‘I found myself’: Rogers High School student reflects on civil rights journey through South, what it revealed about ancestry, resilience

On a school trip to the deep South, a dichotomy was immediately apparent to Emmanuel Eberhardt.

The 16-year-old Rogers sophomore spent two weeks touring historical sites: the Birmingham Baptist church bombed in 1963 by the Ku Klux Klan, slave quarters at a plantation, memorials to lynched Black Americans.

The grief was palpable, a reminder to Eberhardt of the countless tribulations his ancestors endured. But what sat with him just as much as the pain was resiliency. As he absorbed the history of Black Americans marked by slavery, segregation and lynchings, he also saw the thriving Black community of the present: swathes of well-dressed Black men leaving government jobs, Black students on campus at a historically Black college and university, cousins from the area he’d never met.

“I remember seeing so much of myself,” Eberhardt said. “Just being in a space where Black culture is valued.

“It felt like seeing yourself excel in a way. Seeing yourself in a professional setting, it gives you the ambition and drive to want to be somebody for your own and for yourself.”

After two weeks spent on a civil rights history trip in June with classmates from Rogers High School, Eberhardt returned to Spokane with a new insight on his ancestral history and motivation to continue the fight to honor the contributions and struggles of Black Americans.

“I found myself in a way,” Eberhardt said. “Just that, trying to find yourself in the midst of all the chaos that happened.”

Eberhardt had perhaps the realest moment of finding himself in a Birmingham museum. There, he spent time scouring the surnames of enslaved people passed down his paternal line. After searching, he found a record of the Eberhardt name from a plantation in North Carolina.

“My eyes lit up,” he recalled.

“I remember just the feeling I had,” Eberhardt said. “It was like a feeling of pain. It’s like sorrow and like a sense of acknowledgment of this is what my ancestors went through.”

That feeling, Eberhardt said, stays with him. It’s not soon that he’ll forget it.

“It was bittersweet, but it was great,” Eberhardt said. “It was great to learn. It was great to open your eyes to different things.”

Eberhardt said the trip has inspired him to be the best he can be in honor of his ancestors. He’s committed to focusing on his education with the hope he’ll return to a historically Black college or university to play football and study nursing or psychology, he said. He’s also moved to speak out whenever possible.

While his activism looks a little different than that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Eberhardt was compelled to share about his trip at last Monday’s City Council meeting.

He was one of dozens who convened to support a council resolution to recognize holidays Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, to commemorate Black “resistance and resilience” in American history, and to reject attempts to diminish the prominence of that history.

“We have both violent and systemic threats coming towards Black people due to the lack of knowledge of things that we’ve been through, or the lack of not even wanting to know,” he said. “There’s a problem, and that problem should be corrected before anything else spirals out of control.”

The resolution, which passed 6-1, comes on the heels of perceived attempts by the federal government to erase the contributions and struggles of Black Americans from U.S. history.

Last year, federal officials removed Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth from the list of holidays on which people get free entry into National Parks. At the same time, they added what the National Park Service labels “Flag Day/President Trump’s birthday” as a holiday with free access. There’s also an ongoing effort to remove references to racism and slavery from federal parks and museums in the name of “restoring truth and sanity to American history.”

The ignorance that such erasure could bring is troubling to Eberhardt.

“When you erase certain holidays and certain historic moments that matter a lot within history, the threat that it brings is ignorance, and with ignorance comes hate, and with hate comes harassment,” Eberhardt said.

It’s further problematic, Eberhardt said, that the true meaning of Martin Luther King Jr. Day is often disregarded as people enjoy a day off. For him, it’s a time of reflection of how far Black Americans have come, much of that thanks to King, and the distance left to close.

“America wouldn’t be where it’s at right now if it wasn’t for him,” Eberhardt said. “Even though it’s going through its struggles right now due to ignorance.”