Looking Back

IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: A hundred years ago today, Seattle was in the grips of its worst recorded-time snowstorm ever. 

Granted, most of the town was in gridlock, but at the Ballard Locks, thing were in full swing. In fact, it was the first time the locks would 'swing' open!

In the photo above, taken just after noon on February 2, 1916, the water is coming from the filling tunnels at the floor of the lock. Make sure you look up at the guys standing on the (upstream) gate watching the water start to flow in past the snow. What an exciting moment it must have been for everyone working on the project!

And this snowy picture shows the historic moment the first boat moving through the locks. Cool, in more ways than one!

JUSTICE FOR ALL: We continued learning about Thurgood Marshall, the first African American United States Supreme Court Justice today.

I asked the kids if they thought it was better listening to someone else talk about Marshall, or if they'd rather listen to Marshall himself. They both agreed the original source was the best. (Right answer!)

And so we watched a rough, partial interview with Marshall, conducted by a young Mike Wallace (smoking like a chimney).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoPLitU6jVg


 We also continued learning about the legacy of Barbara Johns of Farmville, Virginia. 

Niece of civil rights activist Rev. Vernon Johns, as a 16-year-old, Barbara boldly led her high school, Robert Moton, in a walk out to protest the separate and very-not-equal conditions at her school. (She and her school mates were educated in leaky, over-crowded, tar-paper roofed shacks while their white peers were schooled in relatively palatial buildings.) We loved hearing the story of her masterfully led protest, and the lengths she went to to make sure it was a secret up until the moment it happened, right down to having a couple of friends call the school principal to trick him to leave the building because she knew if he'd been there it would have been hard to pull off. 

In fact, it was such a surprise, as Barbara addressed assembled students at her school, her own sister was shocked by what was going down! Johns led her classmates in a march to the school superintendent's office. He threatened them all with hellfire and brimstone, told them their parents would all be fired from their jobs, and that their parents would all be jailed. At that, one student wondered aloud how big the jail was. A turning point, they all deduced that their movement could not be contained.

The Farmville case morphed into part of the "Brown v. Board of Education" case that went before the U.S. Supreme Court, forever finally setting schools on an equal for all trajectory. 

We watched a short documentary from PBS about Barbara Johns and Farmville, Virginia's role in the Supreme Court case "Brown v. Board of Education" on PBS: 

http://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resou...

PATCHWORK:  Yesterday, we read (via a Reading Rainbow episode) a book called "Follow the Drinking Gourd" that introduced us to the tradition of a storytelling quilt with patches that served as a road map to freedom for slaves. 

Today, we read two more books on the same topic. One was "The Patchwork Path: A Quilt Map to Freedom." By author Bettye Stroud (illustrator: Erin Susanne Bennett and publisher: Candlewick Press), it's a story of a young girl named Hannah who makes a run for freedom with her papa. A patchwork quilt from Hannah's deceased mother holds a series of hidden clues that guides them along the Underground Railroad all the way to Canada. We enjoyed this story via the Tumblebooks feature on Seattle Public Libraries' Web site.

The other story we discovered today was "Show Way" by Jacqueline Woodson. Like the other books, it's about patchwork pieces put together to form a map to freedom for slaves. But this story was so distinctive in tone, and it was especially memorable, because it was told by an author who traced her family's history from slave to present times. If you have a Seattle Public Libraries' card or another way to access BookFlix, you should certainly check it out.