“Mennonites, in particular, have this notion that they have to be useful,” said Art Stoltzfus.
Stoltzfus said that while discussing a Just Peace Pilgrimage that he and his wife, Meribeth Kraybill attended. “We have to be able to fix something, to know the answers, to know what we can do,” he continued. “[These pilgrimages] help you realize you have to set that impulse aside.”
In 2022, Kraybill and Stoltzfus embarked on a United States Civil Rights pilgrimage, Chapter One of the Racial Justice pilgrimage series organized by Mennonite Mission Network. The pilgrimage took them across the Southern United States, visiting historical sites significant to the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee.
“One of the highlights for me was the individuals who helped us on this pilgrimage — [the local leaders] in the different cities [we visited],” Kraybill said. “They live [in those cities], and many of them had grown up there. To hear their own personal stories really impacted the experiences we had.”
In Atlanta, Georgia, Kraybill and Stoltzfus heard from Anton Flores of Casa Alterna speak about the building of Olympic Park in the city during the 1990s, when the city fast-tracked the immigration of thousands from Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico to act as cheap labor to construct the Olympic facilities.
“[Flores] did such a beautiful job of tying the history of civil rights to the history of immigration, particularly around the theme of labor,” Stoltzfus said.
The group visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Mongomery, Alabama, where more than 4,400 Black people who were lynched between 1877 and 1950 are remembered — their names inscribed on more than 800 hanging steel monuments, each one representing a county where at least one lynching took place during that time period.
The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has created replicas of each steel monument in the memorial, which lay in rows around the monument, for representatives of each county to claim their county’s monument and use it to establish a memorial site in that county as a way for communities to grapple with a painful racial history.
According to Dr. Gianluca De Fazio, associate professor at James Madison University (Harrisonburg, VA), these monuments are not yet being given out to those that request them, due to EJI still devising the proper procedure for the reclamation of the pillars. However, Rockingham County — where Kraybill’s and Stoltzfus’ hometown of Harrisonburg, Virgina lies — has erected a monument in front of the county courthouse to remember Charlotte Harris, who was lynched in 1878, 13 miles southeast of Harrisonburg.
“What is powerful to me about the memorial is that it’s not something that is just ‘there,’” Kraybill said. “To have it connect back home shows how intentional [EJI] was in that project.”
Another significant moment from the pilgrimage occurred as they traveled from Montgomery to Selma, Alabama. Jake Williams, tour director of Montgomery Tours and child participant in the Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965, stopped the group’s van near a small graveyard.
“He said, ‘If you want to, you can stay in the van, or you can get out with me,’” Kraybill recalled. She said that Williams explained to them that some of his family members were buried in this place, and that originally, there had been very little in the way of grave markers, and so Williams had taken it upon himself to get markers to memorialize and honor his ancestors.
“It was meaningful to me that he invited us into something that was so personal and significant to him,” Kraybill said. “In hearing his story, the place also became significant to us. We’re honored to be a part of that.”
Kraybill and Stoltzfus attended the pilgrimage with a group from Community Mennonite Church, their home congregation in Harrisonburg. They were both grateful to travel with people from their community. “When we returned home, we didn’t feel alone,” Kraybill said. “We could reflect on [what we had learned] together.”
“This kind of learning; this kind of work — you don’t do it alone,” Stoltzfus said. “You do it together. And you have to keep those relationships for the long run, otherwise you’re not going to learn from the experiences you had together.”
A number of people from Community Mennonite Church that participated in the Civil Rights pilgrimage in 2022 also traveled to South Africa for Chapter Two of the Racial Justice Just Peace Pilgrimage in 2024, including Kraybill and Stoltzfus. Additionally, after hearing members of their church speak about the Civil Rights pilgrimage, another group from Community Mennonite Church attended that pilgrimage in 2023.
“One of the things that has been useful to me is this concept of ‘pilgrimage,’” Kraybill said. “It frames [learning] in a different way. [As a pilgrim,] you engage with an openness to listen to stories and build relationships.”
“We’re not going to fix this on our own,” Stoltzfus said. “We’re not going to have all the answers, and it’s going to make us uncomfortable. We have to be willing to sit in that space, to listen and learn.”
Mission Network invites you to embark on one of the many Just Peace Pilgrimages offered in 2025. To learn more, visit MennoniteMission.net/JustPeace.
Consider a gift to support programs like Just Peace Pilgrimages! Visit MennoniteMission.net/Donate.