ACC Unity Tour Brings Eagles Face-To-Face With History

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. -- Boston College is an institution known for its connection to community service. The school's core mission comes from the Jesuit tradition of "men and women for others," but the execution of that objective resides within the stewardship foundationally built by generations of students and student-athletes alike.

Serving others is woven into the very fabric of Boston College's community, so the annual ACC Unity trip is true complement of the culture in Chestnut Hill. The three-day instructional experience is an eye-opener for many of the student-athletes who journey into the heart of the conference's overall quest for equality, but the Eagles who represent their institution find themselves connected deeply to their subject matter.

This year's trip was no different, and both Bryce Copeland-Del Toro from men's soccer and Athena Tomlinson of the women's basketball team returned to campus with the understanding of their role as leaders within the BC community. Each are striving for excellence within their respective field, yet each found themselves exploring and confronting an uncomfortable history to which they identified and inexplicably linked their own worldview.

"I'm extremely grateful and blessed that I was chosen to be a part of this group," said Copeland-Del Toro. "It's a very, very high honor, especially with what we were learning about. The people that you meet through the ACC offer a unique experience because it's something that isn't necessarily talked about [enough] in this day and age, but it's just as important and may have had as much of an impact as anything on our day-to-day-lives. That unity of the ACC, how we can all pull together as representatives from every school with the same mission of learning and trying to take something back to our schools, is how we're trying, learning and growing as leaders and individuals."

The ACC Unity Tour offers each representative an immersive educational experience that includes visits to historical sites and opportunities to learn from local leaders from history, culture and community engagement. This year's tour allowed each league institution to send upwards of four student-athletes and two coaches or staff members through the Deep South's historic Civil Rights Movement roots while bringing them into contact with prominent figures who marched alongside hundreds of freedom fighters.

The BC contingent of Copeland-Del Toro, Tomlinson - along with fellow Eagles Ty Clemons from football and Janis Espinosa of the softball team, as well as athletics administrators Michael Harris and Josh Beekman - touched on several different eras and came face-to-face with the Tuskegee Airmen Museum before participating in the 60th anniversary of the March from Selma to Montgomery. They walked across the Edmund Pettis Bridge and visited the National Memorial for Peace & Justice Museum, and they collected supplies at the First Baptist Church in Selma, Alabama - known specifically for its own contribution to the Civil Rights Movement.

"At the Civil Rights Museum, they had an exhibit where they printed out the names of every single person that had ever been lynched on record," explained Tomlinson. "The sheer volume was astronomical. Being able to see name-by-name-by-name, there were probably hundreds of thousands of people from almost every county in the United States that had been subjected to injustice. In my life, that's gone unmentioned, just the sheer volume and the seriousness of it. So I was able to see so much more, and it just opened my lens up so much to how much those people really dealt with."

The importance of visiting these sites impacted the California-born Tomlinson and Florida-bred Copeland-Del Toro at the core of their souls. Signed July 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion sex and national origin while prohibiting segregation in schools and public accommodations nearly 100 years after the Civil War's conclusion. More than 60 years later, its watershed moment is the foundational basis in the continued fight for equality and social justice that permeated the first half of the most recent decade.

Even in the modern era, that message requires constant reinforcement only available through physical touch. Witnessing the locations and feeling or sensing what took place in each of those real-time moments is completely different from reading a history or textbook, and the impact is especially important for generations now tasked with carrying the flames even closer to their finish line.

"We spent a lot of time in thought - thinking and journaling," said Copeland-Del Toro. "We all took up journaling and had some yoga sessions, and it was really interesting to see a lot of people's differences - how they were raised and brought up, how they view certain aspects. There were a lot of white American women and white American men that all had the same surprised look on their face that an African-American and Black man or woman had. It was a very real thing, and this is a very real history."

"I was impressed by how seriously the athletes took it," added Tomlinson. "The level of thought and depth that went into every event added to every conversation that we had. A lot of people were emotionally intelligent and really grasped everything that they were told. I could tell it really impacted them, especially people that were born in the south that could see and pick out, like in the exhibit, that they were born in that county and all of these events happened near hometowns."

The ACC Unity tour reached some of the deepest emotional levels, equal parts eye-opening and inspirational, and raw and vulnerable. The understanding how to bring messaging home - the proverbial next step - was an instant flashpoint, and each found themselves stepping into a community that's thirsty and ready to absorb and assist or discuss how to deliver the education needed to continue the modern fight.

"I met with Michael Harris after the trip to go over everything that we experienced together," said Copeland-Del Toro. "and sat with Josh Beekman and Kenny Francis, along with a couple of athletic higher-ups, about how to make a difference in the BC community altogether. I've started conversations about what I experienced and what is working great and what isn't working as great - what we can do to get people more involved in different ways. The thing I loved about that tour was that everybody had a different goal in mind, and I'm a big community service person. We're already making changes and we're looking forward to big things coming in the fall."

ACC Unity Tour Brings Eagles Face-To-Face With History

Players Mentioned

Ty Clemons

Bryce Copeland-Del Toro

Athena Tomlinson

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