Felicia Rova Cameron, associate curator for the Lacey Museum, opened the program Thursday evening with a land acknowledgement and a brief museum update, noting that “The Lacey Museum is on the ancestral land of the tribal people of the Treaty of Medicine Creek.”

Jarvis Harris, a Lacey resident and retired U.S. Army veteran and former Pierce County corrections officer, and Joe Foss, a Tacoma resident, Navy veteran and retired business owner, then described a five-week trip the pair took to visit Black historical sites and museums around the United States. “We titled our journey the Black History USA Rail Tour because we primarily used Amtrak as our primary transportation means,” Harris said as he described the group’s travel plan and daily approach to visiting sites.

The nut of the program was practical and experiential: Harris and Foss urged attendees to visit major museums and local heritage sites, and to share what they learn. “If you only go to one Black History Museum, that’s the one,” Foss said of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., praising its curation, visitor services and a quiet reflection space he described as “a spiritual cleansing.”

The presenters described the tour’s scope and logistics: they spent about 38 days on the road; used an Amtrak 30-day, 10-stop rail pass sold at roughly $500; slept five nights on trains, 16 nights with family or friends and 16 nights in hotels; and logged roughly 6,800 miles (about 4,600 by rail and 2,000 by car), with roughly 200 miles of walking. Harris and Foss said they combined advance planning with daily flexibility and relied on local contacts for lodging and guidance.

Stops the pair highlighted included the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.; neighborhood sites in Philadelphia; the Blacks and Wax Museum in Baltimore; the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the Legacy Museum and the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery (projects of the Equal Justice Initiative); Morehouse College and the Apex Museum in Atlanta; Stone Mountain (a state park in Georgia with a Confederate carving they said would be difficult to remove); the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville; the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis; the Whitney Plantation near New Orleans; and several smaller, locally run museums such as Tacoma’s Buffalo Soldiers museum.

Harris and Foss described the Montgomery memorials as particularly powerful and noted the county-by-county columns that list people killed in lynchings: “I think there’s 4,000 lynchings represented in that site, and there’s more yet to come,” Harris said, characterizing the figure as an estimate drawn from exhibits they visited. The presenters also discussed broader historical numbers they encountered in museum materials, including commonly cited estimates about the Transatlantic slave trade (presenters said about 12 million people were enslaved in the trade and roughly 400,000 were brought to what became the United States; presenters described these as museum estimates rather than precise counts).

Beyond museums, the presenters emphasized the human connections that shaped their trip. Harris described returning to parts of his childhood neighborhood in North Philadelphia, meeting people who remembered him and spending time with longtime friends who hosted the visitors. Foss said those personal encounters—shared meals, impromptu conversations with locals and meetings with museum staff—were among the trip’s most meaningful outcomes.

Both speakers also reflected on race and civic life. Foss described how visiting Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta during election season illustrated a different approach to civic engagement in many Black churches: voter registration tables in lobbies and candidates introduced to congregations without partisan exhortation. He also said he had begun a personal “racism discovery journey” after national events in 2012 and that the trip deepened his understanding.

The presentation concluded with a short audience question-and-answer session in which attendees asked about the tour budget (Foss said travel and lodging “was a few thousand dollars each” and that they split costs 50/50), ancestry-search features at some museums (Harris said museum genealogy services were popular but that a given day’s technology could be temporarily offline) and how to translate museum visits into ongoing local engagement.

The Lacey Museum program closed with an invitation to consult the presenters’ website and materials—Foss and Harris said they have published articles and podcast episodes about the trip—and a call from the presenters to keep discussing history and to form sustained interpersonal connections across racial lines. The museum indicated additional programs and volunteer opportunities on future calendars.