This coming May, Indiana University undergraduate students and graduate students have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join students from Serbia in a program designed to provide new channels of thinking about how to commemorate historical events and heritage sites.

From May 6-13,  24 Serbian students and professors from the University of Novi Sad will embark on a journey to seven different locations in the United States to witness the African American experience and the struggle for racial justice in the United States. The group, accompanied by IU faculty and 10 IU students, will travel the museum, memorial, and heritage complex in the U.S. South known as the “civil rights trail.” From Memphis to Atlanta, from the Mississippi Delta to Montgomery, southern states, cities, and communities are currently wrestling with how to commemorate a racially traumatic regional past.

The aim of the program, which is supported by the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade and donors David and Ann Erne, is to cultivate awareness of the hotly contested politics of memory around the history of slavery, segregation, white supremacy, and civil rights. Recent efforts to reconfigure museums, monuments, and “sites of memory” across the American South have raised profound questions about how a nation can come to terms with a violent and traumatic past, especially when rooted in ongoing racial and ethnic hostilities.  Like the United States, Serbia grapples with its own volatile history, punctuated by a bitter war and instances of ethnic cleansing in the 1990s as the country of Yugoslavia broke apart.

IU undergraduate and graduate students can learn more details here, including how to apply.

Dr. Alex Lichtenstein, a professor of History and American Studies within the College of Arts and Sciences and expert on civil rights history, is leading the partnership program, and has long been fascinated by how people use memorials, monuments, and museums to make sense of their history, particularly in confronting difficult, shameful, or controversial pasts.

For Lichtenstein, this trip was one of the highlights of his career. “It brought together my ongoing research on the freedom struggles in both the U.S. and South Africa with my growing interest in the politics of memory,” he says. “I was thrilled to create the possibility for dialogue between US and South African students about these issues, especially in places so rich in this history.”

Kyra Horton ‘26, a first-year student of criminal justice, political science, and African American studies at IU, will be participating in the study tour. Kyra’s mother and grandparents were born in Mississippi, and her grandfather was friends with Emmett Till until they were 12 years old, just two years before Emmett was killed. Kyra is interested in visiting the state of her mother and grandparents to “not only understand them better, but it would make me feel more connected to our history.”

In turn, she wants to share it with students from outside the United States. Of the Serbian visitors, she says, “I would want to show them that there are parts of the U.S. that go through struggles as some parts of their country might. I would also like to tell them how these issues still linger in our society today.”

The trip will be generously subsidized so that students’ costs for transportation, lodging, group meals, admission fees, and instruction will be $150. For more information on this project and the opportunity to participate: https://go.iu.edu/FreedomJourney.