Standing along the edge of a stage in the Evanston Family Focus Center’s auditorium, a line of fifth and sixth graders read a list of questions to God on Wednesday, guided by text taped to the back of hand-drawn illustrations they held in front of them.
“Why did you give me thick lips, a broad nose and kinky hair?” asked one of the students. “Why did you create someone who receives the hated stare?”
Taking the stage decorated with the colors red, black, and green and the pictures of famous blacks — from jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald to hall-of-fame baseball pitcher Satchel Paige — students in Family Focus’ after-school program presented “The Black Prayer,” a poem by an unknown author. In the dramatized poem, a black child bemoans his physical characteristics.
Asking why he is “the color of darkness, of tired, beaten streets,” the writer of the prayer expresses a deep shame, said Family Focus teacher Djorgy LeRoy.
But, speaking from a balcony above the stage, LeRoy played God and answered the prayers of his class. Rather than making black children the color of darkness, he said they were made in the color of coal, the origin of diamonds.
As part of Black History Month, students between third and eighth grade are giving weekly presentations centered around the theme “This we know for sure,” LeRoy said. Family Focus, 2010 Dewey Ave., serves third to eighth grade black and Latino students and their families. The after-school program meets Monday through Thursday from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., and Fridays from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Weinberg senior Lakeysha Givens, who teaches seventh and eighth grade students at Family Focus through the federal program America Reads, said the marriage of the history represented on the stage and the vocal presentation of that heritage fulfills two needs of the program’s participants. The first is history itself.
“I think it’s important to definitely emphasize it during Black History Month,” Givens said. “It’s something they may not come across at home or at school.”
But Givens said the responsibility doesn’t stop at education. The program also fulfills students’ need to develop a positive self-image.
“A lot of what I come across here is low self-esteem and low confidence,” she said.
Givens said she thinks highlighting success stories like Paige’s and Fitzgerald’s, as well as her presence as a black female college student, will debunk stereotypes that take away hope from younger students.
After the presentation ended, fifth and sixth grade girls group leader Dorothy K. Barton reminded the students that they were made in God’s image.
“Please, always know that nobody can take that away unless you give that person the power to take your queenship or kingship,” she said.
Crawford Richmond, departing interim director of the center, said black history is emphasized at Family Focus year round but must be especially visible during February.
“If you don’t know where you came from, then you have no way of getting footing,” he said.
With a deep sense of reverence, Barton called the students’ attention together and led them in “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the black national anthem, before Wednesday’s performance.
“We really want Martin Luther King, Jr. and all our elders before us, to hear us today, ” she said before they began to sing. “We want to sing with passion.”
LeRoy said the programming will tie this passion with further education about contributions that different blacks have made.
“You show them a picture of Rosa Parks, and they’ll immediately be able to tell you, ‘Oh, that’s Rosa Parks,'” he said. “But if you ask them what she did, they’re not so sure.”
Crawford said the research and practice that the students put into their presentations will accomplish these goals — and ultimately lead to improvement in the future.
“If history wasn’t important, people wouldn’t try to create new history,” he said.
