15 May 2009

Award-Winning Online Exhibit Teaches Tolerance, History

Students explore 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois

By Jeffrey Thomas
Staff Writer

Washington — The 1908 riots that led to the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) can be studied in the classroom much more effectively thanks to an online exhibit that recently won two prestigious international awards.

Flashpoint: Springfield Illinois Race Riot is the work of 16 high school students who researched the 1908 riots using the resources at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, and then created 22 pages of text, graphics, primary sources, audio and video to bring the event to light. The competition judges praised the final result as “fantastic and compelling.”

The riot led to a turning point in race relations in the United States. Mary White Ovington, one of the founders of the NAACP, the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization, was asked in 1914 to describe how the NAACP, which included whites of good will as well as blacks, was started.

“In the summer of 1908, the country was shocked by the account of the race riots at Springfield, Illinois. Here, in the home of Abraham Lincoln, a mob containing many of the town's ‘best citizens,’ raged for two days, killed and wounded scores of Negroes, and drove thousands from the city,” she wrote.

“We decided, therefore, that a wise, immediate action would be the issuing on Lincoln's birthday of a call for a national conference on the Negro question.”

The 1908 riot was not well-known in Springfield before its centennial anniversary, said Erin Bishop, the director of education at the Lincoln Library, where the students did much of their research and created Flashpoint. Even though the riot led directly to the founding of the NAACP the following year and the civil rights movement in the middle of the 20th century, it hasn’t been taught as part of the school curriculum, Bishop said.

“We wanted to tackle this issue because of the centennial,” she said. “It’s a great story for that age group because ... [the students] could really connect with it — the idea of peer pressure, of joining the mob and going with the mob and acting in a way you probably wouldn’t act if you were by yourself.”

The students created Flashpoint in the summer of 2008 during a two-week program funded by a grant from the National Recreation Foundation and administered by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation. The previous summer a similar group of students created a more traditional traveling exhibition on the riots.

Four of the 16 students who created Flashpoint at work in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in 2008.

“The Flashpoint kids were a lot more interested in who the rioters were, whereas the first year, they were more interested in the victims,” Bishop said.

STUDENTS AS TEACHERS AND FACILITATORS

Because the program in part was intended as career exploration, the students worked with librarians, historians, museum professionals, educators and graphic designers. To help them gain the skills needed to create Flashpoint, they took a two-hour workshop on writing succinctly, spent a day at a video-editing studio learning how to shoot and edit video, and took a workshop on photojournalism and an intensive course on design software, Bishop said.

“They story-boarded the look of it and the feel of it, they shot all the video themselves, they went into video-editing studios and worked with professionals, but they were sitting at the keyboard,” Bishop said. “They wrote their own scripts. The one video where they start from a view of the planet and zoom all the way in to the city — that was totally student done. They came back to us with that and we about fell out of our chairs. There were no adults involved in that video at all.”

The international competition that Flashpoint won — the 20th annual MUSE Awards — is an activity of the American Association of Museums.

“This was a fantastic and compelling project. It truly exemplifies teaching and outreach,” said the judges in awarding Flashpoint the gold medal in the Teaching and Outreach category. “The students were not passive participants. They were engaged learners and became the teachers and facilitators.”

Flashpoint also won the Jim Blackaby Ingenuity Award, for which the judges considered all 250 contestants in all 11 categories from a wide variety of museums in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia.

“The project is multifaceted, beautifully produced, inspiring, innovative and will undoubtedly have a long-term impact on these students — an experience they will remember through adulthood,” the judges of the Ingenuity Award said.

As for future programs, “our vision for the future is to make ambassadors of these students who would go back to their schools and give workshops and teach younger grades in the elementary levels about tolerance,” Bishop said.

Flashpoint is available for free on the Web courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.