"Sankofa": Looking back, moving forward

"I have a dream," Martin Luther King Jr. said in his famous 1963 speech in Washington D.C., "that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood."

In November, three dozen members of the Evangelical Covenant Church in the Pacific Northwest traveled to Atlanta, where they set out on a bus tour of some of the key civil-rights sites of the South. But this was more than a simple field trip. Each of then participants was paired with a partner of another ethnic group – mostly whites with blacks. They roomed together, ate together, prayed together, toured the sites together – and wrestled with questions of race and relationships together.

The name of the project that took them on the road is "Sankofa" – a West African term that translates "looking backwards to move forward."

The related articles on this page are adapted from first-person accounts two of the participants wrote for the church's regional publication, "North Pacific Conference News," and are reprinted by permission.