At a time when war, political division, and a lurking pandemic have us on edge, four Swampscott High School students and four town seniors celebrated the human spirit by spanning their age differences to learn and laugh.
Students Alhassan Bangura, 18, Eddie Gomez, 17, Sam Oubala, 15, and Tyler Sanders, 15 and Edye Baker, 77, Ralph Edwards, 74, Victoria Wilder, 67, and Sid Novak, 96, joined forces to create a 20-minute documentary.
High-school students gathered on Monday for their first assembly since COVID-19’s onset in March 2020 to watch “Black History, Our History.”
Senior Center outreach social worker Sabrina Clopton and Temi Bailey, a facilitator with a relationship-building organization called Room of Color, brought the students and seniors together.
Clopton said the meeting of young and old minds sparked surprising conversations, including this insightful observation by Bangura: “History is history until you see it in front of your face.”
Those inspiring and optimistic words remind us that reading and studying history puts the past into focus. But the lessons that history can teach us are really driven home when we talk to people who lived it.
Edwards brought racism into horrifying focus for Bangura when he recounted how, as a boy growing up in Louisiana, he walked on his way to school past the body of a lynching victim.
History told by those who lived it is intense and time’s passage can’t dim the shock, horror, and fear Edwards must have felt in that moment. For Oubala, talking to people who lived through the Civil Rights Movement turned out to be a turning point in his perceptions of racism.
“I have never had an outlet . . . to talk about it,” he told The Item.
Filmed with help from Swampscott Educational Access Television, the documentary is particularly poignant for its ability to bring students and seniors together after months of pandemic-imposed isolation.
We hope “Black History, Our History” is a starting point for building more bridges to bring young and old together and will spark conversations that build friendships between what Clopton described as two age groups “…underestimated for their real-time value to society.”
