Those students at Doris M. Johnson High School are at it again, and this time they've ventured where few in their generation have ever ventured before.
You might have read about DMJ students before, in this column, about this time last year, to be precise. Students then gave presentations on the civil rights movement in Maryland. The site was the Maryland Historical Society. Some of the same students were back again this year, along with a few new ones, giving a presentation they called Collision: People and Events that Shaped the Vietnam Era in Maryland.
Thirteen students worked on the project, covering 11 topics. You're going to read all of their names in the next few paragraphs, because all deserve recognition. In fact, if I wrote as much about each one as he or she deserves, this column would have to run daily for the next three weeks.
But we in the news media have inundated you lately with stories about students who have assaulted teachers, assistant principals and other staff members in city schools. This ain't that kind of party. This is a column about those students who are in Baltimore schools achieving, those who want to learn, and those who know the value of an education.
And there are more of them than we think.
Raven Coleman covered the history of the Medal of Honor and the Baltimore Four, a group of anti-Vietnam War activists who destroyed draft records. Cierra Johnson wrote an essay about Norman Morrison, a Quaker and pacifist who burned himself to death to protest the Vietnam War.
Epiphany Butler, Taivon Murphey and Warren Sweeley tackled the topic of perhaps the Baltimore area's most famous anti-Vietnam War activists: the Catonsville Nine. Kendra Hendricks and Kiana James elaborated on the lives of two of those nine: Kendra wrote about Daniel Berrigan, while Kiana wrote about his brother, Philip.
Anshrea Covington and Lacresha White did some research on the journalism of the era. Anshrea wrote an essay about what writers to The Sun's letters-to-the-editor page had to say about the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and about the Catonsville Nine; Lacresha did the same with the letters-to-the-editor section of The Baltimore Afro-American, but added what readers had to say about the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
