A DIFFERENT COUNTRY

BUS TOUR SHOWS WAKE FOREST STUDENTS A PART OF THE SOUTH THEY DIDN'T KNOW

By Tom Gillispie

SPECIAL TO THE JOURNAL

Tunica, Miss., and places like it felt like another planet - or maybe Angola or Afghanistan.

"I was shocked by it all," said Melissa Williams, one of 19 people who recently took a traveling sociology class at Wake Forest University.

"We went to Alabama on the civil-rights tour, and, in Mississippi, I felt like we weren't in the same country," Williams said.

She shuddered at the poverty and squalor in Tunica, which is in the poorest county in the nation's poorest state.

"People lived acres apart," said Williams, 20, a sociology/psychology major from Charlotte. "They don't have medical care, they don't have running water, they can't take care of their children. The condition of the housing in Tunica was appalling.

"It's hard to believe that there are American citizens living this way."

The class, called Social Stratification in the American South, was a 12-day bus tour that started in Winston-Salem and went through South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, with a detour through Memphis, Tenn., on the way home.

Jarrett Heard, 20, a sociology major, said he had figured that he had a leg up on the other 14 students. His family lives in Chattanooga, Tenn., he visits relatives in Alabama, and he is black. He said he thought that he knew what social stratification was all about.

But in Clarksdale, Miss., the class stayed in the Shack Up Inn, a bed-and-breakfast for people who want to stay in a sharecropper shack and get the feel of what it was like to live in slave quarters. For the first time on the tour, Heard said, he felt fear.

"I thought, 'Why are we here?'" Heard recalled after the trip, as the class met back on campus for a wrap-up session. "You can't replicate the experience of slavery, but I got an inkling of what it's like to be a slave. It was dark, and I got scared."

Earl Smith, who led the tour along with fellow professor Angela Hattery, smiled at the story.

"If that's the case, then he got what we wanted him to get," Smith said. "If any part of the trip was controversial, that was it," he said of the Shack Up Inn.

In a course that was two years in the planning, the 15 students, two professors and two alumni visited such key sites in civil-rights history as Selma and Birmingham in Alabama. They performed a one-day service project in New Orleans in the Cafe Reconcile, which teaches neighborhood students and residents food-service skills and helps them find jobs.

They visited some of the poorest areas in the country and saw places that are still called plantations and are worked by poor blacks. And long-time black residents of Hattiesburg, Miss., patiently told the students about their lives and gave them a tour of their community.

Class members also visited the formidable Mississippi State Prison, Parchman Farm. After leaving the prison, they went to a coin laundry and met a woman who was curious about them. When they said that they had been to the prison, she casually told them she had a brother in Parchman. They said they shuddered at the news.

The students spent a lot of time talking about what they were seeing, whether they were in Selma on the bus, at dinner or in a hotel, where they stayed four to a room.

The bus featured a horseshoe configuration that allowed on-the-road lectures. The students viewed videos and got assignments almost daily. They worked on their laptop computers offline on the bus and online at the hotels. There were no tests - the final exam came later - and they earned three hours of credit.

After their return, they again viewed a video of Bloody Sunday - March 7, 1965 - when Martin Luther King Jr. made his "We Shall Overcome" speech as activists tried to march from Selma to Montgomery. Police stopped them forcefully at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. One student pointed to the screen and said, "There's the bridge." They had walked across the bridge on the tour.

That, too, Smith said, was the point.

"You can't get that out of the best textbook," he said. "Tangibility was a key. It's important to actually physically see and touch it."

The students are still talking about the tour.

"Everyone has money concerns, like what to do on spring break," said Williams, who is white, "but what does that mean to people who can't put food on the table?"

Both Williams and Heard said they would like to return to Alabama to do service projects. They said that the class had made them more aware of the social fragmentation on campus. They said they hope they can be role models to bring students together.

And despite sharing society's fragmentation, they said, they hope that they can remain friends and help others.

"Had we come on our own," Williams said, "I don't think we would have had the same experience."