Carteret hosts Gallery of Heroes

Photo by Daniel Jackovino
Carteret kindergarten teacher Regina Cora stands with students, from left, Amaury Angulo, Hendrick Zavala, Andre Amin and Joseph Miraval; seated, from left, are A’nyla Saafir and Mason Rouse

Black History Month is currently being observed at Carteret Elementary School with student posters taped in hallways and classroom doors showing the familiar faces of Martin Luther King, Jr., Colin Powell and Rosa Parks.

But the times, they are a-changin’ and consequently new faces and unknowns are breaking into the historic lineup pictured. Who is Garret Morgan or Alice Coachman? Of the 26 posters, there are only three famous athletes — none named Michael Jordan; one entertainer and two elected officials. The school’s culture committee coordinated the show.

“The hallways are a gallery of heroes,” said Gianna Allegretti, a committee member. “Each classroom picked a famous Black American and decorated their classroom door with pictures and information about that person.”

For Feb. 26, a walk through the entire school is scheduled to be led by student counselor Marisa Acosta, who originally brought the idea to the committee.

“The best part about the gallery,’ Allegretti said, “are names we never heard of before — Jordan Chile, Larry Doby, Henry “Box” Brown, Mae Jemison. The children chose the person and did the research with some help. That’s why we thought it would be so impactful. I just think, especially with job titles, if you were the first to do the job or if it was revolutionary that one time, their name would come up, like Kamala Harris.”

Jordan Chile is an Olympic gymnast; Larry Doby was the second Black player in Major League Baseball, following Jackie Robinson; Henry “Box” Brown was an enslaved Black man, in Virginia, who escaped to his freedom by mailing himself in a crate to abolitionists in Philadelphia and Mae Jemison, engineer and physician, is the first Black woman to travel into space.

Allegretti noted that because there were so few celebrities in the heroes gallery, the students had to find out who these unknowns were and what they did.

“It was very interesting that the kids didn’t pick people who are popular right now,” she said. “They chose people outside pop culture.”

One of the heroes in the gallery is Garret Morgan.

“He invented the traffic light,” Allegretti said. “How would we know this if not for the gallery walk?”

Morgan’s invention, in the early ‘20s, improved the traffic signal being used at the time. The idea came to him after witnessing an automobile collide with a horse-drawn carriage. Traffic signals did not have lights; they had movable arms lifting up and down with the words stop, or go, one immediately after the other. Morgan’s invention allowed for the go signal to be delayed so that traffic in all directions would be stopped during the same time.

Another hero in the gallery walk is Alice Coachman, the first Black woman to win an Olympic gold medal. A high jumper, she accomplished this in 1948, in London
“You don’t think of Alice Coachman,” Allegretti said. “You should. After the gallery walk, hopefully the children will. She was also the first Black athlete to endorse a consumer product. That was Coca-Cola.”

Coachman’s winning jump of 5 feet six and one-eighth inches set the Olympic record, at the time. In 1996, at the Atlanta Olympics, she was honored as one of the 100 greatest Olympic athletes of all time. She died July 14, 2014.

Acosta, who has been at Carteret four years, said she introduced the idea of a heroes gallery her first year at the school.

“We haven’t done it since then,” she said, “but I thought it was one we should revisit. It’s collaborative and different. At school and at home, the conversation is about culture and diversity. It’s embedded in our Carteret families.”