Teacher empowers students with speech

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Monday, Jan. 19, 2004 | 11:06 a.m.

When 8-year-old Jake Rooney first learned about Martin Luther King Jr. two years ago, he was confused to hear that police arrested the civil rights leader, a good man doing the right thing.

Rooney, whose dad is an officer with Metro Police, thought that police only went after bad guys.

"We had a long talk about how police uphold the laws, but sometimes the laws aren't right," Rooney's mother, Shannon, said.

Jake and his mother recalled that moment Friday at Kay Carl Elementary in the northwest corner of the Las Vegas Valley. The third grader had just practiced the speech he was scheduled to give this afternoon at the fifth annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Oratory Competition.

Gwen Baccus, Jake's teacher two years ago, is now his coach for the contest, sponsored by the International House of Blues Foundation and held at the West Charleston Campus of the Community College of Southern Nevada.

Baccus, 49, will be leading Jake and fellow third grader Ashley Bayles -- two white children for whom segregation is an abstract idea -- in her quest to maintain her streak of victories. Students under her wing have won the contest every year so far.

Baccus' efforts, and the obvious mark they leave on her students, offer a window onto King's legacy in today's America. The dedicated teacher's own life offers a glimpse at how many black Americans conserve that legacy.

Baccus sees the connection between telling her white students to touch her hair and her childhood memories of covering her head in a scarf.

Or between going to Africa when she was 19 and bearing the sting of a white girl telling her to "go back to Africa" when she was a graduate student at Bowling Green University four years later.

Or between seeing Martin Luther King Jr. on television as a 14-year-old in Toledo, Ohio, and coaching Jake and Ashley this semester.

Baccus had some of her own memories before Friday's practice.

She said her parents, from Mississippi and Louisiana, moved north to Toledo in search of a better life before she was born in 1954. Though they both worked in factories, Toledo gave them a chance to be the first black family to own a house on their block.

So when news of King and echoes of the growing civil rights movement reached their radios and TV screens some years later, they were slow to embrace change.

"My parents and the blacks in the community felt comfortable with their lives and were hesitant," Baccus said. "(King) was changing the world and we didn't know what was coming."

But that changed when her father saw images of boycotts, protests, police dogs and water hoses on TV -- some of the same images that would stir Jake decades later.

"After that, my parents bought into it," Baccus said. "How could they explain to their kids that it was all right to sic dogs on a man? He sat us down and told us what was right and what was wrong."

Baccus, a young teen by then, saw the same images.

"I remember crying after seeing the man being sprayed by the hoses," she said.

When King was shot in 1968, something changed in her house.

"Every day after that, my father would ask me and my (seven) brothers and sisters, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?'

"It was a conscious decision on his part to make sure we knew we didn't have to be second-class citizens, that we didn't have to walk the same path he did."

At 19, in 1973, Baccus made the same journey as many young blacks of the time. She went to Africa. To Liberia, a country founded by freed slaves in 1847. There, she was confused by natives calling her "freed slave" in their own language, and liberated by the decision to let her hair grow out.

"When I was a girl, I would see the pictures in Dick and Jane books and cover my own hair with a scarf," she said. "In Liberia, I saw black was beautiful."

Thirty years later, Baccus the teacher doesn't use Dick and Jane books and sees her "nappy hair" as a teaching tool. "I let them touch my hair, to see how it's different from theirs," she said. Most of her class is white.

She also teaches her first graders about similarities between them -- "like telling them I get stomach aches too.

"I figure the more they see I'm a human being, the less likely they are to develop prejudices," she said.

Ashley, who said she wants to be a teacher when she grows up, said she couldn't imagine not being able to have a black woman -- or Mrs. Baccus -- as a teacher.

When the 8-year-old becomes a teacher, the first thing she would teach her students would be "to respect others," she said.

In her speech, Ashley said she puts that idea into practice by helping children with special needs during recess.

Baccus said the contest, and Martin Luther King Day, give her a special opportunity as a teacher.

"It's a chance to make a statement to the boys and girls I serve," she said.

"Give all people an equal chance to be human."