Area high school students are seeking a deeper social justice conscience

Truman High School debater Lorinda Ruz gets passionate talking about what she’s learned regarding civil rights and social justice from school.

“There’s no way,” Ruz said, “that anyone can be in debate and not be aware of all the current events.”

Conversations — one after another — about race and gender relations, poverty, living wage and climate change, rolled rapidly off the 16-year-old junior’s tongue with ease.

“You have to have a good repertoire about social issues and human rights to write arguments,” Ruz said.

Besides, in today’s digital world where social media puts social injustices — in full-blown action — in everyone’s face, many teens find themselves compelled to get grounded on the issues that Martin Luther King Jr. stood for, issues that will reverberate around the nation Monday in celebration of King.

“I believe it’s important and good to know about civil rights, the movement and civil disobedience so we know what we should fight for and how we can go about doing it,” said Shaniyah Higgins-Graves, a 17-year-old senior at Central Academy of Excellence in Kansas City.

Higgins-Graves, also a debater, said she doesn’t think school teaches kids enough on the subjects. She gained much of her knowledge while protesting for a living wage with the community activist group Stand Up KC after working at a McDonald’s restaurant near 63rd Street and Troost Avenue.

Educators at Central see the value in helping their students gain more knowledge about not only civil rights history and the racial injustices that plagued communities 60 years ago, but about “how all that impacts them today,” said Lee Allen, vice principal.

“We are trying to teach students how to stand up and speak for themselves and their community,” he said. “We are working hard and moving in that direction, but I’m not sure all that many students know how to effectively engage in that yet.”

At Truman High in Independence, where 30 percent of students belong to a minority group, Ruz said being in advanced classes makes it easier to bare your social soul. Teachers give students a lot more room to hash out sensitive issues in open discussions during class time, she said.

Another Truman debater, 17-year-old Patricia Davila, chimed in. “The first thing we talked about in Contemporary Issues (class) was civil rights from the ’60s to present.”

Truman students said that in every class except math, issues about social justice and the fair treatment of others come up. Students talk, and teachers mediate those discussions.

Some of those feelings played out for Ruz earlier this school year after the state of Missouri made it mandatory for students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning before the start of class.

Ruz is among the students who took issue with the mandate. In class and on social media, she said, students expressed themselves. Some were for the idea, others opposed it. Some decided they would follow the lead of NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who in peaceful protest refused to stand during the national anthem.

“I didn’t like the idea of being made to say it, but I decided I would stand and say the pledge,” Ruz said. “But I couldn’t say the last line, ‘liberty and justice for all.’ It bothered me to have to say that when I know those words are not true.”

Silence, she said, was her own form of civil disobedience.

Civil disobedience takes a different form for two teachers at Shawnee Mission East.

David Muhammad, who is black and Muslim, and Samantha Feinberg, who is white and Jewish, for the past three years have taken a group of inquisitive students from the predominantly white, mostly affluent high school on a bus tour into Kansas City’s predominantly black neighborhoods.

Feinberg said the tour was their way of bucking the commonly accepted thought that segregation in housing and neighborhoods came by choice, and “that’s just the way it is.” She said that she and Muhammad wanted to bust that thought with their students by telling them and showing them how segregation was engineered in Kansas City.

The Troost Avenue Bus Tour leaves Prairie Village, heading east and crossing what historically has been considered the racial divide in the Kansas City area.

The tour is preceded by a lot of study and teacher/student discussion about engineered segregation, systemic oppression and the post-World War II block-busting efforts that kept black citizens from moving into certain Kansas City neighborhoods.

“We ask students to examine the structure that helped create segregation, the structure that has allowed it to proliferate and the structure that exists every day to reinforce it,” Feinberg said.

On the tour, set for Monday, Shawnee Mission East partners with Wyandotte High School, a far more diverse school in Kansas City, Kan.

This will make the second year that Lauren Cole, a 17-year old Shawnee Mission East senior, has gone on the bus tour. Several years ago, Cole helped form the Diversity Committee Union to talk through issues about race relations in their school and surrounding community.

Cole, whose Jewish grandparents came to the United States from Nazi Germany in 1938, said she has always been curious about social justice issues. “The tour gave me a opportunity to step into a social justice program and to learn about segregation right here,” she said.

Diego Galicia, a Shawnee Mission East senior, lived on Kansas City’s East Side while in elementary school. But he didn’t recognize the existence of a racial and economic divide in the city until he moved across the state line and came to Shawnee Mission East. “There is almost no diversity in this school,” he said.

And Lydia Wickey, 17, who was born in Guatemala and adopted by a white family, said until she went on the bus tour and joined Shawnee Mission East’s diversity club, “I never even thought of myself as a minority.”

But now after learning a bit more about the issues, Wickey is quick to speak up when discussions touch on Black Lives Matter, the 2015 race-related protests at the University of Missouri or politicians talking about religious groups.

“I don’t want to be a part of the background anymore,” she said. “I don’t want to ignore the injustices anymore.”

It’s how a lot of young people feel, said Cole. “This is so important for so many of us. It’s about our future. It’s like Mr. Muhammad has told us. We have to stay woke.”

This story was originally published January 15, 2017 at 6:00 PM with the headline "Area high school students are seeking a deeper social justice conscience."