Mattie Wells Elementary School students put together a play for black history month on Feb. 29 and March 1, highlighting important black historical figures for the community to learn about.
Sherrod Rockmore, a teacher at Mattie Wells Elementary School, said the students started auditioning for the play in January, and they practiced every Monday and Wednesday.
He said the students were well prepared by the time of the performance. Rockmore added that some of their lines were very long, and he said he is very proud of the two narrators since they had the biggest parts to play.
“The black history program was an idea I have done before at other schools, but I noticed here at Mattie Wells there was no program,” he said. “I wanted to bring a black history program here, and the play we put on for black history month was called Dreams of Glory.
We traveled through the time when slaves came over from Africa to the U.S., and we built it from there to Barack Obama becoming one of our former presidents of the U.S.”
The teacher said the purpose of Dreams of Glory was to show people in the community black Americans have ended up better than others ever wanted them to be. He said the play was important for Mattie Wells Elementary School, because it taught students who black historical figures are in history. “There are people from our past who gave up and sacrificed a lot for us to have what we have today. Being a black man teaching at Mattie Wells would not have been possible without those who came before me and helped to make it possible,” Rockmore said.
Tori Everett, a fifth-grade student at Mattie Wells, said Dreams of Glory was important for Mattie Wells Elementary School, because he didn’t think the students knew much about black history. He was glad he could help teach them about a piece of black history and enjoyed the songs from the play. “The black history program was good, because we had a lot of good people we learned about like Rosa Parks and Barack Obama,” he said. “I played Barack Obama in the play, and I liked learning about his leadership and his speaking skills. I learned there are people who might not know much about black history, so I want them to learn about it through plays like this.”
The teacher said some of the black historical figures represented in the play were Nat Turner, Henry Box Brown, Fredrick Douglas, Booker T.
Washington, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama.
He said his students learned a lot through performing in Dreams of Glory, and they were excited to learn about what the historical figures did.
“I could tell just by hearing the excitement from the hallway after the play that some students realize they can do great things after watching the play. My favorite part of helping these students with Dreams of Glory was seeing where things started to where it ended. Seeing the light bulbs go off in their heads of this is where things started for us and how things keep progressing is great,” he said.
Kitara Gomez, another fifthgrade student at Mattie Wells, said the play was important for Mattie Wells Elementary School, because people in the community needed to hear about the historical figures.
She said the music was the best part of the play. She said black history is important, because the people who helped to end slavery and segregation need to be celebrated and remembered.
“We learned a lot about the historical figures in the play, and it took a lot of hard work to get it to where it was supposed to be,” the student said. “I played Rosa Parks and the grandma in the opening scene, and I learned Rosa Parks was a leader. I learned that these historical figures had a lot of impact across the world, and I could see it when I was performing in the play.”
