MLK 3000 Immersion Experience
MLK 3000 students and staff pose with Pastor Tracy Collins, the owner of the only Black-led tour company in Natchez, Mississippi on March 11, 2025. Photo by: Seth Richardson/MLK Program
MLK 3000: Where Civil Rights Become a Reality, Walking in the Footsteps of Giants
This course includes a civil rights and social justice immersion experience and is offered by the University of Minnesota's College of Liberal Arts for 3 credit hours of electives. The course is designed to be a race immersion intensive learning experience in and outside the classroom that explores how race has impacted civil rights movements and connects current day social justice movements centering the life and work of Rev. Dr. King and the Beloved Community. Together they will study the art, literature, music and how the history of these movements transformed American life.
On these themed immersion experiences, students will have the opportunity to learn about the Black Freedom Movement aka Civil Rights; the Red Power Movement; Chicano/Latino Civil Rights Movement; and the Asian American Civil Rights Movement. Through these encounters, students and staff will meet and interact with many unsung heroes and sheroes of these movements where our goal is to honor the courage and foresight of those who put their lives and the lives of their families on the line to bring freedom and equality for all to our land. These movements emphasized solidarity among people of all ethnicities, nationalities, intersecting identities, socioeconomic status, faith-based ideologies for multiracial solidarity for human rights and human dignity.
This high impact learning experience will open the eyes of college students who grew up so far from the heart of these movements, and perhaps encourage them to start and organize and build student coalitions across racial, cultural, nationality and ethnicities for progressive change in the years ahead; you are the leaders that we have been looking for.
Recent Immersion Trips
During the spring breaks of 2024 and 2025, CLA students enrolled in MLK 3000 traveled to Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama to investigate and interrogate truths from the Civil Rights Movement and listen to stories from past and present-day civil rights leaders.
Watch a summary video from Spring Break 2024
