Celebrating Black History Month Through Art, Word and Craft

Black heritage will be explored in a vibrant variety of ways in Peachtree Corners and throughout the county as libraries, schools and the community celebrate Black History Month.
Among school programs planned, Duluth Middle School will do a tribute to HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) and create a living wax museum of historical Black figures.

Coleman Middle School is working on a Feb. 24 Literacy Night featuring activities around the book “Ghost” by Jason Reynolds and presentations by students and community members.
Meanwhile, the Peachtree Corners Branch Library is preparing for family programs, including a Black history scavenger hunt and an Underground Railroad quilt block activity for children.

In another virtual program, Gwinnett County Public Library’s (GCPL) Ron Gauthier will discuss the moral and religious thoughts of abolitionist Frederick Douglass with Professor Scott C. Williamson of Kentucky’s Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary on Feb. 3 at 7 p.m.

Partnering for voting and civil rights history

Gauthier, the library system’s youth services community partnerships manager, is working with a library task force and school representatives to deliver a new series of lessons on national and local voting and civil rights history to Gwinnett County Public Schools (GCPS) students.

The program began in 2019 when Gauthier presented a program for Bay Creek Middle School at school media specialist Mona Pop’s request.

Customized to meet teachers’ requests, the program became popular and has expanded to other middle schools and a couple of high schools in a virtual format.

The task force is working to match the program to the students’ social studies curriculum with a goal of making it available to all eighth-graders. Their work has been enhanced with funding from a Library of Congress grant, “Teaching with Primary Sources.”

Margaret Penn, the library system’s director of Branch Services, said the grant is designed to “connect students with original documents of history and photos, anything from legislation to newspapers to first-person accounts.”

A series of 55-minute programs accompanied by lesson plans features lectures and visuals and is “loaded with primary sources” from the Library of Congress, the Digital Library of Georgia and other sources, Gauthier said.

He said children have been fascinated to learn of the youth who participated in the Civil Rights movement, such as students who protested segregation through lunch counter sit-ins. They’ve learned about Claudette Colvin, who was arrested at the age of 15 in Montgomery, Ala. for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus, nine months before Rosa Parks.

One of the Library of Congress video clips the program uses is an excerpt from “CBS News Eyewitness: The Albany Movement,” broadcast in 1962. In the video, teenage demonstrators are arrested for singing and praying in front of the segregated public library.

“The act of civil disobedience, actually kneeling in front of the library, is a really powerful video image,” Gauthier said.

Pop, the Bay Creek media specialist, said Gauthier’s presentation is one of students’ favorite Black History Month activities.

“The project is well-designed, thoroughly documented and Mr. Gauthier’s presentation is captivating and memorable with an extensive array of supporting documents, photographs, illustrations, newspaper clippings, stories and other related content that engage students in critical thinking and help them develop knowledge, skills and analytical abilities,” Pop said.

“We are looking forward to having Mr. Gauthier this February again at our school as our media center’s special guest to celebrate Black History Month and learn more about the struggle for social justice and the efforts of the many civil rights activists against segregation, Black voter suppression and discriminatory practices.”

Dr. Dawn Jo Alexander, a GCPS teacher leader, said the partnership of the nation’s library with Gwinnett’s school and library systems is “a great example of organizations coming together to make teaching and learning engaging and authentic.”

“The LOC has thousands on thousands of primary sources that the Gwinnett County library system and schoolteachers can use to teach history in an age-appropriate and authentic manner. These resources are not just limited to Black History, they also tell the story of American History,” Alexander said. “At the end of the day that is what we want, authentic, rigorous learning that will stick with students for years to come.”

Mining history close to home

GCPL is looking for current and former Gwinnett residents willing to give first-hand accounts of how they were impacted by the voting rights and Civil Rights movements in this county.
Interviews will be recorded and maintained in the library’s first-ever collection of oral stories developed in-house, with funding from its Teaching with Primary Sources grant. Excerpts will be used in library programs about the Civil Rights movement for audiences of all ages, Penn said.

Of particular interest to the library are people who actively participated in organized movements for justice and equality for Black people; people who were personally impacted by segregation, discrimination, denial of the right to vote and other injustices; and people who lived in Gwinnett during the Civil Rights milestones.

“We really wanted to include a local component, so that people could see what happened down the street from where they currently live, basically,” Penn said. “And so, part of that is finding those first-person accounts to include in our materials so that students hear not just about the big events that many of us learned about in school, but also about how those events connected at the state level and at the local level.”

The first recording, produced in December, features a person who attended the only school for Black students in Gwinnett County for decades and who later, as an adult, helped spare it from demolition, Penn said.

Plans are to convert that school, the former Hooper Renwick School, into a museum and a new library branch.

The library system hopes to gather many more first-person accounts of experiences from the era of the Civil Rights movement.

“The library is an educational institution, and that’s for all ages, all members of the community,” Penn said. “Part of educating the community is educating us about each other. This is a big county, with a lot of people in it, and it’s still growing by quite a bit. Learning about each other’s history and culture and traditions is important for us to be able to live well together here.”

You can find a “Share your story” form at gwinnettpl.org/news/civil-and-voting-rights.

Find events and programs at Gwinnett Public Libraries