Inside the only high school in our small northeast Ohio town, 50 mostly African-American students stood on risers outside the lunchroom, uncharacteristically still as they enacted a living museum in honor of Black History Month.
Outfitted in costumes from home or the high school's theater department, the earnest young high-schoolers, along with a handful of teachers and staff, looked the part of such notable African-American figures as Alice Walker, who in 1983 became the first woman of color to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Dressed in period clothes of a time, they portrayed older men like the great, bow-tied former slave turned orator, author and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, and young men their age, like 14-year-old Emmett Till, who launched the civil rights movement when he was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly flirting with a white woman who later recanted her story.
Some carried the symbols of their notoriety, a tennis racket for the black female star of the sport, Serena Williams, one of his books, "The Fire Next Time," for author James Baldwin.
Trayvon Martin, meanwhile, whose 2012 shooting death by a neighborhood watchman while walking through his father's girlfriend's gated neighborhood in Florida, became the catalyst for the Black Lives Matters movement, wore simply jeans and the dark hoodie that defined him.
Sojourner Truth, the escaped slave who became a voice for abolition and women's rights with her famous "Ain't I a woman?" speech, carried nothing but the clothes on her back.
And yet it was the eyes of the students that held the stories for me, their hope-filled gaze uplifted and beyond my own, as if they were seeing the visions that portended the great accomplishments of the heroes and heroines representing a race I can only try to understand.
"It was important for me to portray Sojourner Truth as well as I could," said senior Taijanae Johnson, who was curious from a young age about the history of her race, despite not being taught much either at home or school. "They never taught us in elementary school about black history, except Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King."
Johnson said she began to educate herself in middle school, even going so far as to teach her father about people like Emmett Till. In high school, she was one of the first students to enroll in a new class, "The Black Experience," and when the opportunity came to be part of the living museum, she was ready, especially to play the role of a woman like Sojourner Truth.
"To be an empowered female and an empowered black woman during her time, that was something you did not see a lot," Johnson said. Portraying her, "I felt empowered."
History buffs have long espoused the importance of learning about the past. Openly telling and accepting the stories from a society's past sets free the secrets, lifts truth to its rightful place, helps explain the conditions of the present and informs the future so that past problems don't repeat themselves and new solutions can take their place.
The originators of Black History Month, including Harvard-trained historian Carter Goodson, who was born in 1875, who dedicated his career to the field of African-American history and who lobbied extensively to establish Black History Month as a nationwide institution, must have known that.
Today, not just at Kent, Ohio's Theodore Roosevelt High School, but in high schools in Pennsylvania and Florida and Louisiana _ across a nation that we white people can't figure out how to run without shutting it down; where we can't come to terms with the effects of our privilege; yet the ghosts of slavery and oppression live on in such behaviors as racial profiling, educators see an opportunity in Black History Month. Not just for uninformed adults on the outside of a community, but for a new generation of young people, whose early education might help fortify a better path than the one we're on.
"African-Americas helped build this country," says Tahira Habeeb, one of the organizers of the living museum, who advises Project Unity, the African-American club she started when she was a student at the Kent high school 27 years ago. "The point is to bring all this to light. And while ultimately, of course, we'd like to see black history taught at all levels of schooling all year long, we have to start somewhere."
For Habeeb, studying black history in such a concentrated way means giving credit where credit is long overdue.
"We all have a story, we all make a contribution," says Habeeb. "To downplay that or ignore it altogether is wrong."
For 17-year-old Johnson, studying black history offers an affirmation of her own fascination, and a hope of what could be.
"All so many of us know are the stereotypes," Johnson told me. "Learning about others is going to help people be more open to other people, to know no race is superior to another."
For all of us, opening ourselves to the unsung stories that complete the picture of a nation, is the righteous act of a responsible citizenry, if not for us, then for our children of all colors, who deserve better, on whom our hope relies.
It was Sojourner Truth herself who once said: "Perhaps the pioneers in the slave's cause will be as much surprised as any to find that with all their looking, there remained so much unseen."
