Around a dozen people gathered at the Iowa City Public Library Tuesday to view a local filmmaker’s documentary about Iowa high-school students traveling to key civil-rights movement locations — one of several events in a city-wide celebration of Black History Month.

The documentary Still Rising was created by Iowa City Media Production Specialist Jack Brooks and released in 2018 to recognize the 10th anniversary of the student trip, and the last year with trip founder Henri Harper.

Brooks said the theme of water throughout the documentary inspired the title.

“It always kind of stuck with me,” Brooks said. “The idea of the fluidity of the American lifestyle and how that differs depending on the color of your skin.”

According to the documentary, Harper started the trip in response to concerns from black students that they were not learning enough in the classroom. Harper and a core group of 15 students embarked on the first trip and it has since grown exponentially, with more than 600 students participating over the past 12 years.

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Currently, the week-long trip is organized by TeamCan — a grassroots nonprofit that is an offshoot of the national workers’ union Teamsters. An average of 50 students attend the trip every year and the $500 cost of the trip is covered by TeamCan and funded by donations.

Johnson County Supervisor Royceann Porter, a member of TeamCan, touched on the importance of the trip and its emotional impact.

“It’s very important for our kids to see,” Porter said. “And like he said earlier in the film, if you don’t know where you’ve been, you’re definitely not going to know where you’re going.”

Stops on the tour center on key locations of the civil-rights movement, including Alabama cities Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham; Memphis, Tennessee, and Atlanta, according to the documentary. The trip also includes visits to historically black colleges and universities.

Students on the trip have an opportunity to visit Martin Luther King Jr.’s motel room 306, where he stayed before his assassination; the location of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, an act of white supremacist terrorism that killed four young girls in 1963; the Slave Haven Underground Railroad Museum, the White House of the Confederacy, and other historical locations.

“[The trip] reflects a deficiency in the current pedagogy of a lot of the educational institutions,” said former Iowa City City Councilor Rockne Cole, an attendee of the trip. “What I’m getting from the students is there is a lot of this history they were not aware of.”

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The documentary was screened at the Iowa Independent Film Festival in September 2019 and the Indie FanFilmFest International in May 2019, Brooks said.

The 2020 trip — its 12th iteration — will be held from June 6-14, and donations to sponsor the travel of a high-school student can be given to TeamCan online, Porter said.

“This stuff should be taught every day,” said North Liberty City Councilor RaQuishia Harrington, who attended the showing. “It should be taught from the moment they enter kindergarten. It should be taught, and they should be empowered to embrace who they are and they’re not.”