JOHNSON CITY PARKS AND RECREATION SPECI AL
POI NTS
OF
IN TEREST:
~ CARVER EDUCATIONAL TRIP TEACHES, INSPIRES -
ADMINISTRATION HIGHLIGHTS
~ ATHLETIC DIVISION HIGHLIGHTS ~ PARK SERVICES DIVISION HIGHLIGHTS ~ GOLF DIVISION HIGHLIGHTS ~ RECREATION
A Walk in the Park Your Parks and Recreation Connection I S S U E
4
A P R I L
2 0 2 2
Carver Educational Trip Teaches, Inspires On March 14, 33 students and nine chaparones from the Carver, Langston, LXI and Rise Up afterschool programs boarded a Knoxville Tours chartered bus and headed for Atlanta on what was the fifth spring break civil rights educational trip organized by the Carver Historical Field Trip Committee. “The kids got to read about, then visit, the sites where they took pictures and gained knowledge about the civil rights movement in a spirit of camaraderie,” said Herb Greenlee, Carver supervisor. “They also got to experience traveling. Some had never been out of Johnson City.” The group visited the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Park, the home in which King was born and the Ebenezer Baptist Church where the slain civil rights leader was a pastor. They also visited a memorial to civil rights activist and former U.S congressman John Lewis. The field trip continued in Birmingham, Alabama, where students visited the 16 th Street Baptist Church, a key civil rights meeting place at which four black girls perished in a bombing in 1963, and the park where a civil rights rally was held over that city’s transportation system. Next stop: Selma, Alabama, where a tour guide described the civil rights march across the Edmond Pettus Bridge. Students also walked the bridge – the site of the brutal Bloody Sunday beatings of civil rights supporters marching for voting rights. This year’s trip concluded with a tour of the Museum of Natural History in Montgomery, Alabama. Students have been taking various trips since 1990. The Carver Field Trip Committee was formed by Greenlee and former Carver activities director Barbara Love Watterson in 2017. Trips are paid for by donations, and sites visited include the Martin Luther King Jr. statue/memorial and the Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., the Lorraine Motel at which King was assassinated and the National Civil Rights Museum, both in Memphis.