Calvert County

"Strive Not to Equal, But to Excel" is an evolving exhibition that will expand to include additional Calvert County artifacts, oral histories, and audio-visual presentations in the summer of 2000. School programs conducted by the former teachers and administrators of segregated schools will be available in the fall 2000. Educational materials for these school programs are being developed to coordinate with the State of Maryland content standards in the Social Studies. Jefferson Patterson Park & Museum

Charles County

"Inside Our School World: African American Schools during a Century of Segregation, Charles County, Maryland"  Exhibit at the Tony Hungerford Art gallery

CSM Gallery Presents Exhibit on African American Schools of the Past Century

A traveling exhibit commemorating the African American schools experience from 1865 to 1965 will be presented at the College of Southern Maryland's Tony Hungerford Memorial Gallery beginning Feb. 2, and continuing through March 4. A Free gallery talk will be presented Tuesday, Feb. 20 at noon in the gallery.

The exhibit, titled, "Inside Our School World: African American Schools during a Century of Segregation, Charles County, Maryland," is a project of the "Strive not to Equal but to Excel" partnership supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The exhibit was created through a partnership with Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum of Calvert County and focuses on the stories of local community members who lived the experience of segregated schools in Charles, Calvert and Anne Arundel counties.

This unique "immersion" exhibit combines traditional and contemporary methods of exhibition with authentic artifacts collected from each community.

Through this "immersion" exhibit, the visitor becomes part of the presentation as stories come to life though visual panels and audio description.

Collected artifacts donated or on loan from the public make up this collaborative effort, which was funded through an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant. Each county focuses on a different aspect of the effects from social issues to the impact of segregated schoolhouses on its teachers and students. Staff from each site gathered materials to include in their exhibit, including everything from books and chalk slates to grade reports and class photos.

Other immersion features include multimedia presentations, video clips and a web site that the College of Southern Maryland helped create with a virtual exhibit linked to CSM's web site 

CSM is hosting the second installment of the exhibit, which opened at the Jefferson Patterson Park Museum in Calvert County last year. The next installment will be at the Banneker-Douglas Museum in Annapolis and a final showing will bring a summary of all three exhibits together for display at the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons.

The project utilizes the expertise of Dr. James Loewen, senior researcher at the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of American History, and author of the book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, who will be serving as a "guest curator." Dr. Loewen compared the lessons in more than a dozen modern textbooks to the lessons in original source materials from the Smithsonian. From his research, he concluded that today's textbooks are still teaching forms of racism.

For more information about the exhibit or the resources and volunteer opportunities available within the Southern Maryland Studies Center at CSM, call Jennifer Pitts, SMSC coordinator, at 301- 934-2251 or 301-870-3008, ext. 7110.

Anne Arundel County

Banneker-Douglass Museum in Annapolis will present "Strive Not To Equal" in late spring 2001. The stories of Anne Arundel County educators and students of segregated , and then desegregated schools will be featured at Banneker-Douglass Museum.

For more information on this Museum-Community-Library partnership, call Barbara Stewart Mogel at 410-586-8531.