Memphis students connect with JFK, Kenya and Obama
Second-graders in Mrs. Simmons’s class learned about John F. Kennedy on Friday, the 50th anniversary of the day he was assassinated.
They didn’t quite understand the significance of the man or that moment in history until she explained that Kennedy was the president, like President Obama.
“That’s when t hey made the connection,” said Mrs. Simmons, who teaches at Caldwell-Guthrie Elementary School in North Memphis.
That was just the beginning of a day of connections at Caldwell-Guthrie, a day when children and adults alike learned about what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the great dreamer, called “an inescapable network of mutuality.”
This particular network extends back more than half a century in history and more than 8,000 miles in distance from North Memphis to Germantown to Kenya.
After they learned about Kennedy, Caldwell-Guthrie’s second- and thirdgraders joined a few members of Germantown United Methodist Church, including Ed Clark and Leda Phillips, for a short ceremony in the school lobby.
About 70 church volunteers spend at least 30 minutes twice a week tutoring the school’s secondgraders. Team Read has become a model for faithbased mentoring programs in Shelby County Schools.
Last spring, Team Read leaders asked CaldwellGuthrie’s second-graders to draw pictures of their dreams. With crayons and pencils they drew their future selves as teachers and doctors, Grizzlies and FedEx pilots.
In April, former city council member Carol Chumney organized a prayer breakfast for the church’s summer mission to Kenya, where it supports a hospital as well as
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a preschool for 120 AIDS orphans, ages 3- 6.
The prayer breakfast highlighted the drawings from the Caldwell-Guthrie dreamers. It was the beginning of an art exchange with the Clark Early Childhood Development School near Maua, Kenya.
In July, Clark, Phillips and Chumney delivered the Memphis drawings to the school in Kenya. Then they asked the Kenyan children to draw their dreams.
With crayons and pencils they drew their future selves as teachers, doctors, drivers and pilots. Those drawings were on display Friday in Caldwell-Guthrie’s lobby.
“My dream when I grow up I want to be a pilot,” wrote one of the Kenyan children, Barack Munene.
Barack is a famous name in Kenya.
President Obama’s father was born in Kenya. In 1959, he and 80 other students from East Africa flew to the United States to attend various colleges and universities on scholarships.
Future president John F. Kennedy was one of the initial and largest supporters of the African American Students Foundation, which helped dozens of Kenyan students attend college in America in the early 1960s.
Kenya’s Barack Obama Sr. was the first African foreign student to attend the University of Hawaii, where he graduated with a degree in economics in 1962. He later attended Harvard University.
So did his son, future president Barack Obama Jr., born in Hawaii in August 1961.
“Let the word go forth from this time and place,” President Kennedy said in his Inaugural Address in January 1961, “that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.”
During Friday morning’s ceremony, last year’s second-graders gathered in the school lobby with this year’s second-graders.
Principal LaWanda Hill, wearing a Harvard University T-shirt, noted that it was the end of College Week at the school. “It’s a perfect day for our children to express their aspirations,” she said.
With crayons and pencils, this year’s second-graders draw pictures of their future selves as teachers, doctors, pilots and presidents.
Then the third-graders lined up next to the second-graders and passed a paper torch to a new generation of dreamers.