In February, the Academy at Saint Joan of Arc, 9245 Lawndale Ave., held its first annual Black History Month writing contest, with poems and essays from fifth through eighth graders about inspiring Black people with roots in the Chicago area.
Entries featured a wide variety of historical and current figures, including icons like Ida B. Wells and lesser-known individuals like professional soccer player Sarah Gorden. Participants received prizes donated by several local businesses, including Soul & Smoke, Booked, YoFresh Cafe, Bookends and Beginnings, Field Notes, Bennison’s Bakery and Hecky’s Barbeque.
Below is a look at five winning entries.
‘DeMarvelous,’ a haiku by Mae Pickering, fifth grade
DeMar DeRozan
You hit a buzzer beater
To win the close game
‘Ida B. Wells’ Amazing Life,’ by Betty Gleason, fifth grade
Ida B. Wells was an American journalist and an activist. She became an activist so that she could fight for women’s rights and racial equality. The way she lived her life inspires me because she was a hard working and motivated woman and she cared about other people.
Wells was born into slavery in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi. She was freed from slavery when she was six months old. Her father was a carpenter. He had eight children and, of all of them, Wells was the oldest. When she was sixteen, both of her parents and her infant brother died from yellow fever. The year was 1878 when this tragedy occurred. A few months later she told a school executive that she was eighteen so that she could legally work to provide for her siblings. Along with working as a school educator, Wells also worked as a Sunday school teacher, not to mention being very responsible for feeding her seven siblings, as well as washing and ironing their clothes.
When she was twenty-two, Wells bought a first class ticket on a train to Holly, Mississippi. As she normally did, she sat in the ladies’ car. But when the train conductor came over to her to check her ticket, he asked her to move, or change seats. She refused, and when he tried to force her out of her seat, she bit his hand. Two other men came to help him get her out of her seat.
In 1886, Wells was fired from her teaching job because of her criticism of the system. She then started a new job as a journalist because she had written a few articles for the newspaper and wanted to keep on going. Three years into her career she bought a share in the newspaper. Wells became the first female co-owner and editor of a black newspaper in the U.S.
In 1892 Wells’ friend Thomas Moss was lynched by a white mob. He was a mail carrier and grocer. After the lynching of Thomas, she bought a pistol to protect herself. She started writing anti-lynching editorials. Once she had started writing more of the editorials, the same mob that killed Thomas burnt down her newspaper office in New York. She realized that she was putting herself, her friends and her family at risk. She felt threatened by the opposition because they had burnt down her business and forced her to move to Chicago. In 2020 she was bestowed a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in recognition of her “outstanding and courageous” reporting about lynching.
Wells worked for the rights of women as well as African Americans. She was a true supporter of women’s rights to vote. She started going to the Alpha Suffrage Club, which taught women to be politically active. In 1913 she marched in the suffrage parade. Ida B. Wells was a co-founder of the NAACP, she started it in 1896. NAACP stands for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Since her death, Wells’ name has been honored all over the country.In Holly Springs, Mississippi, there is a museum called The Ida B. Wells Museum and Cultural Center of African American History. There is a road in downtown Chicago called Congress Parkway. This road was renamed Ida B. Wells Drive on July 28th, 2018. Ida B. Wells Drive was the first road in Chicago named after an African-American woman.
Ida B. Wells encouraged so many people throughout her lifetime. Her guts helped her get through rough patches in her life and gave her an example of how she could help others.
‘The Inspiring Life of Marva Collins,’ by Noor Habash, sixth grade
For this essay, I chose Marva Collins. I chose her because she inspires me by her actions. She opened a school to inspire students to be independent and successful. Her actions made peoples’ lives better and inspired them to help others. Collins opened her own school in Chicago because of a public school system she found to be bad for the young students. She is a woman that was passionate about learning.
Collins was born on August 31, 1936, in Monroeville, Alabama. She received her early education in Atmore, Alabama. Atmore is a town where the segregated school system provided very little information for African-American students. Collins eventually entered Clark College in Atlanta, and after she graduated there, she returned to Alabama. She then taught in an Alabama school for two years.
Soon Collins moved to Chicago and worked in Chicago Public Schools. She found that
the system was failing and did not let children reach their full potential, so she opened a school of her own called Westside Preparatory School. The school invited everyone, including people with disabilities, and provided education for people that suited their needs. Collins trained more than 100,000 teachers and then traveled to Africa with the Young Presidents’ Organization to spread her methodology to educators throughout the world.
Collins inspires me by her good actions. While she was working in a public school, she realized that the school’s system was failing young students. So she opened her own school to help with the students’ education. In my opinion, I think she did a stunning job. What if you were her, going to a school with very little information – what would you do?
‘Inspiring Ida,’ by Aubrey Hoeppner, seventh grade
Ida B. Wells is one of the most inspiring writers and activists of her time. Not only did she fearlessly publish her opinions, she also was a co-founder of the NAACP and started multiple different causes to help make Chicago what it is today. So, let’s look deeper into what makes Ida B. Wells so fearless and inspiring.
Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Ida B. Wells grew up as the oldest of her eight siblings. So naturally she had to take on a job when her parents died, even though she was only sixteen. She taught at a black school where she saw how bad the conditions were for the children and stood up for them, which cost her her job at twenty-four years old. Since had written a few articles in the past, she decided that she would now write full time. Now she had the voice to speak out about the challenges everyone faced, but most didn’t like what she wrote. On May 27, 1892, while she was away in Philadelphia, a white mob destroyed her journalism office in Memphis, Tennessee, and threatened to harm her if she ever returned to the city. The threats became so bad that she had to flee to Chicago, but that didn’t stop her.
Shortly after she moved to Chicago, she became an activist for multiple causes. She boycotted the World’s Columbian Exposition and started the National Women’s Club Movement. She even found the love of her life, and on June 27, 1895, married Ferdinand Lee Barnett, an attorney with two sons. After getting married, she continued being an activist, helped found the NAACP, and started the Alpha Suffrage Club. She continued to help Chicago’s community like it was her own by fighting against the establishment of segregated schools in Chicago until she died in 1931 at sixty-eight years old. She left behind a legacy that will never be forgotten.
Ida B. Wells brought so much to Chicago and made it what it is today: a community of every race. Without her, people would not have known the horrors that black people faced even after slavery was abolished. She inspires me and many others greatly because she would not back down from anything, didn’t give up, and was an exceptional writer. I hope that she inspires you and many others in the future with her legacy.
‘Ida,’ a poem by Ivy Miller, seventh grade
Ida was always a writer from within
But she was judged blindly by her skin
Yet, when times got dire
She never failed to inspire
Fighting for education for the youthful Black
No matter how much the light would attack
The children could write, read, and learn
Ida was a hero from womb to urn
She wrote for the headlines, paper and news
To vanquish the southerners mournful blues
And as all good things come to an end
I will always see Ida as a friend
Celebrating Juneteenth with one school’s Black History Month writing contest is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.