ECU football has powerful experience in D.C. while visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture

WASHINGTON, D.C. (WITN) -Part of the Military Bowl week is experiencing the area around where the game will be played. It really hit home with ECU football Friday.

ECU football held practice Friday morning and it went pretty well according to the team. The Pirates got on the bus and headed to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the afternoon in Washington D.C.

“An awesome experience. It was very powerful to see everything. To learn more about our fellow African Americans. For those who aren’t, to learn some of the things that our people have gone through,” says ECU safety D.J. Ford, “To see some of the history that isn’t talked about as much as everything else in history. Like it was really cool as you start in the bottom and it has all the slavery stuff, and then it works its way up to civil rights, then it gets more up into sports and visual arts and music culture and things like that. It hits on everything about African-Americans and our history here in this country. It’s awesome.”

“I’m just glad people came and got to experience this,”says ECU running back Rahjai Harris, “Because you know we see it on Twitter all the time, and we can look it up on Google, but just coming here can really change your life, change your outlook on life. What your grandparents, or some family that you never met before, what they had to experience is crazy. But you know it’s good that we can get the knowledge from museums like this.”

Some of the players had been to the museum before but for many it was their first time.

“I feel like they were caught a little bit off guard just by the sheer details of all the exhibits,” says Ford, The verbiage that was used in some of the slavery stuff.”

“There was a lot of stuff that was wrong in the past,” says Harris, “The world has come into today, you know we have equality, you know we have whites with blacks, it’s just so much better place.”

These pirate say it says a lot about their football team to embrace this museum experience.

“It just shows that we are like inclusive, tight knit, we’re family,” says Ford.

“I don’t see no color,” says Harris, “Just being around my brothers, we don’t see no color, we just a unit.”

We do not have a newscast on Saturday on WITN. We will have something on Saturday’s team activities on social media and our website tomorrow night.

Copyright 2021 WITN. All rights reserved.