Unity Tour Provides Educational Experience

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — The opportunity to learn more about Charleston, S.C., and the history of social justice in that city was one that four University of Virginia student-athletes could not pass up this summer.

Brooke’Lyn Drakeford (track & field), Myles Plummer (track & field), Kyren Butler (wrestling) and Kymora Johnson (women’s basketball) traveled to Charleston in July—along with Ellen Cook, Virginia Athletics’ director of student development, and Jordan Bullock, the Virginia Athletics Foundation’s director of donor experiences—for the third ACC Unity Tour.

“It was a really amazing experience,” Butler said.

The annual event is part of ACC UNITE, the conference’s social justice platform, and it “provides valuable educational opportunities for our student-athletes and school administrators in areas of social justice, diversity, equity and inclusion,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said when the tour was announced.

For the inaugural tour, in 2022, representatives from ACC schools visited two Alabama cities (Selma and Montgomery) that played prominent roles in the civil rights movement.

Last year’s UNITY Tour was held in Washington, D.C. Among other activities, participants toured the U.S. Capitol; visited the National Museum of American History & Culture and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and learned about the famed 1963 March on Washington.

The theme of this year’s UNITY tour was Journey of Resilience: Cultivating History through Community, Culture, and Cuisine. Stops included the International African American Museum, the Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, the McLeod Plantation, the Gullah Geechee Experience and the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest Black church in the South and the site of a mass shooting in which nine people were killed in June 2015.

“It was so much to take in,” said Plummer, a media studies major from Franklin Park, N.J. “Even once I got back, it took me a while just to be able to digest everything that happened down there.”

To prepare for the trip, UVA’s participants watched a Netflix special titled High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America. In Charleston, they sampled esteemed chef Rodney Scott’s barbecue.

At the start of the tour, Boston College’s head men’s basketball coach, Earl Grant, spoke to the ACC group. Grant grew up in North Charleston and was head coach at the College of Charleston when the 2015 church shooting took place.

“He gave insight on Charleston from when he was a kid growing up, and you can’t get that out of a history book,” said Butler, a history major who’s from the Akron, Ohio, area.

“It was really amazing to hear his story, how he came up, his view of the world. It was very, very personal, and I connected with his story. Hearing his story of his childhood and how he grew up reminded me of how Akron was a rough place. Just to hear from another Black man that made it out of that type of environment and is successful and is able to give back and tell his story was cool.”

Drakeford, a kinesiology major from Piscataway, N.J., is in her second year at the University, as is Johnson, a Charlottesville native. Drakeford saw posts on social media last from the UVA student-athletes who participated in the second ACC UNITY Tour, and that piqued her interest.

At UVA, Drakeford is co-vice president of BOSS (Black Student-Athletes Offering Service and Support). Academic coordinator Destiny Coleman works with the organization, “and she reached out to me about the Charleston trip and said she likes to usually offer that to the BOSS executive board firsthand,” Drakeford recalled. “So I just jumped on that opportunity once she offered it.”

Plummer is BOSS’ secretary. Butler hasn’t been involved with the organization, but “this year I told myself that I would be,” he said. “My first three years here, I was just all wrestling, just committed to my sport. But even with the success that I’ve had with that, I’ve learned that growing up I can’t put all my eggs in one basket like that. I have to branch out and do more things, and UVA offers a ton of opportunities that I missed out on or have been missing out on, and I’ve really enjoyed the opportunities that I have partaken in.”

That’s one of the things that appealed to Butler about the Charleston tour. “This summer I was like, ‘I’m not going to commit so much to wrestling, I’m going to branch out and do some other things,’ and the ACC Unity Tour was a part of that.”

In Charleston, the ACC paired student-athletes with counterparts from other schools. Johnson roomed with NC State’s Kayla Fekel (softball), Plummer with North Carolina’s Conner Harrell (football), Drakeford with SMU’s Aubrey Brown (women’s soccer), and Butler with North Carolina’s Kaimon Rucker (football). Over the course of the tour, the UVA group connected regularly with additional representatives of other schools.

“That was one of the biggest things for me,” Plummer said, “going down there and trying to interact with as many people as I could. Not just from track & field, but from any sports. Just network and get to know new people. Because I feel like a lot of those kids are in the same position as me.”

Butler recognized a wrestler from Pitt, Jordan Villareal, and found they had much in common. “It really cool to just get to know him, as well as all the other athletes,” Butler said.

Drakeford said: “Another highlight of the trip was that everyone was so friendly. Everyone was just super social, super talkative, so we definitely all spent time getting to know each other.”

Heading into the tour, Plummer and Drakeford, as track & field teammates and BOSS officers, knew each other well, but they did not have similar relationships with Butler or Johnson.

“That was one of the things that I was nervous about,” Butler said, “just because we had never hung out before. I didn’t know how it was going to be, but it was amazing. Our chemistry, it was just amazing. It was like we knew each other for years, and we had just met.”

Drakeford said it “was nice to make some new friends here at UVA.”

The student-athletes found time to work out in Charleston, but their focus was on learning. For Drakeford, the visit to the International African American Museum was especially memorable and moving.

“They had a lot of interesting exhibits,” she said. “One of them was this fountain kind of thing, and on the ground they had engraved a bunch of bodies kind of stacked side by side, and it was meant to resemble how slaves were transported over and how they were stacked on these ships. All of it was just so thought-provoking.”

As a kinesiology major, Drakeford said, she’s become aware of “the racial inequalities in health care. So that’s something else that I liked about the Charleston trip. It kind of removed me from that setting I’m used to and showed me some of the inequalities in other ways that I haven’t spent as much time thinking about.”

In BOSS meetings this year, Drakeford said, she and Plummer plan to discuss “ways we can implement some of the things we learned into our club and throughout the school. And even with [Johnson and Butler], we said we wanted to meet maybe monthly or so just to keep things refreshed and see how we can apply what we learned moving forward.”

Would they recommend the ACC Unity Tour to UVA student-athletes who have never taken part in it?

“Absolutely,” Drakeford said.

“Definitely,” Plummer said. “If I’m able to go again next year, I’d want to go again.”

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