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Upper St. Clair High School students develop Black History Month activities

By Harry Funk staff Writer hfunk@thealmanac.Net 3 min read
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Try to decipher the meaning of this piece of instruction:

“Draw a line around the number or letter of this sentence.”

Huh? It contains no numbers and multiple letters, and using “the” connotes a singular occurrence. So how do you answer?

For those who were forced to take the State of Louisiana Literacy Test to attempt to gain the right to vote, that bit of information represented just the first of 30 instructions to be completed in 10 minutes.

Harry Funk/The Almanac

The Louisiana Literacy Test has baffled this Upper St. Clair High School student and her classmates.

And although many of the items were just as confusing, missing only one constituted failure.

“The literacy test you took was actually from the year 1965,” Upper St. Clair High School student Constantine Tripodes told a group of baffled classmates who gave it a whirl. “These were administered to anyone who could not prove they were an educated property owner before they were allowed to vote. Basically, it was given to disenfranchised African Americans.”

None of the Upper St. Clair students thought he or she answered even 50% of the items correctly, which may come as little surprise considering the verb-lacking wording of the final one: “Draw five circles that one common inter-locking part.”

The test-taking exercise was part of a Feb. 21 activity for Black History Month developed by Tripodes, Taha Zafar, Michael Martinelli and Eva Rankin.

In all, 45-plus student facilitators who participate in the high school’s No Place For Hate Committee, Black Student Union and Multicultural Club led similar thought-provoking exercises.

“They teamed up, and they actually developed lesson plans and scripted everything out,” said assistant principal Daniel Zelenski, who leads the No Place for Hate Committee. “The students really took it and ran with it, and we had so many teachers and staff members coming together on our committee.”

Part of a national program developed by the Anti-Defamation League, the committee was formed in Upper St. Clair this school year to support the mission of celebrating diversity, promoting respect for differences and challenging bias and bullying at all levels.

“We’re required to do only three activities, but our committee said, ‘no. We want to do an activity every month,'” Zelenski said.

A Diversity Week is planned for March.

Harry Funk/The Almanac

Taha Zafar, left, and Constantine Tripodes represent one of the groups of students facilitating Black History Month educational activities.

In addressing classmates for the Black History Month activity, Tripodes pointed out the color of the clothing worn by his group of facilitators.

“Red is the official color for Black History Month,” he said. “The color red symbolizes the bloodshed during the Civil Rights Movement and the passion African Americans displayed to reach equality.”

Following the Louisiana text exercise, the students answered multiple-choice questions on their smartphones using the game-based learning platform Kahoot! In doing so, they had their knowledge broadened substantially with regard to what African Americans faced throughout U.S. history.

The first question, for example: “What was the significance of the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson?”

The answer is the 1896 decision upheld the constitutionality of the “separate but equal” doctrine, the so-called Jim Crow laws.

And that stood until 1954, when another Supreme Court ruling helped pave the way toward bringing segregation to an end, at least from a legal standpoint.

If you answered Brown v. Board of Education, you’re doing much, much better than you would on the Louisiana Literacy Test.

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