(CBM) – Every year, the Black Voice Foundation (BVF), an African American-led educational organization based in California’s Inland Empire, offers a group trip to diverse groups of area residents the South and Midwest called the Footsteps to Freedom Underground Railroad Field Study Tour.
During the annual excursion, which began in 1997, the BVF escorts hundreds of San Bernardino and Riverside residents along the multi-state trail that traces the path to freedom thousands of African Americans took from enslavement in the South to freedom up North above the Mason-Dixon line.
“I was honored and blessed. You have to feel what it’s like to walk the path and stand on the shoulders. And I can’t say it without tears in my eyes that I saw myself there. It takes everyone. It doesn’t take a skin color to free the enslaved,” said Jacque Irons, a teacher at Cypress Elementary School in the San Bernardino City Unified School District. She went on the BVF tour. Irons is a White w