NCS: special town meeting

Hello. Given that it is Martin Luther King Day, we moved our all-school Town Meeting to this morning.

The interactive presentation was coordinated by Jane our 8th grade language arts teacher and Balcony houseparent, with 8th grader Emerson as the MC, and several of his classmates as readers. The enclosed pictures show the building of a civil rights timeline stretching 135 years. We were using students and staff as “data points,” and this human timeline snaked around the Quonset. Some of the events that were plotted on our continuum included: Emancipation Proclamation, Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier, Brown v. Board of Education, Montgomery Bus Boycott, lunch counter sit-ins, James Meredith integrating “Ole Miss,” the March on Washington, assassinations of Medgar Evers and and Martin Luther King, the Voting Rights Act as well as a reminder that tomorrow’s Inauguration represents the first time an African-American will be sworn in as President. This morning we also had readings of poems from Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou, as well as a reading of sections of the “I Have a Dream” speech.

At lunch council I will remind students that Camp Treetops was the first racially integrated “sleep-away” camp in New York state, and that James Meredith sent his sons to NCS.