More than 20 years ago, a community group known as the Martin Luther King Dream Team (MLKDT) was created in east central Indiana to promote civil rights education. Since its inception, the group has offered college scholarships to Indiana students and other learning programs, but its latest project has been in the works for more than 10 years. The Freedom Bus project targets students in the fourth and fifth grades and gives them the opportunity to learn about the history of civil rights in Indiana aboard a renovated city bus.
“By far, the Freedom Bus is certainly our most ambitious project. It started with the death of Rosa Parks, and the team at the time was inspired by her legacy,” said MLKDT member Beth Messner. “They wanted to do something to promote civil rights education in our community that took civil rights to the schools in a new way. Once our founder, Bea Moten-Foster, realized the symbolism between Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, she thought what better way to do this, both physically and metaphorically, than to use a bus.”
In 2005, Muncie Indiana Transit System decided to retire many of its busses and donated a city bus to the MLKDT. That donation then attracted other community partners such as Minnetrista, a museum center for cultural exploration, and community schools that wanted to be involved with the project. During the same time period, the organization was granted $10,000 by the Community Foundation of Muncie–Delaware County to design the art for the bus’ exterior.
The Freedom Bus emphasizes local civil rights history for a good reason, explained Messner.
“When we were talking to teachers and students, it became clear people had a fairly good understanding of the national movement, but they were not aware of their own local history,” Messner said.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, many classrooms neglect to teach civil rights history outside of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Black History Month. In addition, The National Assessment of Educational Progress — commonly called “The Nation’s Report Card” — finds only 2 percent of high school seniors in 2010 could answer a question about the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.
The project came to a screeching halt when Moten-Foster, a former newspaper publisher and civil rights activist, became ill and passed away. In addition, the bus was in need of costly mechanical repairs, but in the fall of 2014 the MLKDT, composed of about 20 members, found hope in students at Ball State University through its immersive learning experience.
“They have done a pretty sizable investment in the project in terms of financial investment, the teaching and learning components and also supplying me with the ability to work with students on this project. For the first month or so, we worked on the students’ own civil rights education. Many of them were passionate about social justice, but we only had a few history majors on the team,” mentioned Messner.
Members of the MLKDT and Ball State students began their development of the bus’ interior activities by visiting civil rights museums in Atlanta, Cincinnati and Memphis, Tennessee, and even found themselves at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.
Once activity prototypes were made, pilot testing began in east central Indiana. Now that the bus is fully completed, the project plans to revisit those pilot testing schools, as well as a few popular summer events, such as the Muncie Black Expo and Anderson Black Expo.
Due to the bus’ age and 50-mile-radius driving span, the Freedom Bus, which can hold up to 12 students at a time, will not be able to travel to Indianapolis in 2016, but project coordinators hope they can expand the project within the second year or encourage Indianapolis schools to visit the bus outside of Marion County.
Students who participate in the project experience a multi-tier curriculum. A video is shown and discussions take place prior to the students’ interaction with the bus. Once a visit is scheduled, students are walked through the more than eight exhibits on the bus, including “History of Oppression,” “Acts of Hate,” “Employment,” “Oral Histories” and more.
For more information on the Freedom Bus, visit thefreedombus.org.
