First Week Finished

Roosevelt intersects with California as a boarded-up warehouse. There’s a pothole you have to avoid, and then you’re running down south next to the park. At 19^th Street you take a right. After a few blocks, you pull up in front of one of three branches of the Carole Robertson Center for Learning.

The Center was named after one of the victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. When I showed up on Monday for orientation (which consisted mostly of six square blocks of forms, occasionally livened up by the seriously friendly staff members in charge of making sure I understood what I was signing) I was handed a brief article by Angela Davis. Davis writes,

…it occurred to me that the way the memory of that episode persists in popular imagination is deeply problematic. What bothers me most is that their names have been virtually erased: They are inevitably referred to as ‘the four Black girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing.’ Another traumatic moment occurred in 1964 when James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were killed in Mississippi. A decade earlier, Emmett Till was found at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. These boys, whose lives were also consumed by racist fury, still have names in our historical memory. Carole, Denise, Addie Mae, and Cynthia do not.

Part of my work at Carole Robertson will be an oral history project. This week I talked with Michelle, the teacher I will be working with most closely, about how we might go about it. She was very excited when I mentioned the possibility of such a project, especially when I floated the idea of one focused on the Center, which is celebrating its 35^th anniversary this year. She told me about how, right before I arrived, the director addressed students and parents and asked whether anyone knew who Carole Robertson was. None of the students did.

I’m at the Center in a very vague capacity as a “School Age and Youth Literacy Specialist.” I perch in various locations around the building and do my thing. On Tuesday, “my thing” consisted of helping to inventory and organize roughly ten million books provided to teachers through a grant. Wednesday, my thing was a different thing: hanging out in classrooms and getting to know the kids I’ll eventually be working with. Thursday was more meetings and lesson planning and getting to know more about the Center as a whole. Today: more kids, ice cream, games, and teaching approximately sixteen teenage and preteen girls how to fold fortunetellers, which they called cootie catchers. Next week and into the foreseeable future, the real thing: theater and creative writing and oral history oh my!

We’ll see what the kids like best—I’m guessing theater, and I’m trying to plan accordingly—but I’m going to try very hard not to lose sight of history. It’s the reason any of us are doing what we’re doing right now.

For now, I’m looking forward to the Labor Day weekend, as I have been throughout this first (exhausting, confusing, awesome) week. Like many other Fellows, I’m not sure that what I’m doing this year will be something I want to pursue for the rest of my life, but I’m trying to make everything I do meaningful, from lesson planning to helping clean the floor after snack time. The sense that the Carole Robertson Center is part of history helps.