National History Day, Iowa state winners

The Iowa team of Allison Stutting, Ali Watkins, Halle Wilmott, and Dan Stutting performed their original drama on the “The 1963 Birmingham Children’s Crusade” at the nationals level competition for National History Day 2014. As they developed their project, the high school students interviewed storytellers and, after winning at the state level, made a journey to Birmingham to meet with two more. They said, “The interviews gave us so much insight to what Birmingham was like in the 1960s, especially regarding racial tension in the South.”  See the evocative drama they wrote and performed here.

School Visit

Storyteller Virginia Jones made a connection with a former teaching colleague through Kids in Birmingham 1963: “I had a wonderful visit with Mrs. DeLaine Ragland’s third grade class. DeLaine went on the Kids site and found me. She just asked me to come and chat with her class. They had been studying about the Children’s March and some about the Civil Rights movement. I talked about what it was like at Shades Cahaba Elementary School in Homewood, Alabama, when I went there in 5th-7th grade. What is ironic is that I went to school with no blacks my whole life, then ended up integrating an all-black school/faculty in Columbus, Georgia in 1968.”

Photo credit: Virginia Jones