At the end of the 2018 fall semester, Maurice Wallace, former UVA Associate Professor of English and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American & African Studies traveled to Montgomery, Alabama with the students in his seminar, MLK: Power, Love, Justice to visit the Equal Justice Initiative, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King’s first pastorate was located. Professor Wallace has taught the MLK seminar on several occasions, previously at Duke, where he always incorporated a sponsored class trip—once to New York for a Broadway production of Katori Hall’s play The Mountaintop and another to Atlanta University to conduct archival research at the Robert Woodruff Library. At UVA, Wallace found his class’ reading of Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, to be so rich and gratifying, he felt compelled to take them to Montgomery to honor their deep investments in the course and the cause of justice. Wallace described his students as brilliant and passionate, writing that this class was “the single most memorable teaching experience I’ve had in twenty-three years of college teaching.”

(Above: Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, Montogomery, AL)

Image by Akash Raje