Whitman College is partnering with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights organization based in Montgomery, Ala., to help its students teach schoolchildren about the civil rights movement in Walla Walla, Wash.
The small city known more for its sweet onions and wine in the state's southeastern corner might seem an unlikely place to engage students in the topic of racial justice: Blacks make up less than 3 percent of the population and even less at the college, and Washington State sits many miles from the movement's heated center in the Deep South.
