WFU students hit the road to study social inequality in the Deep South
This summer, while following the paths of civil rights history through the Deep South, Wake Forest University sociology students will explore present-day social inequalities.
From Atlanta to the Mississippi Delta, 15 students enrolled in a three–credit course will travel by bus to cities, towns and rural areas in five southern states beginning July 28.
The class, Social Stratification in the American Deep South, was designed by Earl Smith, chairman of the sociology department at Wake Forest, and Angela Hattery, associate professor of sociology, to help students better understand social, economic and political issues in the South.
The students will board the bus for a two-week field seminar from July 28 – Aug. 8. The bus itself will be a high-tech rolling classroom with a full complement of audio-visual equipment and a horseshoe-shaped seating area set up for seminars on the go.
The two Wake Forest professors will coordinate lectures, documentaries, statistical information and other course materials with visits to places like Tunica County, Miss., among the poorest counties in the country’s poorest state, and Montgomery, Ala., home of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“The goals of the course are to show students, via a lived experience, how stratification unfolds in the American South and to show that America is not a classless society,” said Smith, who also directs the American Ethnic Studies program at Wake Forest.
Using civil rights sites as a roadmap, the class will make stops in Birmingham, Selma, Tuskegee, Hattiesburg, Memphis and a handful of other places. Students will visit the 16th Street Baptist Church, the Tuskegee Institute and the hotel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
The professors plan to use these important places from the past as a springboard for an examination of current imbalances between rich and poor, black and white. The journey will allow the students to reflect upon not only the milestones of the civil rights movement, but also contemporary social class structure in areas such as housing, employment opportunities, education and criminal justice.
Students will create demographic profiles of the communities they visit with data from the 2000 U.S. census and other sources. Laptop computers will allow the students to access and present information while they are on the road. Students will use their laptops to plot maps of social inequality, create charts showing marriage and housing patterns, and chart industry and employment for the communities they visit.
“We’re hoping that when we’re done each day, conversations will carry over, unfolding from what took place that day,” Smith said. “The idea is not to replicate what other schools are doing – visiting civil rights sites, but to teach about social stratification.”
To explore issues related to “southern justice,” the bus will stop for a day at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. At Parchman, the students will talk with inmates and prison officials.
The prison population is 80-90 percent black in a state that is only 40 percent black, Hattery said. “One-third of the state’s blacks spend time in Parchman, so the prison shapes the lives of people who live in Mississippi in profound ways.”
As part of the journey, the students will volunteer for a day in New Orleans at the Café Reconcile, a community restaurant that trains low-income people for jobs in the hospitality industry.
In many communities, the class will meet with local ministers, civil rights activists and workers at social service agencies and mingle with ordinary citizens as much as possible to learn about day-to-day life in the South.
“I hope the students will become more engaged citizens,” Hattery said.
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