05.05.10
By Caroline McMillan
South Charlotte News
The Charlotte Observer
They stood at Moore's Ford Bridge in Monroe, Ga., the site of the last mass lynching in America in 1946.
They celebrated Palm Sunday at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., where a bomb blast killed four girls and wounded 12 in 1963.
And they stood in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s kitchen, where he planned and prayed about how to change the paradigm of a nation.
So it's no surprise that weeks later, the high schoolers still found it hard to vocalize the trip's impact.
Ten Charlotte Latin students joined 37 East Mecklenburg High School students March 26-28 on a civil rights tour of the South through Georgia and Alabama.
Weeks later, they gathered together in the East Meck media center for a reunion and debriefing.
The trip's goal was two-fold: to give students a more thorough understanding of the Civil Rights Movement and "to provide a context for conversations that continue to go on today about race, gender, discrimination and poverty," said Nick Wharton, director of diversity at Charlotte Latin, who went on the trip.
"I knew the context and the important figures," said Noland Griffith, a junior at Charlotte Latin. "But everywhere we went, I learned something new."
This was the ninth trip East Meck history teacher Larry Bosc had planned, but the first with students from another school.
Jackie Fishman, an English teacher at Charlotte Latin, used to team-teach humanities classes with Bosc at East Meck. She'd always wanted to make the trip with Bosc, but was never able to. She thought this would be a great way to bridge the public school-private school gap.
During the debriefing, the students discussed how they planned to apply the trip's lessons to their day-to-day lives.
One student said she now had a better understanding of how heritage affects identity.
Another student said he'd befriended a kid who always sat alone in the lunchroom.
Afterward, a number of Charlotte Latin and East Meck students exchanged telephone numbers and made plans to keep in touch.
"The fellowship was good from the start," said Griffith.
East Meck senior Mark Hatcher said going with Charlotte Latin students gave him an interesting perspective on the sites.
"You hear so much about Charlotte Latin being more affluent, but we were all putting ourselves in those shoes," said Hatcher. "There's really not much of a difference."
The world is changing - it's more diverse, more progressive, Wharton said.
But there's still work to be done.
"There are a lot of artificial lines that divide us," Wharton continued. "And it's powerfully important that they learn these lessons and bring them home to others issues of otherness. They're making it universal. ... And in a few of the kids, you can see a light has been turned on."
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