At Codman, every month is Black History month

CITY WEEKLY / BOSTON NEIGHBORHOODS / DORCHESTER

Below the crossfire of experts and educators engaged in the "diversity debate" over Boston's charter schools, Codman Academy Charter School educates its primarily black student body with an unofficial motto that students, parents, and teachers often recite: "You have to know where you're coming from to know where you're going."

Eighty-three percent black, Dorchester's first charter high school infuses African-American history into its curriculum from the chalkboards of math classrooms to the scripts of theater productions.

"We don't celebrate black history month," said Meg Campbell, the founder and head of Codman. "Because here, every month is black history month."

After spending their first nine years in regular public schools, coming to Codman (which has grades 9-12) is an adjustment for students, said humanities teacher Thabiti Brown.

"Most schools, you get historical textbooks that are told from a largely Euro-centric point of view," said Brown, adding that many texts are "denigrating of Africans and people of dark skin."

"What we try to do a lot is to give a perspective of what else is out there."

In English class, sophomores are writing a series of monologues of African-American historical figures, which they'll perform at the Huntington Theatre at Boston University later this month.

At school assemblies, prominent African-Americans come to speak about black issues. A recent lecture featured Dr. Charles Finch, an author of several books on African history. Finch presented a slide show that told stories such as that of Imhotep, the ancient Egyptian "father of medicine."

Afterward, as students ate Caribbean food in the school's conference room, Finch sat on a bench outside the door and talked about educating blacks.

"When you're looking at overall academic performance," Finch said, "it is always strengthened by a sense of community." But for African-Americans, he pointed out, that community was severed by slavery. Reconnecting black students with their African origins gives them a deeper sense of their community, Finch said.

The African connection at Codman even hits the math classroom, where studying slope means analyzing the pyramid steps in ancient Egypt.

Codman's approach finds its purest strain in the African Diaspora Project. Taught by associate professor Robert Johnson, chairman of the Africana Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, the course meets Saturday mornings and enrolls both students and parents.

Johnson considers the class, which is a four-year pilot project in its first semester, a "motivational course." He opened a recent session with a video about the American civil rights movement, and then asked his students, "In what ways was the civil rights movement not just a fight for blacks?"

Students stumbled at first. Johnson kept pecking, trying to get the class to understand that a struggle for civil rights "humanizes Americans" and "helps us live up to our creed." Later, he asked if successful African-Americans should maintain a presence in their home communities, instead of just donating money to them.

Marlon Thompson, a 10th-grader, said they should. "It's like child support the father gives the mother money, but he's not there to help the kids."

This elicited chuckles from the mothers in the class. Johnson later spoke about the four women who are enrolled alongside the eight teenagers.

"I knew that most of the parents would be black females," he said. "So this was a way of empowering them as well, to learn something about history and culture, and also to work with their child on an intellectual level."

Codman Academy's study of African-American history will leave the continent next February, on a service trip to South Africa. In preparation, Codman is developing a "sister school" relationship with the A.W. Barnes Primary School in East London, South Africa; the two schools occasionally hold teleconferences between their students.

"I'm talking to people in Africa, and I'm here in Boston," said Codman 10th-grader Benjamin Hollins of one such meeting, as he stood in the Codman lobby after the Finch assembly.

Aside from a sound delay of a few seconds, Hollins said, the teleconference made it feel like the South African students were "in another room."

"It's like, `Wow.' I would like to go there," he said.