03.26.10
Charlotte Latin students joining East Meck High group to visit significant sites around the South
By Celeste Smith
The Charlotte Observer
The popular civil rights tour of the South that teacher Larry Bosc organizes at East Mecklenburg High School has an unusual twist this year.
Ten students at Charlotte Latin School will join 37 East Meck students for the bus trip, which runs today through Sunday and will hit some of the most significant sites of the nation's civil rights struggle. Their teachers say the idea is to bridge the public- and private-school gap a bit, and allow students to learn from each other during the ride through history.
"There are so many ways we separate ourselves," said Jackie Fishman, an English teacher at Charlotte Latin who used to teach with Bosc at East Meck.
The group's stops will include one at Moore's Ford Bridge in Monroe, Ga., site of the violent, racially motivated murder of four African-Americans in 1946.
In Montgomery, Ala., they'll visit the Rosa Parks Museum, which commemorates the woman who first challenged Montgomery's bus segregation laws. And they'll cross the Edmond Pettus Bridge in Selma, site of Bloody Sunday in 1965, where voting-rights marchers were beaten by police.
East Meck senior Montrell Morgan expects "a more close, personal view of the exhibits" thanks to Bosc, his history teacher. Charlotte Latin junior Eliza Karp says seeing what they've read in class is important: "We want to know about the past so we can make more informed opinions about current events."
Bosc first started organizing the tours for East Meck students and teachers about 10 years ago, after reading "Weary Feet, Rested Souls," a guided history of the civil rights movement.
Fishman, who had team-taught humanities classes with Bosc for several years, had long wanted to go. After teaching at Charlotte Latin, she knew her students would want to go, too.
While the East Meck and Charlotte Latin students haven't spent much time together before the trip, at least two share similar interests in why they want to go. Seventeen-year-olds Alex Taylor from Charlotte Latin and Serit Kelly from East Meck both say they're looking forward to having more in-depth conversations with their fathers after the trip.
"We don't necessarily understand the struggle (people) went through to get the rights that we have today," Kelly said.
Bosc expects the trip will leave the students inspired.
"Students are proud of what they know after this trip. That's pretty hard to beat as a teacher."
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