by Christine Hauser
After
five teenagers defaced a historic black schoolhouse in Virginia with
racist and anti-Semitic graffiti last year, a judge handed down an
unusual sentence. She endorsed a prosecutor’s order that they read one
book each month for the next 12 months and write a report about it.
But
not just any books: They must address some of history’s most divisive
and tragic periods. The teenagers can read “Night,” by Elie Wiesel, to learn about the Holocaust. They can crack open Maya Angelou’s landmark 1969 book, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” for an unsparing account of the Jim Crow South. They can also dive into “The Kite Runner,” by Khaled Hosseini, a captivating tale about two boys from Afghanistan.
Those
books were among the 35 works of literature that the judge, Avelina
Jacob, ordered the unidentified teenagers, ages 16 and 17, in Loudoun
County to choose from last week after they pleaded guilty to
spray-painting the Ashburn Colored School, a dilapidated, one-room
19th-century schoolhouse that had been used by black children during
segregation in Northern Virginia.
The
teenagers’ sentence, known as a disposition in juvenile cases, also
includes a mandatory visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the
Smithsonian’s Museum of American History’s exhibit on Japanese-American internment camps in the United States.
The
graffiti sprayed in September on the building in Ashburn, a community
of about 43,000 people northwest of Washington, included swastikas,
dinosaurs, sexual images and the phrases “brown power” and “white
power.”
Two of the teenagers are white and three are minorities, the commonwealth attorney’s office said in a statement announcing the decision last week.
They were arrested in October, and each pleaded guilty to one count of
destruction of private property and one count of unlawful entry. At
least one of the teenagers said he did not know the symbolism of a
swastika.
Alejandra
Rueda, a deputy commonwealth attorney who came up with the idea, said
in a telephone interview on Wednesday that it was the first time in her
19-year career as a prosecutor that she has assigned a reading list as
part of a disposition.
“It
occurred to me that the way these kids are going to learn about this
stuff is if they read about it, more than anything,” Ms. Rueda said.
“Yes, they could walk into court and plead guilty and get put on
probation and do some community service, but it wasn’t really going to
bring the message home.”
“I
just thought maybe if they read these books, it will make an impression
on them, and they will stand up for people who are being oppressed,”
she added.
Ms.
Rueda said she had been inspired by her own history growing up in
Guadalajara, Mexico, in the 1980s, when her librarian mother handed her
Leon Uris’s books “Mila 18” and “Exodus” to learn about Israel and the
Holocaust while she was participating in a model United Nations project.
She later went on to read Alan Paton’s “Cry, the Beloved Country,” which touched on race and injustice in South Africa.
The
teenagers will also be required to write a paper about the impact
swastikas and “white power” messages have on African-Americans and
members of the broader community. The paper must include historical
references such as Nazism, lynchings and discriminatory laws.
They
must also listen to a recorded interview of Yvonne Neal, a Virginia
woman who described her experiences as a student from 1938 to 1945 at
the Ashburn Colored School, its official name in tax records.
“We
are seizing the opportunity to treat this as an educational experience
for these young men so they may better appreciate the significance of
their actions and the impact this type of behavior has on communities
and has had throughout history,” the commonwealth’s attorney, Jim
Plowman, said in the statement.
Some
of the books on the list have been banned or challenged in the past:
like “Black Boy,” the 1945 autobiography by Richard Wright; “The
Handmaid’s Tale,” by Margaret Atwood; and Ms. Angelou’s book, according
to the American Library Association.
Ms.
Rueda said she first gave the list to defense lawyers to make sure
there were no objections from the boys’ families on religious or other
grounds.
“Given how fractured our country is right now,” she said, “the more people who are open minded, the better our country will be.”
Probation officers will check the work of the youths, who are public school students.
Deep Sran, the founder of the Loudoun School for the Gifted,
a private school that owns the Ashburn Colored School and is renovating
it to use as an education museum, said of the vandalism: “It was just
profoundly disappointing. Profoundly disappointing because this building
is evidence of the worst story in American history: swastikas, white
power. I teach history, and at some point you think the story will end.”
Dr.
Sran said in a telephone interview he was told about the vandalism in
an email in October from a man who rents space on the grounds of the old
schoolhouse to smoke meat overnight for his barbecue food truck
business. Dr. Sran and his colleagues raced over to the school to find
spray paint on the windows and the sides of the building, a sight that
was particularly upsetting because students had raised money to upgrade
the windows a week before.
He
said the school worked with Ms. Rueda on suggestions for the book list.
One of the school’s English teachers balked at the idea of using
literature as punishment, inspiring the inclusion of Ms. Neal’s
interview, he said.
Eventually, Dr. Sran and his colleagues pitched several options, including Wright’s “Black Boy” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir, “The Beautiful Struggle.”
“If
things like this are still happening in 2016 in a very diverse county
with all the resources in the world, it’s an indictment on teachers, if a
16- or 17-year-old thinks this is how you should spend a Friday night,”
Dr. Sran said.
He added, “If any good can come out of this, it has to be through an effort to educate.”
source: New York Times
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