Roger Ellis, 11, finished a bowl of raisin bran and started to tie his sneakers when he heard the anchor on Fox News make an announcement: Coretta Scott King is dead.
He ran to the bedroom to tell his mother, Melanie Ellis. “She was shocked,” Roger recalled. “I was surprised too, because she lived for so long and then all of a sudden died.”
The fifth-grader knew King was the widow of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and that she was a leader in her own right. But he wanted to make sure students at his school, Elkhart Elementary in Aurora, knew.
So at school he wrote on green construction paper “In Memory of Mrs. King.” He walked around asking teachers and students to sign it. He plans to hang it in the school hall.
He’d gotten nine signatures by the time I met him in Tee Littleton’s class Tuesday afternoon.
Roger called the Kings his heroes. Why? “Because my two best friends are Mexican and black.” What did the Kings have to do with that? “If it weren’t for them we’d probably be forced to go to different schools.”
Wise words from a little man wearing a sweat shirt emblazoned with a line from the movie “Napoleon Dynamite”: PEDRO OFFERS YOU HIS PROTECTION. Roger wears his hair close-shaved on the sides, with sprouts of wavy blond hair from his forehead to the nape of his neck, Stegosaurus style.
He showed Littleton the memorial he was working on.
Littleton smiled. “Do you know how much I love you, Roger? I’m so proud of you.”
Roger never had Littleton as a teacher, but Roger says she is the only teacher who taught him about black history.
“She’s taught me everything I know about black history,” Roger said. “The only time I learned about black history in school was through her plays.”
I met Tee Littleton last year at the stock show, and she invited me a month later to see her children perform at the school’s Black History Month play, which she has put together nearly each of the 13 years she has taught at Elkhart.
She incorporated a lesson about Coretta Scott King in her class Tuesday. Roger helped.
Students wrote essays and drew posters depicting life before the civil rights movement. One drew a restaurant with a sign on the window: “No negroes.” Another struggled with his spelling: “No injucetest and no black people sitting in the back of the bus.”
Littleton gathered the students at the front of the class, at a place she called “freedom’s carpet.” (Littleton tells them daily that education is the great equalizer of American society.)
She asked the students to share their thoughts regarding “living the dream.”
Eduardo García, 7: “It’s about changing things that are wrong without using fists or guns.” Melisa Mireles, 8, added: “You can use love to change things.”
Then Littleton told her students they were going to bid Mrs. King farewell by sending balloons to her.
Eduardo, her class leader for the day, reached into a box of already inflated balloons and handed one to each of the 23 students. They walked to the courtyard, clenching ribbons attached to colorful balloons.
As the wind blew, causing the balloons to flutter, Littleton announced: “OK, everyone. Repeat after me:
“We love you, Coretta Scott King.”
We love you, Coretta Scott King.
“OK. Now let go of your balloons. Let them fly up in the sky!”
Red, blue, yellow, green, purple, pink and white balloons floated away as the children’s necks stretched upward.
Roger watched his purple balloon take off and waved bye-bye.
Cindy Rodríguez’s column appears Tuesdays and Thursdays in Scene. Contact her at 303-820-1211 or crodriguez@denverpost.com.
