Faith Clark, 18, stared curiously at the poster of an ancient, dark-skinned figure wearing a golden crown before whipping out her smartphone. Underneath the poster, which was taped to a wall in a second-floor hallway at Oak Park and River Forest High School, a QR code prompted her to scan.
“This looks like it was during Egyptian times,” said Clark as she fiddled with her phone last Friday afternoon.
The visual depicts Mansa Musa’s famous 14th Century pilgrimage to Mecca. The Mali ruler, one of the wealthiest people in all of human history, is credited with Islam’s proliferation throughout West Africa during the 25 years of his reign, from roughly 1312 to 1337 C.E.
“He had so much gold that when he went to visit a town, it drove down the value of everybody else’s gold,” said Jason Spoor-Harvey, OPRF’s history division chair.
“Really? Wow,” Clark said. “That’s cool.”
Spoor-Harvey is working with students from his history classes and various extracurricular clubs to tape a total of 150 images “celebrating black excellence” on hallway walls at OPRF for the duration of Black History Month. Since the posters have started appearing, Spoor-Harvey said, there have been many of those Aha! moments.
“A lot of times students and even teachers will be walking and they’ll see something that catches their eye in the image, stop and scan it,” he said. “For instance, they’ll see that castle downstairs, this great castle on this beach with beautiful water. Then they’ll stop, scan it and see that it was a fort from the triangle slave trade.”
Spoor-Harvey said the students retrieved many of the images from Google, before blowing them up to poster size. They were also responsible for creating presentations that were uploaded to a website where those who scan the QR codes are directed for more information.
Students Sylvia Battersby, 17, Andrea Krunick, 15, and Nadia Fields, 17, worked together on creating a poster, taped to a wall on the fourth-floor — which is dedicated to notable African American singers — of musician and songstress Billie Holiday.
Scan the image’s accompanying QR code, and you’re taken to a brief biography of Holiday’s life and career, and you can even watch a YouTube clip of her singing.
“She was a blues and jazz singer who really intertwined music and civil rights,” said Krunick, explaining why she and her classmates selected an image of Holiday to feature in this virtual black history museum. “It was cool to see someone so famous who was a woman, especially at that time. She sort of, like, came from nothing.”
Spoor-Harvey said that he wants to feature these African American figures so prominently throughout the school in order to shed light on historically significant personalities who may otherwise go unmentioned during conventional history lessons.
“I teach African history, so we talk about how our history classes are white-washed and what that means and how that supports the racial hierarchy,” Spoor-Harvey said while standing near a poster of Claudette Colvin.
On March 2, 1955, Colvin was arrested because she wouldn’t give up her seat while riding a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama — nine months before Rosa Parks would go on to make the kind of black history that’s much more mainstream.
Colvin was named as a plaintiff in the federal court case, Browder v. Gayle, that ultimately led to the Supreme Court ruling in 1956 that Alabama’s bus segregation was unconstitutional. Her role in history, however, has been downplayed for various reasons.
According to author Phillip Hoose, who wrote an award-winning book about Colvin called “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,” black civil rights leaders at the time declined to press Colvin’s case through the courts because they “worried they couldn’t win with her,” Hoose told the New York Times in 2009.
“Words like ‘mouthy,’ ’emotional’ and ‘feisty’ were used to describe her,” Hoose said, adding that Parks was considered “stolid, calm, unflappable.”
Colvin told the New York Times that, “My mother told me to be quiet about what I did. She told me: ‘Let Rosa be the one. White people aren’t going to bother Rosa — her skin is lighter than yours and they like her.'”
When Colvin became pregnant by a married man, any thought of making her the symbol of the desegregation fight was completely banished from the minds of black leaders.
OPRF student Honora Nudnik, who was in the hallway working on her laptop near the Colvin poster, said she didn’t know the woman the image depicted. She did know Rosa Parks.
“It’s really important to educate ourselves,” said Krunick. “I think the struggles and successes of these prominent figures in society shouldn’t be ignored just because of their skin color.”
CONTACT: michael@oakpark.com