Forty Bolles Upper School students, including those in Carrie Ezzell’s Advanced Spanish Conversation class and members of Bolles’ Black Student Union, traveled to St. Augustine on February 27 to learn more about the history of slavery, Afrolatino culture and civil rights efforts in the area.

The group’s first stop was at the Willie Galimore Community Center to meet Gwendolyn Duncan, President of ACCORD (Anniversary to Commemorate the Civil Rights Demonstrations). Then they embarked on a two-hour trolley tour of the ACCORD Freedom Trail. With historian David Nolan narrating, students learned about more than 400 years of Black history in St. Augustine, focusing most heavily on the fight for Civil Rights in the 1960s.

After lunch, the group headed to Fort Mose State Park where they were assigned groups for a digital scavenger hunt that led them around the museum’s exhibits and asked them to provide photo, text and video evidence of their learning. The Spanish students, who have been learning about the cultural and linguistic contributions of Afrolatinos this month, shared their knowledge of Fort Mose, a free settlement of escaped enslaved persons during Florida’s Spanish Colonial period, one of the earliest stops on the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad Network and an example of one of the few that ran south instead of north.