Can you imagine coming all the way from New Zealand to Scottsboro, Alabama? Holly Mason can. We caught up with her to talk about her school trip to the United States to follow the Civil Rights movement from Washington, DC down.
What’s your name?
Holly Mason
And you’re in town from where?
We’re in town from Auckland, New Zealand.
You’re on a class trip?
We’re here on a Black Civil Rights trip
That’s really powerful. All the way here from New Zealand for that. How did that program come about?
We study all this kind of stuff in our course at school and through the company Travel Bound, we just said it would be really cool to go on a trip like this and they offered it. We just did some research about it and here we are.
That is amazing. And you said there were 20 students?
Yes, 20 students.
That’s impressive.
A lot of schools will go on tours even here in America. We’ll go on tours showing the history of America maybe up the coast or whatever and then they write a story about it.
Do you guys do anything like that?
I don’t know if we will for this trip because we’ve already studied it and done our assessments on it, but we’ll probably do some sort of project to show the school or something.
So, right now is it the school season in New Zealand?
It’s actually term holiday. We’re finishing term one and going into term two. So we’re going into the winter season back home.
You had visited Birmingham, Washington…
Yeah, Montgomery, Washington…
From those places, what was one of your more memorable experiences so far here in America?
I think what was really cool for me was in Washington. We went to the Capitol Building, and that was amazing. We have nothing like that in New Zealand so it was so cool to see.
That is awesome. How did your trip or your team find out about Unclaimed Baggage? Why was this on the bucket list?
A couple of the girls were saying they’d seen a show or a documentary about you. And we were all talking about it and seeing it on Instagram and I don’t know where. And we were just like, we have to go there!
Very cool! Did you guys just get here?
Yeah, we just got to Scottsboro this morning, and we’ve just been at the museum for the Scottsboro Boys.