Black History Month Comes Alive at Garton School
Students at Garton Elementary School take part in a Black History Month event on Wednesday afternoon.
It’s not always easy talking history that was made many decades ago to an audience whose personal histories only go back one or less. But local actress/activist Sharon Kay Brown carried it off Wednesday afternoon when she staged a brief re-enactment of the Edna Mae Griffin saga at Garton Elementary. Her appearance capped off the school’s observance of Black History Month. Earlier in the day Principal Renita Lord and her staff had hosted other guests who made presentations about George Washington Carver, The Communicator newspaper, and Alexander Clark.
“We really tried to focus on locally prominent African Americans,” Lord said, “to help the students realize that history is made right here, not just in faraway places.”
Griffin, known to some as the Rosa Parks of Iowa, fought discrimination in Des Moines. On July 7, 1948, seven years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, Griffin, her daughter and two friends were refused service at Katz Drug Store in downtown Des Moines.
Griffin responded by picketing every Saturday in front of the establishment. The store manager was eventually prosecuted under Iowa’s only civil rights law, a criminal statute prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations. The Iowa Supreme Court upheld his conviction and the case was the first successful enforcement of the 1884 Iowa Civil Rights Act.
Griffin continued to be an active participant in the civil rights movement throughout her life until she died in 2000. She founded the Iowa chapter of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and organized Iowans for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom led by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963.
In 1998, on the 50th anniversary of her successful desegregation of the Katz lunch counter, the Flynn Building at 7th & Locust downtown where Katz Drugstore had been was renamed the Edna Griffin Building. The same year, Des Moines Mayor Preston Daniels declared May 15th Edna Griffin Day in Des Moines and in 2004 a downtown pedestrian bridge was named after her.
Given the chronology of events you could make the case that Rosa Parks ought to have been known as the Edna Griffin of Alabama.
Brown slips easily into character as the pioneering crusader she portrayed at Garton. It’s a role she’s played countless times to a wide array of audiences. After she whipped a gym full of kids into the mood for ice cream and hot summer days the Garton Chorus, made up of 3rd-5th graders, got them back on point with an enthused rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” — sometimes referred to as The Black National Anthem— a song written as a poem by James Weldon Johnson in 1899 and set to music by his brother John Rosamond in 1900, nine years before Edna Mae Griffin was born in Kentucky. Half a century later fate steered her into a drugstore in Des Moines to get a few ice cream cones. The service was slow but eventually she got something for everybody.
