Gophers athletes share emotional experience touring civil rights landmarks in Alabama

Gophers athletes Taylor Landfair and Julia Hayes knew of the landmark civil rights movements in Alabama in the 1960s, but visiting where the events took place made a lasting impression.

Landfair and Hayes, along with four other Gophers athletes, joined 100 Big Ten representatives last week in Selma and Montgomery retracing steps taken by civil rights pioneers such as Dr. Martin Luther King and his followers decades ago.

"Everything we did there is impactful and is going to be something I will hold on to forever," said Hayes, a member of the Gophers track team.

Emotions of sadness, anger and frustration were shared among athletes, coaches and administrators during the three-day trip. They agreed much work still needed to be done for equal rights.

"I think we're still experiencing things they had back then just in different forms today," said Landfair, a Gophers volleyball player. "So the Big Ten taking steps is huge to bring a whole lot more awareness to the situation."

After George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis two years ago, Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren started an equality coalition, leading to last week's inaugural Big Life Series event to help educate people on racism and social injustice issues.

Warren, the only Black leader of a Power Five conference, marched with his athletes over the weekend and expressed to them the impact they could make by sharing how they felt on the trip with their teams and communities.

"It was real inspiring listening to him talk," Landfair said about Warren. "One of the things he said I took away was that we are butterflies. That if you take a butterfly out of the cocoon early, it's not going to fully develop. You have to wait for a butterfly to fully develop in order for it to be as beautiful as it is. And that's what we have to do. We have to bring our change to everybody around us. … We have to bring it to everybody."

Walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Montgomery was the most memorable experience for many athletes. That was the site of the 1965 Bloody Sunday attack on civil rights protesters.

The trip started last Friday night in Montgomery when author Sheyann Webb-Christburg, who witnessed Bloody Sunday in person, spoke to the group while viewing an episode of the documentary series "Eyes on the Prize," chronicling the history of the civil rights movement in the U.S.

On Saturday, the Big Ten contingent traveled to Selma to visit the First Baptist Church, which originally hosted the voting rights committee that made the 53-mile journey to Montgomery in 1965.

"Actually getting to march from First Baptist over Edmund Pettus Bridge, that was really moving," Hayes said. "You could just feel in the environment with everybody around how emotional that was. Getting to cross and seeing the monuments and signs from Bloody Sunday was really moving."

Hayes, who will be the U's diversity and inclusion paid intern this fall, said the civil rights memorial had her in tears on Saturday. The events from the past were tied together with the social injustice that exists today.

"They showed the videos of Martin Luther King and John Lewis with all of the history," Hayes said. "And they brought it back to everything that's happened more recently with George Floyd in the last couple years. They showed pictures of riots and protests happening in the '60s and then showed them from this year. Seeing that was frustrating and hard. Everybody left there with a lot of high emotions."

Other Gophers athletes on the trip included football standout Mo Ibrahim, women's basketball player Rose Micheaux and rower Natalie Doebler.

Gophers senior associate athletic director Peyton Owens III, who accompanied the athletes in Alabama, said the Big Ten is planning to return to Selma in the near future to take part in uplifting the community with different projects.

Owens also hopes the Big Ten visits more impactful sites involving Black history across the country in the coming years to continue the educational experiences of the athletes.

"I'm just grateful to Commissioner Warren, the Big Ten and all those young scholars who showed up really making sure they were committed to learn more [about] the truth," Owens said. "Each of us needs to spend time in the space of truth. It was transformational."