ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 11, 1996 TAG: 9602090020
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
A BIOGRAPHER, A CURATOR, a collector of the past - teacher Marylen Harmon has made it her lifelong mission to teach the celebrations and struggles of African-Americans. Preserving history, so that it won't be repeated, ``is why I was born,'' she says.
On the day after Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, Northside Middle School teacher Marylen Harmon has two subjects on the agenda for her first-period class.
She displays a cake in honor of her first subject - King's 67th birthday. It's a fake three-tiered number made of cardboard and icing.
``One of the sayings Dr. King liked was, `When you wake up, get up. And when you get up, do something,'''she tells her students.
``I try to do that.''
Then the 48-year-old Harmon - a Ph.D. who has spent three decades documenting and teaching the achievements of black Americans - gives an impassioned account of the civil-rights leader's childhood.
She reads from a biography written for young adults. But she stops every other sentence to infuse tidbits about the second subject of the day: herself.
Seamlessly, she brings the civil-rights movement home to this classroom of mostly white Roanoke County children.
``Like Dr. King, I also grew up in segregation,'' she explains. ``I went to Carver School in Salem. We had kids from Bedford, Goodview - kids who had to leave home at 5:30 in the morning just to get to school...
``When Dr. King told [his daughter Yolanda] why they couldn't go to the amusement park in Atlanta, it was the same reason I couldn't go to Lakeside in Salem.''
When Harmon gets to the scene in King's childhood when the white neighbor kids refuse to play with him, she pauses to talk about her own upbringing in Pulaski.
``We had a family next door that was white, and we were allowed to play with them until a certain time every day - when the father came home. Now the mother didn't care, but the father said if he ever caught us together he'd stomp us to death.''
As she continues with her lesson, a hand shoots up from the back of the classroom. A sixth-grade boy can't let go of the neighborhood scene.
He wants to know, ``But what happened if the dad came home early?'' |n n| ``Never let it rest until the good is better, and the better best.''
Harmon picked up that saying from Mrs. Jesse Jones, her third-grade teacher at Carver and a lifelong role model. It's one of many lessons she imparts to her students, friends - anyone who crosses her path - in her ongoing battle against complacency.
Harmon grew up in the days of Jim Crow, when she was not allowed to enter a movie theater except through the back door, or try on clothes or shoes in a store before buying them, or attend school with whites.
``It was truly the best of times and the worst of times,'' she says.
For the daughter of educators Chauncey and Lucy Harmon, it was a time when children worshipped their teachers, when the Harmons' supper table was ringed with school kids who had nowhere else to go.
``There are still people in Salem in their late 80s, and if they told me to stop doing something right now, I would say, `Yes ma'am,' and I would stop,'' Harmon explains.
Like the civil-rights leaders she teaches about, Harmon grew up in a tight-knit community of school, church and neighborhood. Her father, who studied under George Washington Carver at the Tuskegee Institute, was principal of Carver School. Her mother taught first and second grades there.
Both were instrumental in fighting for equal pay for black teachers. Before he became a Supreme Court justice, Richmond lawyer Thurgood Marshall defended Chauncey Harmon in a 1936 teacher-pay lawsuit against Pulaski schools that resulted in a settlement - and the loss of his job.
Before moving to Salem, Chauncey Harmon was principal of the black Scott Memorial School in Wytheville. Marylen remembers the Galax kids who had to catch rides with the U.S. Mail trucks to get to Scott: ``They arrived early, so they'd come to our house and baby-sit while our parents got ready for school.''
Not surprisingly, Harmon uses stories like these to make her classroom lectures in language arts and social studies come alive. She is sought out as an expert on teaching cultural diversity. She has written curriculum guides on the topic and gives lectures across the Southeast on incorporating African and African-American studies in the classroom.
She has self-published two books on black history and three calendars - chock full of little-known anecdotes and the accomplishments of African-Americans in Roanoke and beyond.
Asked to grade area educators on their teaching of the civil rights movement, she offers a C+. ``Some teachers are self-committed to tell the story. And others don't feel comfortable with it. They're afraid parents might get upset, or they think that we've moved beyond it.
``But we haven't really moved beyond anything unless we're willing to talk about it.''
Some of her own students' parents have challenged her, questioning some of her materials on black inventors and civil-rights leaders. ``I've had to send information home, documenting these contributions,'' she says. ``It happens several times a year, but I keep on rolling.''
She believes that teaching kids about real-life heroes - of all races - is a lesson that transcends textbooks. ``It shows them that ordinary people can make a difference.
``I had a student today who told me, `If I see things going wrong, I'm going to make a change.' That's my bottom line: If you can understand the feeling of someone [who's oppressed], and you don't want that, will you be willing to speak up?''
As a tribute to her father - who died in 1993 - and to remind herself of her mission, Harmon looks up to the sky every morning in the Northside parking lot and says, ``Hey Pop, I'm going in this door, and I'm gonna make the best of this day.''
``I'm loaded down with my book bags, but I'm out there saying it every day,'' she explains. ``It's like, no matter what happens, you can't take my joy away.''
Harmon doesn't rely solely on textbooks for information. She prefers to study history first-hand, like an anthropologist digging for relics and clues.
``I grew up with textbooks that didn't tell me what blacks did,'' she says. ``The books said slavery was good.''
In the interest of learning about her own past and the pasts of others, she has been to every country in Europe except three.
She's visited King Tut's tomb, she's been to Brazil, the Ivory Coast, Egypt...In fact, it's easier to say where Harmon has not been than where she has.
She has dipped her feet in the waters of the Nile.
She has climbed the Great Pyramids in 123-degree weather.
She has, with great pain and reverence, stepped into the dark dungeon of a slave holding cell in Ghana. ``The guide said to be careful,'' she recalls. ``And so you were holding onto the walls, which were rough like cinderblocks. And then the guide explained what the roughness was.
``And I realized I was touching the human waste and remains from people who died there 300 years ago. I was touching the waste from my ancestors' bodies.''
Her Roanoke County house is full of artwork and travel mementos that regularly get hauled into the classroom. She also has more than 500 African-American inventions - complete with patent certificates - that she loans out to libraries, museums and classrooms.
She feels it her duty to teach people that Benjamin Banneker, a black man, laid the architectural groundwork for Washington, D.C., even though a white Frenchman got the credit; that the first striking clock in the U.S. was developed by a black man; and the chamber commode, and the fishing rod and the ironing board....
There's a cast-iron pot resting on her fireplace that was once used by her enslaved great-grandmother: Slaves would line their cabins with cast iron to block out the sound while planning their escapes. She has a quilt, handed down through her family, that once kept people warm along the Underground Railroad.
Harmon regularly wears to school clothes she bought abroad ``to show that styles are a part of someone's culture.'' And always she wears two wrists full of bracelets - the left arm representing bracelets from European cities, the right arm representing African cities.
``If King were alive today, I think he'd bow his head and cry,'' Harmon says, citing the disintegration of families andcommunities, low voter turn-out and the rise in race hate groups.
``We've come a long way, but we've been marching in time lately, and in some cases I see us moving backward,'' she says.
Preserving history - so that it won't be repeated - ``is why I was born,'' Harmon says.
And so she tells stories to make her lessons known: ``I tell them that my dad worked his way through college shoveling coal at 5 cents a ton. To show them that whatever they want to be, they can be.
``Blacks have made contributions to world history and they're human beings like everybody else. That's the lesson - that if they can make it, you can, too.''
LENGTH: Long : 165 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: WAYNE DEEL/Staff ``Like Dr. King, I also grew up inby CNBsegregation,'' explains Northside Middle School teacher Marylen
Harmon.