Seattle project tears down walls, opens students' eyes to the civil-rights struggle

With a tape recorder whirring on the table between them, two high-school students interview a leader of Seattle's civil-rights movement about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s only visit, in 1961.

"What was Seattle like then?" one of the young women asks.

The Rev. Samuel McKinney, pastor emeritus of the predominantly African-American Mount Zion Baptist Church, quickly takes them back to a Seattle in which blacks could work in department stores only if they weren't visible to customers, a city in which lending practices and prejudice restricted them to housing in a few segregated neighborhoods.

Instead of learning history in a classroom, the two students, Nicole Czubin and Elena Feldman, are hearing the stories of living witnesses in the places where history was made.

The yearlong program, sponsored by the Seattle nonprofit Museum Without Walls, brings together 10 suburban and 10 inner-city students to learn about the civil-rights movement both locally and nationally.

In June, the students traveled to three Southern states. They stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel where King was assassinated 40 years ago in Memphis, Tenn. They saw the fading bloodstains in the carport in Jackson, Miss., where NAACP leader Medgar Evers was gunned down.

They learn about social activism and how students like themselves led a movement to end segregation and racial intolerance.

"There are lessons students can't learn from books," said Karen Sherwood, a history teacher at Mercer Island High School who accompanied students in 2006. "It's really eye-opening for them to see people who were activists in the 1960s and who are still active today. It inspires them to work on issues now."

For the young people, the program also has meant journeying beyond their own largely segregated worlds. Franklin High School is predominantly African American, Asian and Hispanic, with just 9 percent white students. About half of the school's students come from low-income families.

Mercer Island High School is overwhelmingly white and affluent, with just 1 percent African-American students and fewer than 2 percent who come from low-income backgrounds.

Over the course of the year, the students confront how different their perspectives on race and education can be.

"Before the trip, I thought Seattle was racism-free," said Feldman, a senior at Mercer Island High School who is of Mexican and Jewish heritage. When she returned from the South, she said, she was struck by the lack of diversity at her own and other Seattle-area schools and frustrated by her inability to communicate what she'd learned about racism and violence to her classmates.

For Czubin, a junior at Seattle's Franklin High School, the program brought together personal and social history. Her godmother was a Garfield High School student when King addressed the student body during his Seattle visit. Another relative remembers that blacks couldn't get a loan to buy a house in the city's white neighborhoods.

"The civil-rights movement was one of those things I had to find out about. If you don't understand history, how can you make a better future?" Czubin said.

Power of stories

The high-school program, known as Multicultural Scholars, is the creation of Suzzanne Lacey, executive director of Museum Without Walls. As a reporter at a National Public Radio station in 1994, she covered the 30th anniversary of the Freedom Riders, mostly young college students who faced violent attacks and arrest as they tried to desegregate the bus lines of the South.

A subsequent visit to Poland and Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, convinced Lacey of the power of personal stories to bear witness to injustice.

"There are issues of intolerance and racism that resonate today," she said. "When you hear a story, you receive it in a way that's not forgotten. It becomes a part of your own experience in a way that's very, very powerful."

Since founding the organization in 2000, she has taken university students from Seattle to concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald in Germany, where they listened to Holocaust survivors, and others to Bainbridge Island, where they met Japanese Americans who had been interned during World War II. Last week, Lacey accompanied Czubin and Feldman to their interview with McKinney. But the students carried out most of the interview.

As the most visible leader of the civil-rights movement, King already had attracted the hatred of segregationists and white-supremacy groups, and the FBI was fueling rumors that he was a Communist, McKinney told them. The First Presbyterian Church of Seattle, which originally had agreed to host King's Seattle appearance, withdrew its offer. Some white parents at Garfield High School protested plans for King to speak to students there.

"The whole town was stirred up," he recalled.

McKinney eventually secured the Eagles Auditorium for King's community rally. That site, now ACT Theatre, will host a permanent exhibit the students are working on with Seattle's Museum of History & Industry to commemorate King's visit.

As the interview progresses, they learn about documents and photos they may be able to add to the exhibit.

Witnesses aging, dying

The students recognize that there is some urgency to their task.

The number of people who can share their memories of the civil-rights movement is dwindling. McKinney is 81. One of the activists they met last summer in Montgomery, Ala., Johnnie Carr, died in February at 97.

Ari Schorr, a Mercer Island senior in the Multicultural Scholars program, said his most powerful memory of the program was the students' conversation with Carr, a lifelong friend of Rosa Parks who took over leadership of the Montgomery Improvement Association from a young Dr. King.

On his desk on Mercer Island, Schorr has a picture of himself with Carr.

"Whenever I look at it, I remember holding her hand and walking her to her car. She was a great civil-rights leader and she talked with students right up to the end," he said.

Charmaine Ma, another Mercer Island student, said she was inspired by the group's visit with the Rev. Jim Lawson, who helped organize the Freedom Rides and brought his nonviolent philosophy to the civil-rights movement.

"A lot of the protests were student-led. He made us believe that students could take leadership, that we could continue to fight injustice today," she said.

As Czubin and Feldman turned off their tape recorder and shook hands with McKinney, the Franklin student said she was prepared to carry on the work for racial justice.

"There's been a lot of work, a lot of progress, but I don't think we're done yet," she said.

Lynn Thompson: 206-464-8305 or lthompson@seattletimes.com