MLK 3000 immersion trip takes students to second largest domestic slave market in the Deep South
- Samantha Siedow
- Mar 14
- 5 min read
Updated: Apr 13
By: Samantha Siedow
March 11, 2025
Under the relentless Southern sun, University of Minnesota MLK 3000 immersion students and faculty stood on land where tens of thousands of enslaved men, women and children once marched for days to be sold at the second largest slave market in the United States.
Forks of the Road, a slave market in Natchez, Mississippi, was among the stops the MLK immersion group visited on day four of their trip. The visit to Natchez focused on teaching students about the history of one of the wealthiest areas in antebellum America.
Natchez, a city once home to the most millionaires per capita in the United States, owed its prosperity to an economy built by the exploitation of enslaved people, according to the Mississippi Encyclopedia run by the University of Mississippi. Seventy-one percent of Mississippi planters who owned more than 250 enslaved people during the 1850s resided in Natchez.
Michaella Burmis, an 18-year-old first-year Spanish and global studies major from Monticello, said it was difficult to hear about the pain and suffering felt by hundreds of thousands while standing on that very ground. Burmis said she could feel a shift in the air when students saw chains worn by enslaved people left as a marker on the ground.
“It definitely gave me an energy that was very, very dark,” Burmis said.
Pastor Tracy Collins, the owner and operator of Rev's Country Tours, the only Black-led tour company in Natchez, said his emphasis on the history of slavery in Natchez has alienated him from other tour companies focusing on the grandiose infrastructure and lives of people living in the antebellum Deep South.
“Getting to be part of the Natchez tourism industry has been a daunting task,” Collins said.
Collins has been a pastor for 16 years, and said when he walks into a church, he knows in five minutes how to approach his sermons — in a similar vein to how he analyses his tour groups — making a point to connect with everyone.
One of the main misconceptions Collins said he has seen in his tour groups is the idea that slavery happened because white people hated Black people, an untrue story he heard even from his children.
“Slavery was about money,” Collins said. “Slaves could have been white, Black, yellow, green, purple from the moon or Mars. As long as they could pick cotton.”
Collins believes his tour fills an important niche in empowering people with knowledge about how the past informs the future.
“The value in this place is not the artifacts, it's the bones,” Collins said.
Learning through differences
Students and faculty said while they’ve appreciated learning from the experiences of speakers so far, they have leaned on each other to fill in gaps when misinformation or outdated phrasing and comments have taken them out of the moment.
Zacharias Khan, a second-year student majoring in political science and American history with a focus on African American legal history, said he spoke with another student who aptly phrased the disconnect sometimes present between different generations of activists as the same battle on different battlefields.
“We're not fighting for equality, or equity for that matter, because that's implying that there's a legal difference between two groups of people,” Khan said. “There's just a social difference right now, so we're fighting for the injustice.”
Khan said as a Pakistani-German man, he will never fully be able to understand the lived experience of Black people. But in being able to acknowledge that, he is effectively learning from other students on the trip.
Charissa Blue, a Dakota woman and senior academic adviser for the MLK Program in the College of Liberal Arts as well as the adviser for the university’s Department of American Indian Studies, said while she appreciated Collins’ want to include information and history about the local tribes of Natchez in his tour, he made an error in describing other tribes, including her own.
Collins called the tribe the “Sioux” tribe, a French name translated from a negative term another tribe had for her people. The nation’s actual name for themselves is Očeti Šakówiŋ, which includes the Dakota, Lakota and Nakota “oyate,” meaning “people.”
Blue said because Collins would be sharing this information with future tour groups, she believed it was important for her as a Dakota person to take advantage of a teaching moment.
“I introduced myself to Pastor Collins and shared some of this information with him. He was very open and welcoming of the conversation, which made me feel affirmed in my decision to approach him,” Blue said.
As a Dakota person, Blue said she has experienced the immersion trip through a unique lens, drawing parallels between the experiences suffered by American Indian and Black people.
Having people from a variety of cultural, racial and ethnic backgrounds share and receive information has enhanced the messages students and faculty are learning, according to Blue.
“I've learned so much not only from the information presented to us, but from how other people in our group are experiencing this through the lens of their own cultural backgrounds,” Blue said. “They're presenting things in different ways than I may have interpreted or thought about.”
Paige Bautch, a 21-year-old third year majoring in communications and cinema and media from Temple, Texas, said as a white, southern woman, she joined the MLK immersion trip to build an understanding of what other people go through in the hopes of using her privilege for positive change.
“I think it's important to take the time to learn about other people's experiences, because if you don't, then you are just living blissfully ignorant,” Bautch said. “I think it's not really fair to go about life with the privilege that I have and not, I guess, use it.”
Bautch said the nightly “courageous conversation” reflection sessions hosted by MLK staff after each day’s activities have helped her navigate difficult emotions.
“I really do love the sense of community that we have,” Bautch said. “I think simply just having each other is what gets us through all of this kind of stuff.”
Burmis said she appreciated hearing from someone who was open to being corrected and asking questions about what he didn’t know. For example, Collins asked why Cubans tend to lean Republican, and as a Tejano, she was able to provide an answer from her own perspective.
“To see some tour guide who knows a lot but wants to keep learning more about other circumstances and about things outside of his bubble, that's really important to me,” Burmis said. “That was really surprising to me.”
Collins said understanding history is essential to shaping the future, because who a society or person is today is directly shaped by their past.
“You cannot be who you are without who you were,” Collins said. “So if I need to understand what America is, I got to know where it was, where it came from, what made it this way. Without that knowledge, ain't nothing gonna change.”
Burmis said leaning on and sharing moments of vulnerability with students on the trip has helped her to fully immerse herself in learning from other cultures, and apply that to the experiences on the trip. She hopes this will help students to make change in their own communities.
“We need to look at the bigger picture,” Burmis said. “It starts here. It starts when we're all coming from different places, and we're able to be vulnerable with each other and create spaces to make change, systematic change. I think that's going to be the good part of this.”
