Mars Estates Celebrates Black History Month

Leo Tompkins knew who the Rev. Martin Luther King was and how he led the civil rights movement.

But Tompkins, a fifth-grader at in Essex, did not understand just how deep segregation once ran throughout the country. He just didn’t understand why whites and blacks once couldn’t drink out of the same water fountain, eat at the same restaurant or sit together on a bus.

“Why would whites think there is anything wrong with drinking out of the same water fountain?” asked Tompkins, 10, who is white. “We’re all the same.”

It was questions like that and the discussion that followed that Lee Myerhoff Hendler wanted to engage as she spoke to Mars Estates fifth graders this week as part of a lesson on civil rights during Black History Month.

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Hendler is the project director with Freedom’s Feast, a Baltimore-based non-profit that tries to educate families about American holidays and history so they “can pass on the stories, values and behaviors we care about to our next generation of American citizens and leaders,” according to the organization’s website.

Freedom’s Feast was established following the as a way of offering young people engaging ways to better understand American history and values.

“We don’t believe in just lecturing,” Hendler said. “By making the lessons engaging and starting a discussion, it allowed the students to stop and really understand the depth of such times as the civil rights movement.”

Prior to meeting with Hendler on Tuesday, students at Mars Estates spent time learning about different historical figures of the civil rights movement. This includes Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, and Ruby Bridges, who was 6 in 1960 when she became the first African-American child to attend an all-white elementary school in the south.

“I think seeing the story of Ruby Bridges opened a lot of the students’ eyes,” said Mars Estates fifth-grade teacher Julie Hendricks. “It showed them that children played a big part in the civil rights movement.

“It was a story they could really relate to, especially as they looked around the room ad saw they children of all races and backgrounds now sit in a class together and don’t think about the color of their skin.”

Fifth-grader Kamari Bailey, 11, gained a greater appreciation for the civil rights movement this week. As part of the lesson, each student was asked to speak to a relative that lived during that time. Bailey spoke to her grandmother, who painted a very real picture of Baltimore during the segregation era.

“It was amazing to learn what blacks were not allowed to do then,” said Bailey, who is African-American. “People were willing to die, if necessary, in the name of freedom. I never really understood before this week what people had to go through just to get equal rights.”  

Who do you consider the most heroic person of the civil rights movement? Tell us in the comments section below.