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In Lansing schools, 'HistoryMakers' tell their stories

Vickki Dozier
Lansing State Journal
Hugh Clarke Jr. calls out a student to give a teacher, lined up behind him, a hug as he talks with fifth- and sixth-grade students at Hope Middle School in Holt.

HOLT — Hugh Clarke watched 400 or so Hope Middle School fifth and sixth-grade students file into the school gymnasium, full of energy and vigor.

They sat down cross-legged, talking excitedly, waiting for the rest of their classmates to come in so they could listen to “the judge” and do the “Hope Wave.”

“I’m a district court judge in Lansing, and I’ve adopted your school,” Clarke told the packed gymnasium.

Clarke was at Hope Middle School as part of the sixth annual Back to School With The HistoryMakers. The national program made its debut at three schools in the Lansing area Sept. 25. The theme of the day was “COMMIT.”

Ingham County Judge Hugh Clarke Jr., takes a selfie Sept. 25 with fifth- and sixth-grade students at Hope Middle School in Holt. Clarke was speaking to them about the nationwide HistoryMakers project.

At its core, The HistoryMakers, is committed to preserving the untold personal stories of successful African Americans, both the well-known and the unsung.

“The program is a benefit to young African American kids because they should see that you have a lot of positive individuals and people should understand that you can be somebody,” said Clarke. “You can get somewhere.”

At Hope, Clarke talked about growing up in Detroit. He talked about the riots of 1967 when he was 12 years old.

“We could see the stores burning, people looting, snipers at night, the National Guard rolling down the street,” said Clarke. “My father made us sleep on the floor because of all the shooting.”

They moved in 1968. Clarke was bused to a predominately white school district. He and his friend, Carl Floyd, were the only two black students in the school.

“I was a light-skinned red-haired kid whose name was Hugh,” said Clarke. “Carl and I told them we weren’t going anywhere. We weren’t scared. My folks didn’t raise me to be scared.”

He had a mission. He wanted to become a lawyer, and he wasn’t going to let anyone stop him. His parents wanted him to have a career, not just a job.

Clarke brought evidence of his success. On an overhead projector, he showed photos of himself with Shaquille O’Neal, Isiah Thomas, Jesse Jackson, Earvin “Magic” Johnson and the late Tupac Shakur. He talked with the students about how he came to know them.

“When Tupac Shakur needed someone to represent him in a case, he called me,” said Clarke. “He called me because of my reputation. He wanted a good defense attorney. He called me because failure was not an option.”

In front of a photo of him and Isiah Thomas, Ingham County Judge Hugh Clarke Jr., talks to students at Hope Middle School in Holt. Clarke was speaking to them about the HistoryMakers project. HistoryMakers is a nationwide effort to explain the importance of education and tell the story of well-known and unsung African Americans.

“Because of my relationship with some of the Pistons I knew, I would get invited to the NBA All-Star Game and had a chance to hang out with these guys,” said Clarke.

“Why? Because I was good at what I did and failure was not an option.”

Clarke told the students they would have the opportunity to take a “selfie” with him at the conclusion of the presentation. They let out a loud cheer.

In 2008, six Lansing-area folks each were interviewed by the HistoryMakers. Alongside Clarke, there was Michigan State University microbiology and molecular genetics professor Julius Jackson, MSU engineering professor Percy Pierre, longtime arts and education advocate Eva Evans, Lansing genealogist Melvin Holley and his wife, educator and arts activist Verna Holley.

Last month, three of them went into Lansing area classrooms to give their testimony of pursuing an education, overcoming challenges on their paths to success and making a difference in their communities.

Clarke went to Hope Middle School; Evans, a former Lansing schools deputy superintendent, was at Reo Elementary School; and Jackson went to El-Haj Malik El-Shabazz Academy.

“I plan to go in, work with the kids, let them see me, ask questions and keep them encourage, four times each year,” said Clarke. “Anybody can go once and not go back for another year, but I want them to see me and let the teachers in the district know I am here to help these kids.”

Students walk by a sign welcoming Ingham County Judge Hugh Clarke, Jr., Sept. 25, 2015, as they prepare for an assembly at Hope Middle School in Holt. Clarke was speaking to them about the HistoryMakers project. HistoryMakers is a nationwide effort to explain the importance of education and tell the story of well-known and unsung African Americans.

HistoryMakers was founded by Julieanna Richardson in 1999. As a nine-year-old living in Newark, Ohio, Richardson couldn’t relate to Black history because, she says, there wasn’t anything that represented her.

The only black history Richardson had studied in school was about slavery, and George Washington Carver.

When the teacher asked the students to come in prepared to talk about their family backgrounds, Richardson says she felt embarrassed and ashamed.

“Other kids were saying things like ‘I’m part German,’ and they seemed to know exactly who they were,” said Richardson. “When it was my turn, I said something like Negro or African, Indian and I said French because I didn’t want to be left out. The teacher looked at me like I was a fraud. She knew I was lying. Which I was. I was 9. That feeling of not knowing stayed with me. Everybody wants to feel like they came from something.”

Richardson wanted to ensure it didn’t happen to other children.

The nonprofit is committed to preserving, developing and providing easy access to an archival collection of thousands of African American video oral histories. They are headquartered in Chicago.

The first group of HistoryMakers was interviewed in 2000. The digital archives are designed to promote and celebrate the successes and to document movements, events and organizations that are important to the African American community and to American society.

“The digital interviews are fascinating because they’re broken down into different segments,” said Clarke. “If someone’s talking about growing up in the 1930s, you can key in and click on just that portion of their interview. It might be a three or four-hour interview, but you can just click onto that particular two-minute segment if that’s what it is.”

Richardson says they now have more than 1,000 HistoryMakers’ stories in the digital archives, which can be used for teaching black history, but also for art, science and literature. Recently, the HistoryMakers designated the Library of Congress to serve as the permanent repository for its collection of interviews. The goal is to create an archive of 5,000 interviews.

“I didn’t want any kid to feel like I felt when I didn’t know my history and didn’t know I had one,” said Richardson. “I wanted them to feel the elation that I felt when I learned how much the African-American community had done.”

Richardson says she was concerned that although she knew blacks had many accomplishments, every Black History Month you keep hearing the same names mentioned over and over.

“Everyone in our archives, they were influenced by someone,” she said. “That’s very, very important. It could be their parent, it could be a teacher, it could be someone they saw or read about. And with the issues happening in urban America now, there’s even more need for our project.”

In 2010, the organization held its first “Back To School With The HistoryMakers.” HistoryMakers went into schools to share with students their stories of perseverance and triumph against the odds.

This year, schools participating in the event will receive a free one-year membership for the digital archive.

The significance of the HistoryMakers project, Richardson said, is that there’s only been one other time, in the history of the United States, that there’s been a mass attempt to record the black experience in the first person.

That was the WPA Slave Narrative. In that case, the federal government gifted the black community the project.

“In our case, we, a small black project, are gifting to the world these stories,” said Richardson. “There has been virtually no attempt to record the 20th Century African American experience since the stories of the enslaved.”

Contact Vickki Dozier at (517) 267-1342 orvdozier@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter@vickkiD.

On the Web

www.thehistorymakers.com