When 13-year-old Eva Hall of Westminster thinks of moral courage, she thinks of Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president, who served decades in prison for his principled stand against apartheid.
“Sheer compassion, and strength of character are what drove him,” she wrote in her winning essay on moral courage, “and I yearn for my own inner courage to take a stand toward what I am passionate about.”
Tuesday night she was among the young essayists recognized during the Anti-Defamation League’s Governor’s Holocaust Remembrance Program, which concluded with a speech by Gov. Bill Ritter.
The winners of the Leslie and Norman Davis Student Essay Contest huddled backstage at Boettcher Concert Hall.
Amid the hubbub and orchestra warming up, Eva said the class assignment at Mandalay Middle School became a life-changing lesson.
“When I started, I didn’t know who he was or what he did,” she said of Mandela. “I learned he had the strength and will of an army.”
Her composition, “The Black Pimpernel,” won first place among essays by students in grades seven through nine in the contest put on by the ADL’s Mountain States Regional office in Denver.
The contest theme was “A Tribute to Moral Courage: Standing Up Against Injustice.”
The winners were selected from among 130 essays by middle school and high school students from across the state.
After Eva, winners in younger divisions were in second place, Margo Brown, an eighth-grader at Graland Country Day School in Denver; and in third place, Cheyanne Wilson, a freshman at Heritage High School in Littleton.
In the division for 10th- and 11th- graders, Abbey Leone of Carbondale, a junior at Bridges High School, took first place. Rachel Fenwick-Smith, a sophomore at Fairview High School in Boulder, was second, and Tyler Newcomb, another junior at Bridges High, finished third.
In her first-place essay, “A Life of Courage,” Abbey wrote of Paul Rusesabagina, a 40-year-old assistant hotel manager who risked his own life sheltering and saving 1,268 people during the 1994 Rwandan genocide that claimed more than 800,000 lives.
“Paul Rusesabagina’s actions have inspired me to live a life of honor and courage,” she wrote.
“To act with moral courage you don’t have to be a genius, or a body builder. You don’t have to be a war hero, or a natural born leader. All you need is to believe and act on what is right.”
Abbey said her English teacher, Maggie Riley, encouraged her to enter and that she was surprised but excited to be honored as a winner.
“I’ve always been interested in Africa,” she said. “But the assignment really gave me a lot of respect for the issues of culture, how other people’s is so much different than ours.”
The first-place winners received $500. Abbey, who turns 18 on Saturday, said the money would go to a still-unchosen gift for herself.
Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com
