The elementary teams, for which the moderator was Running Brook Elementary School Assistant Principal Troy Todd, showcased their knowledge in the school's media center. Middle-schoolers took their question-answering skills to the auditorium stage, where the moderator was Herbert West, social studies team leader at Wilde Lake High School.
Students had studied for weeks, often getting together with teammates on their own time, to answer the questions. "They worked mostly on their own," said Stephanie Noonan, the Cradlerock adviser who had brought two middle school teams and one elementary team to the competition.
One Cradlerock student, Abigail Asamoah, 13, an eighth-grader, said she got involved because she wanted to learn "things about my own culture that I didn't know." Her friend Sapphire Ukairo said she liked "just learning about the history."
Students studied as many as 800 facts on topics as diverse as slave trade and African-American winners of the Academy Award.
Those with the correct answers announced that the Niagara River was the one that slaves crossed to get into Canada, that Harriet Tubman was known as the Moses of her people, that Brown vs. Board of Education was the name of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that ended legalized racial segregation in schools, and that Frank Robinson was the first black manager of a major league baseball team.
"It's been fun," said Todd Garner, the Atholton Elementary School adviser whose team came in second. "We've had it kind of like a club, and we meet twice a week."
Of course, not every question was answered correctly. Middle-school teams were stumped when asked to name two states from which more than a million slaves were sold. No team correctly said Maryland and Virginia and identified the states on a map. And hardly anybody knew that an F.W. Woolworth counter in Greensboro, N.C., was the site of a historic sit-in.
But the Cradlerock team of Ceaira Thomas, Chizoba Ukairo and Alisa Metzger racked up enough correct answers to take first prize. This was especially gratifying to Alisa, who had been an alternate and found out two days before the competition that she was going to be part of the team. "I was really excited, because I had studied a lot," she said.
The team plans to go to the state competition, but Chizoba said that learning about black history has been its own reward. "It's kind of interesting to see what people who are just like us went through so we could have a good life," she said.
