The public is invited to attend an awards ceremony and reception Tuesday evening, July 23, at the Willow Hill Heritage and Renaissance Center honoring seven Bulloch County high school students whose essays on racial injustice were read by judges from the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery, AL.
The winning writers will receive cash prizes totaling $5,000, according to an EJI spokeswoman.
The essay contest was co-sponsored by the Statesboro-Bulloch Remembrance Coalition and the EJI Community Remembrance Team. The contest aims to foster students’ exploration of how racial injustice in America historically is connected to racial injustice currently. All participants were invited to work with a mentor from the Coalition, and a few chose to do so.
“The fact that young people are already thinking about these connections between the historic and the contemporary in very intentional and analytical ways is something that needs to be celebrated,” said Coalition member Dr. Stacy Smallwood, who mentored one of the student writers. “They are critically evaluating what is happening now and making connections to things that happened in the past, which points to the importance of telling an accurate account of history, which we know is under attack. Through this essay contest, we can provide support and a platform for their voices to be heard.”
The contest is another project of the Statesboro-Bulloch Remembrance Coalition, a county-wide initiative with a two-fold purpose: To memorialize local victims of racial violence and to foster meaningful dialogue about race and justice today. Earlier this year in front of Statesboro City Hall, more than 100 people gathered to witness the installation of a historic marker detailing the documented lynchings of nine people in Bulloch County between 1886 and 1911.
Coalition members Dr. Tilicia Mayo-Gamble and Dr. Michelle Reidel, both professors at Georgia Southern University, worked closely with Portal Middle High School teacher Vickie Lewis and the EJI team to inform public high school students about the contest.
Interested students were invited to respond to this prompt posted on the website EJI created for the Statesboro-Bulloch Remembrance Coalition’s contest:
“Analyze a topic related to racial injustice in America and at least one historical event that shows this topic in action. How does this history help to explain a present-day injustice? How can this history be overcome in order to change current realities and address the challenges our nation currently faces?”
Dr. Smallwood said his student chose to connect medical mistrust among Black communities to the historic Tuskegee Syphilis Study in which researchers followed infected Black male participants from 1932 to 1972 “without informing them that they were only being monitored and not treated.” More than 100 participants died. “The nation did not apologize to them until the Clinton administration.”
Another mentor, Georgia Southern English professor Dr. Lisa Costello, said her student focused on injustice in the legal system historically. “Starting with Black codes and what became the Jim Crow Laws, the student moved to white extralegal violence and the present-day justice system. We had a rich research exchange in the beginning as they were developing their topic around this and how the legacy of the Black codes still reverberates in our legal system today.”
Eleven students voiced interest in participating. Of the seven who submitted essays online to EJI, most were juniors and seniors, plus one freshman and one sophomore, according to Coalition Co-Chair Adrianne McCollar.
Four will receive monetary prizes, and all seven will be acknowledged in the ceremony at the Willow Hill Heritage and Renaissance Center’s pavilion at 6pm Tuesday, July 23.
Dr. Mayo-Gamble acknowledged that the local contest organizers faced challenges in getting information to students and parents. “I believe the community supports scholarship opportunities for students,” she said. “However, injustice is often a sensitive topic. Rather than viewing it as an opportunity to support youth from low socioeconomic backgrounds, there was apprehension about creating spaces to label injustices in the community. Young people should have opportunities to voice their concerns, whether the topic is injustice or other socially acceptable topics.”
Dr. Mayo-Gamble would like to see the community work together to create more opportunities for students to access higher education. “Youth disconnect from historical events is not a novel challenge,” she said. “We assist children in creating family trees to help them understand their history. That means collectively, we value history at some level. Understanding the history of your community is not distinctive.”
Unfortunately, young people sometimes dissociate from their community's history “when they perceive that the challenges they face today are different from the challenges faced in prior generations,” she said. “Quite the contrary, injustice has been a persistent issue across generations. The contrast is in how it is experienced today by our youth. A critical step in resolving the injustices of today is to provide an outlet to voice those concerns. This scholarly competition allowed Bulloch County students to define how the injustices of the past impact their lives today and the ways in which those injustices are pervasive in their community.”
For more information on the contest or awards ceremony, please contact the Bulloch Remembrance Coalition.
