ROCK ISLAND, Ill. — Students in the after-school program at the MLK Center in Rock Island have transformed a chalkboard wall in their classroom into a mural for Black History Month.
"I was like, 'I want you guys to look on the internet and find things about Black history that really stands out to you and things that make you feel a certain type of way,'" said CJ Dilworth, the youth service assistant at the center. "I said you can put whatever you want, the good, the bad, the ugly, whatever resonates with you."
Sixth through ninth-grade students spent an afternoon putting the wall together, drawing pictures, writing quotes and remembering famous Black icons.
"I wrote a Tupac song, and then I wrote a whole bunch of Black names around it," said sixth grader Taliyah Toneyslater. "And I wrote a couple of quotes (by Maya Angelou and Muhammad Ali) over there."
Others added "I am Black history," "Young, gifted and Black," and "One month can't hold our history."
"It's true really, one month can't hold our history," fifth-grader London Johnson said. "This is a big, basically, like a whole community of different Black people, different things said by different Black people. It's just all squished together, and it makes it look so nice. It just really explains what our culture is."
Sixth grader Aiden Leihsng wanted to draw something invented by a Black person, so he researched and found that a street letter mailbox was invented by a Black man in the 1800s.
"I think that's pretty cool, like, more people should know about it," Leihsng.
The kids said they all learned a lot from doing it, too.
"Like, how significant (Black history) really is," Leihsng said. "There's so much stuff on here. And just by looking at this wall, you can tell how complicated it can be and how important each and everything on here is."
"There were even some quotes I didn't even know about by people I knew," Johnson said. "Famous Black people I knew about, but didn't know that they said just such these philosophic things and stuff."
"It was a really good example of how people see you and how you respond to certain things," Toneyslater said. "I didn't know who Ella Baker is and I decided to write that quote to find out more about her."
Dilworth said he wanted to give them a creative outlet to learn about Black history in a positive way.
"I think it's important to put them in positions to be able to resonate with those things and be able to make decisions for themselves on what they think Black history is, how it affects them, what they can do to change it," he said.
Dilworth added he was impressed watching the students work. Neither he nor any other staff member added to the wall, so it could be all be done by the students.
"It's amazing that they understand a lot of things, it's sad, but it's also cool that they understand the things that are on this wall. They understand the differences and things like that," Dilworth said. "They could have put negative things on this board. And they chose to focus on the good parts of Black history to put on this board, and I thought that was really dope."
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