BOTTOM LINE Private school’s Black History Month project on slavery angers Black parents

But this year, the 9 and 10-year-olds at Trinity Lutheran School in Hawthorne will observe Black History Month by implementing an Underground Railroad Project in which they are required to “free” four Black “slaves” from the plantation owned by one of the school’s White teachers and transport the “slaves” to the North, which has been designated to be the office of one of the school’s administrators.

The “slaves” being used are four Black dolls, which a parent, Trina Burton, describes as being different shades of Black. She said the blacker the doll, the more important it is for the children to free it from slavery.

“Everything about this is maddeningly offensive,” Burton said.

The details of this Underground Railroad Project are printed on five pages and is quite thorough, complicated and intrusive in the children’s private lives, and also seems to include the participation of the school’s entire community. This project involves the fifth grade children in dealing with “runaway slaves,” bounty hunters who are chasing the slaves and payments from the “Mistress” for the return of missing slaves. The children must find “safe houses” for the slaves they free, as well as find jobs for them when they get to the North!

Item 13 on the third page of the instructions reads as follows: “This project does not take a break on the weekends or at night. The plantation owner and members of the community have the right to appear at anyone’s house and ask for the return of a slave.”

The instructions conclude as follows: “At the end of the project, teams will compile a video documentary of their experiences. Please video tape part or all of this experience. Have fun and good luck!!!”

Trinity Luthern School does have a relatively decent component of minority children among its 100 pupils. And needless to say, some Black parents are virtually apoplectic by this Underground Railroad Project. As of Tuesday, the parents of three students have refused their children’s participation in it, and even before the groundhog made his appearance, parents Narda Christopher and Burton have been trying unsuccessfully to convince the school’s administrator to stop this madness.

Burton, who forbade her daughter from participating, raised considerable ruckus over the project.

“I didn’t see anything positive in this project,” Burton said. “It is offensive to me. I found a lot of projects that they could have done, but no.

“I want to know why this? How could they do this? This is a touchy subject to people since we are still living in a world where racism exists. If they wanted the children to see a dark time in our history, why couldn’t they just read ‘Roots?’” Burton asked.

Christopher, who has two children in the school, engaged the principal, Fran Sanders, in a long series of well-reasoned arguments against the Underground Railroad Project, including this one:

“To take one of the largest crimes against humanity and make it a project that involves a re-enactment of slavery and include prizes and use dolls as symbols, trivializes the entire piece of history. Our children have the capacity to absorb lessons without the proverbial spoonful of sugar,” Christopher wrote in a lengthy email to Sanders.

“The thousands of slaves that perished attempting freedom through the Underground Railroad (and other means) should never be trivialized even for children to absorb. Our children’s depth of understanding is developed enough to take a lesson as it is without making it a game.”

Then Christopher asked Sanders these questions? “Has anyone in the psychological or sociological field weighed in on the possible fallout that may come from how our children interpret this lesson? Can we invite some guest speakers to a series of assemblies to dialog with our children and your staff when each aspect of Underground Railroad is reviewed?”

Sanders responded to Christopher’s email, thusly: “I am grateful for your input. The conversations I have had with you have weighed heavily on my mind and I am doing my best to come to a decision that will be best for our students and school. I hope that you know that this project was not taken lightly nor was it meant in any way to trivialize what happened in our nation’s history. I am meeting with teachers [Jan. 31] and I will have a decision on the project tomorrow. As always, I value your opinion and your support of our school.”

Sanders refused to discuss the thing with me; she punted me to the Rev. Lawrence Becker, senior pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church, to which the school is connected. As with all clergymen I’ve encountered, Becker immediately took the position that he’s right and is doing wonderful work and that I’m wrong, am “misunderstanding” the issue at hand, am a racist and a contentious evil doer. He was offended that I — a descendant of slaves — was offended by his school’s enactment of slavery! I kept calling it a “replication” and an “enactment” of slavery. He said it wasn’t. He said he was a “simulation” of slavery.

In any event, Becker said his school is doing what it’s doing because “We want people to understand what happened so we won’t repeat the same problem. We want people to actually go through the experience of slavery and learn to treat everybody with dignity and respect. One of the reasons we have a school is to help people become the best they can be.

“We want kids to know what’s wrong and to stop it when they see it,” Becker continued. “We want to get them into the concept of freedom and how the system can undermine freedom. This project is helping people. Off and on during the month of February, we will be asking the kids: ‘What did you learn about slavery? What did you learn about injustice? What did you learn about a corrupt system?”

I asked Becker how his school would teach World War II and the Holocaust? I asked if he’d have Jewish dolls getting gassed in concentration camps? He said: “I hope that we’d be just as hands-on about that as we are about slavery.”

Becker said the Underground Railroad Project is his school’s response to the California Department of Education’s 1998 Student Curriculum Guidelines for Grade 5, Section 5.4, paragraph 6, which reads: “Describe the introduction of slavery into America, the responses of slave families to their condition, the ongoing struggle between proponents and opponents of slavery, and the gradual institutionalization of slavery in the South.”

I talked to Tina Jung, information officer for the Department of Education in Sacramento, about this particular guideline and she said it is a “framework” created by the state to ensure that certain matters are taught in all of California’s public schools.

“It is written in broad strokes, but the content — the specifics of how you teach it are under the control of the local school districts,” Jung said. When I described how the Trinity School is teaching it, Jung said: “Now, this is a perfect opportunity for the parents to have a vigorous interaction with their school board.”