7. Black

HISTORY OUTSIDE THE BOX Black Studies classes create miniature museums for elementary students

602.12.20 SPREAD DESIGN BY L. LOCHMOELLER & R. PATNEY I hope the kids learn a lot from these boxes because Black History Month is supposed to shine light on the great African Americans that have given a positive contribution to our country.” “ -Paris Hamilton, 11 I n December 2019, Black Studies students made miniature museums in boxes that depict various important events and people throughout Black history. This month, high schoolers are bringing these boxes to Ladue elementary schools to share some of the many stories of Black history.

Black Studies is co-taught by English teacher Brandon Murray and history teacher Ashley Lock. The class focuses on Black history and culture and is offered during both semesters, broken up into Black Studies I and II.

“Our mission is to center Black culture in a space where it’s not always centered,” Murray said. “We show students the rich and expansive history and literary tradition of Blacks, not only in America, but also on the African continent.”

The students were given a time period from 1619, the year the first ship arrived with enslaved Africans, to 1870, the middle of Reconstruction. Lock and Murray left it to the students to decide what went into each box.

“Even though the Underground Railroad wasn’t an actual railroad, we had a student turn their box into a railroad,” Murray said. “Inside the box were certificates related to the services of Harriet Tubman to the United States. Henry ‘Box’ Brown is a person who shipped himself in a box from the deep south into Philadelphia, so someone put a doll-like figure into the box to exemplify his journey from the south to the north.”

Throughout the project, the students were able to look further into some of the stories and people that have not been represented throughout history and retell them in their boxes. Junior Paris Hamilton chose to make her box about Rebecca Lee Crumpler, one of the first Black female physicians in the U.S.

“I personally loved this project because I was able to shine light on a woman who no one knows because [she] is not really spoken of today,” Hamilton said. “[Crumpler] went to a school in Massachusetts, an all-women’s school, and she was the only African American to graduate from that school. I think it’s important, especially to the kids who will see the boxes, to learn the obstacles she had to overcome to become a physician.”

The projects will be brought to the Ladue elementary schools in order to educate the younger generation of students. The boxes will be set up in a makeshift museum, and kids will be able to pick up the items inside the boxes to learn in an interactive way.

“Right now, the plan is that, through a Google Form, teachers will have the opportunity to ‘check out’ the boxes,” District Social Studies and English Coordinator Laila Crabtree said. “The boxes will be sent to that teacher to use with their classroom and then returned, so it can be checked out again. The Curriculum Office will facilitate sending out the boxes.”

This project has inspired the creation of additional Black history curriculum for the next school year.

This upcoming summer, teams of teachers will be creating hands-on Black history lessons that will become a permanent part of elementary school curriculum, in addition to the already made boxes. Junior and Black Studies student Andrea Swihart-DeCoster hopes that the new curriculum will give Black kids a more detailed depiction of their history.

“When I was in elementary school, there wasn’t a lot of education about African Americans in school,” Swihart-DeCoster said. “Young African American kids are not really exposed to a lot of history about people like them, so there is not a lot they can relate to. I think it’s important for them to get different views about how different people have impacted the world.”

Ultimately, the goal of the project is to bring lost stories of Black history to life and educate elementary school children on those stories. The boxes were a creative extension of all the knowledge the high school students learned last semester, and they aim to take a step further than the commonly taught names of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.

“We wanted [Black Studies students] to see how they could extend their learning, along with helping younger students understand that there are other disparate voices out there who are not often heard,” Murray said. “We wanted to do that in a way that was fun and approachable, so even a fourth-grade student could look at these boxes and understand the story being told.” LUCY LOCHMOELLER news staff RHEA PATNEY news editor

What is in a box?

Junior Lauryn Donovan creates box about the underground railroad

Quilt: Quilts were used in the Underground Railroad to send encoded messages. The patterns represented codes and helped slaves escape to freedom. Haitian Money: The money represents the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791 and ended in 1804 with Haiti’s independence from France. This was the only successful slave rebellion in history that resulted in sovereignty. 1. 2.

(Photos by Burke Howe)

54th Regiment Badge: This regiment was the second Black regiment to ever be created. It was organized in the northern states during the Civil War. Alexander L.Twilight: This book represents Alexander L. Twilight, the first Black person to earn a bachelors degree from a United States college. 3. 4.

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