A powerful history lesson, from dolls
They're just dolls, barely two feet tall.
They're made of cloth, with porcelain heads and porcelain hands. Displayed behind a pane of glass, near a wall of Shirley Temple dolls, they represent a forgotten form of entertainment that feels as antiquated as an eight-track tape.
Yet, these 16 dolls inside High Point's Angela Peterson Doll & Miniature Museum mean much to Chris Greene.
She's a guidance counselor at High Point Central. And six years ago, she helped the museum acquire the dolls.
These days, she'll pick up a few from the museum, cart them into a classroom and talk to students young enough to be her grandchildren about the struggles of a different America.
She'll tell students about the importance of a baseball player, a Georgia preacher and a petite Alabama woman who refused to give up her bus seat more than a half century ago.
She did that Wednesday for Danielle Crosby's social studies class at High Point Central. She brought dolls of baseball player Jackie Robinson and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., talked about their fight for equality and asked students to write about what they learned.
"It's all races for all people,'' student Keival Kittrell told Greene. "Blacks. Whites. Chinese. Hispanic. It's all people. That is what he fought for.''
If it were only that easy. Race is active in almost everything we do in our corner of the world, and in some cases, charges of racism continue to fester like a wound that can't heal.
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They're made of cloth, with porcelain heads and porcelain hands. Displayed behind a pane of glass, near a wall of Shirley Temple dolls, they represent a forgotten form of entertainment that feels as antiquated as an eight-track tape.
Yet, these 16 dolls inside High Point's Angela Peterson Doll & Miniature Museum mean much to Chris Greene.
She's a guidance counselor at High Point Central. And six years ago, she helped the museum acquire the dolls.
These days, she'll pick up a few from the museum, cart them into a classroom and talk to students young enough to be her grandchildren about the struggles of a different America.
She'll tell students about the importance of a baseball player, a Georgia preacher and a petite Alabama woman who refused to give up her bus seat more than a half century ago.
She did that Wednesday for Danielle Crosby's social studies class at High Point Central. She brought dolls of baseball player Jackie Robinson and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., talked about their fight for equality and asked students to write about what they learned.
"It's all races for all people,'' student Keival Kittrell told Greene. "Blacks. Whites. Chinese. Hispanic. It's all people. That is what he fought for.''
If it were only that easy. Race is active in almost everything we do in our corner of the world, and in some cases, charges of racism continue to fester like a wound that can't heal.