils the journey exposed. After further stops, discussions, tears, and prayers, the trip leaders asked each participant to name one way they would become a change agent. Austin no longer remembers what she said, but says her commitment was genuine.

The commitment continued after the group returned. Austin began showing up: she helped challenge her college administration to hire and retain Black faculty and staff, attended race-related events, and organized small settings for diversity, including prayer groups and worship services. Compared with high school, where she noticed racism but kept her thoughts to herself, college became a period in which she began speaking up. The trip thus marks a change from witnessing racial injustice to taking part in efforts to contest it, even though Austin later recognizes that her early attempts at collegiate racial justice were not always healthy.

The museum’s images also return in the book’s later account of Ferguson. Watching police confront Black residents, Austin recognizes parallels with the photographs she had seen during the Sankofa Trip; the trip had prepared her to see historical violence as connected to present conditions rather than finished and safely past. Its lasting effect is therefore both personal and interpretive: it commits Austin to action and gives her a way to recognize how racial violence can persist even when its forms and settings change.