Celebrating human rights

COEUR d'ALENE - Listen, learn, understand, accept, celebrate.

Those words adorned a colorful quilt hanging on stage at North Idaho College's Schuler Hall on Friday morning, as images and words illustrating Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy were projected onto an adjacent wall.

It was the 28th annual Human Rights Celebration, an event that brings the message of the slain civil rights leader to hundreds of fifth-graders from Coeur d'Alene and Post Falls each year.

The program featured "Right to Dream," a multi-media presentation by Living Voices, a Seattle-based performance company.

"If we're all citizens of the same country, do you think we should all have the same civil rights?" asked Dior Davenport, the sole performer.

The 821 Coeur d'Alene fifth-graders who attended the morning event, responded with a resounding "Yes."

Davenport portrays Ruby Hollis, a black girl who grows into a young woman in the south, during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s.

Before giving Ruby a voice, as archival footage of events in Mississippi, Alabama and Washington, D.C., was displayed on a screen behind her, Davenport provided some history of events prior to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. She spoke briefly of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and of the Jim Crow laws that called for "separate but equal" segregation of blacks and whites.

In the role of Ruby, Davenport paints a picture of how there was separation, but little equality in the United States, for many years.

The little girl speaks about her father, who picked cotton, and then fought in World War II and earned medals.

"Then he got back to Mississippi, and they still called him 'boy,'" Ruby said.

She talks about her first realization, as a small child, that white people lived differently than her family did. Her mother worked in an ornate plantation residence, as a servant, and the woman often brought home, to the shack where Ruby and the rest of the family lived, leftovers from the plantation owner's meals.

Ruby recalls playing with a white girl, and feeling that they were the same, but eventually, the white girl's father wouldn't allow the girls to be together.

She had to attend a different school than the white kids, also in a shack, with no transportation.

Ruby was 12 when Rosa Parks made her stand and refused to sit at the back of a bus, when things began to move tumultuously and often violently toward change.

Ruby went on to attend Tougaloo College, a historically African-American school in Mississippi, on a full scholarship.

Inspired by Parks, Ruby participated in peaceful protests that ended in violence, including a famous sit-in at a lunch counter. Through the years, she lost friends and family members to the violence, including her father, but like many, she never gave up, until the laws were changed.

"What will you do?" Davenport asked the young audience, at the end of the performance.

Another 475 fifth-graders from Post Falls attended a similar presentation later in the day.

At each of the presentations, several students got up on stage and shared essays they wrote about people who acted on the "right to dream" and inspired them most. They also shared their own dreams.

Post Falls student Josie Ford selected Harriet Tubman, a woman "born into and raised as a slave." Tubman escaped from her owner and then helped slaves find similar freedom by assisting them as they traveled along the Underground Railroad.

"My dream is to help people who don't have basic necessities such as personal hygiene products, food, water, clothing and a place to live. Harriet Tubman has inspired me to do this ...This world could definitely use more people with such courage and love as Harriet R. Tubman," Ford wrote.

Tony Stewart, co-founder and board member of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations, said that through the years, more than 35,000 children have participated in the annual program.

"We've always said, you never completely combat prejudice and discrimination unless you do it through education," Stewart said.

The task force, along with the Idaho Humanities Council, the Human Rights Education Institute, North Idaho College and the two school districts, sponsored this year's event.

For the grownups, the task force is hosting its annual Gala Event in honor of King on Monday from 5-8 p.m. at the Parkside Tower Event Center, 601 E. Front Ave., third floor, Coeur d'Alene. The fundraiser, for the task force, offers food, wine, music and auction items. Tickets are $40 per person and can be purchased at the door.