Education Features

Teachers have close up view of diversity, segregation

wnycatholic April 19, 2024

TONAWANDA — Two staff members from Cardinal O’Hara High School joined 52 Buffalo community advocates who spent two days last week at the museums of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, as a way to learn about and bring home strategies for racial healing and equity.

Earl Schunk, assistant principal at Cardinal O’Hara High School (left), and Maria McGrath, special education teacher and DEI coordinator at O’Hara, show off some of the memorabilia they brought back from their recent trip to Montgomery, Alabama to learn about strategies for racial healing and equality. The logo on the shirts they are wearing represent breaking the bondage of racial injustice. McGrath also shows off a puzzle that represents part of a mural in the Legacy Museum and Schunk holds a copy of “Stories of Struggle,” that tells the perils of growing up in the segregated south. (Photo courtesy of Cardinal O’Hara High School)

Maria McGrath, special education teacher and DEI coordinator at Cardinal O’Hara, attended the event along with Assistant Principal Earl Schunk.

McGrath is in charge of the St. Margaret Scholars program for students with developmental and intellectual disabilities, a new initiative at Cardinal O’Hara.

“Kids today need information,” McGrath said. “The Legacy Museum emphasizes personal stories like that of Joanne Blackmon Bland, a survivor of Bloody Sunday who shared her story about being attacked as the marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the 54 mile walk from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. This was truthful education.”

McGrath also noted that Cardinal O’Hara is the most diverse Catholic high school in the Buffalo area.

The visit, organized by the ad hoc Buffalo Servant Leadership Coalition also included former Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield, whose mother, Ruth, was murdered with nine others in the racist attack on the Tops Supermarket on Jefferson Avenue May 14, 2022.

“By definition and by example, the murder of my mother and nine others on 5/14 was a modern-day lynching,” he said. “I believe their names will one day be added to the thousands ‘hanging’ from the ceilings of the (Legacy) museum, as examples of the true story of American democracy and hypocrisy.”

The group visited many Legacy Sites including the Legacy Museum. The city by 1860 was the capital of the domestic slave trade in Alabama and the focal point of the civil rights movements in the 1960s and beyond.

Schunk suggested that schools today have a change in curriculum to make diversity truly happen.