For 17 years, Canyon School second graders participated in The Black Living History Museum by selecting a book about a famous black American, writing a report and then pretending to be that person in the school gym, alongside 60 of their peers.
“Unfortunately,” said museum founder Marlene Morris, “students worked so hard, but it was difficult for them to be understood because the gym was noisy and crowded. We [the second-grade teachers] decided to change the format.”
This year the museum became a stage performance and Darrell Goode, NAACP Santa Monica-Venice Branch president, who attended the inaugural performance on February 24, called it “exceptional.”
“This should be a standard in schools; it needs to be duplicated,” Goode said. “You get a chance to absorb it and see how the children absorb it by living and breathing it, which is so important. We work with discrimination problems, but this is the better way to do it—educate, so discrimination can be prevented.”
The play, written by Morris and students, begins with abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass (Max Cowie), Harriet Tubman (Cara Banks) and Sojourner Truth (Ann Monjazeb).
“All of the students performed ‘as if’ they were the famous African American, just like they did in the museum, except that their speeches were within a historical context,” Morris said.
The early 1900’s included the recognition of scientists, inventors and explorers such as George Washington Carver (Dara Imankhan), Bessie Coleman (Maya Casanova), Madame C.J. Walker (Ella Mastrippolito) Charles Drew (Samson Raskin) and Matthew Henson (Mia Pearson).
Famous athletes Jesse Owens (Jack Sullivan), Muhammad Ali (Ansel Waisler) and Jackie Robinson (Giacomo Rivers-Altieri) said they were not allowed to eat in the same restaurants as their teammates. A student narrator commented, “Famous athletes are treated like royalty today. How did things change?”
This provided the perfect segue to the Civil Rights era and students who portrayed Thurgood Marshall (Maddox Brien), Ruby Bridges (Sadie Sabin), Rosa Parks (Presley Wernick) and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Teix McDonald).
Then it was famous writers and musicians such as Maya Angelou (Lia Tompkins), Langston Hughes (Lucas Gutheim) and Louis Armstrong (Colin Rahimian). The play closed with Oprah Winfrey (Ava Noland) interviewing Barack and Michelle Obama (Duncan Mahony and Ava Wolff).
Students sang songs, including “Freedom,” “If You Miss Me at the Back of the Bus,” “We Shall Not Be Moved” and “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” accompanied on the guitar by the school’s drama teacher, Peter Kors.
The loose structure of the play allowed Mona Huizar’s and Laura Goldstein’s classes to customize performances.
“I am very proud of what my students have learned,” said Morris, a Lori Petrick Excellence in Education award winner, who will retire this year after 18 years in the classroom. Prior to teaching, Morris worked for 20 years as a family and marriage and creative arts therapist.
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