Prized Look at Black Inventors : Monrovia 4th-Graders’ Mural Takes Gold at Fair

When Daphne Niall came up with the idea for her fourth-grade students to illustrate a social studies lesson on black American inventors with a mural, she had no idea the project would become the handiwork of champions.

In fact, everyone involved considered it a routine social studies project.

“I wanted (the class) to be aware of some concrete things that have been contributed,” said Niall, adding that she always tries to work in “something ethnic” during the year.

The expectations proved overly modest when the work won recognition at the Los Angeles County Fair recently as the best class project in the show, netting the school its first gold award at the fair.

The project, consisting of individual drawings strung together to form a 10-foot-long mural, illustrates about 40 inventions, among them the fire escape and the baby carriage. The inventors’ lack of recognition was apparent in the fact that Niall was unable to find many of their first names.

Some of the students said they had no idea so many things, from the ironing board to the letter-box, had been invented by blacks.

“I knew Kareem (Abdul-Jabbar of the Lakers) invented the (sky) hook,” said Charles Brown, 11. But he knew nothing about the inventors eventually included in the mural.

“They weren’t recognized because white people thought they were superior and thought they were the only ones who could do anything,” said 10-year-old Drew Pierce, now a fifth-grader. “I thought that was mean.”

Vice Principal Laural Erpenbeck was proud of the students and the school.

“This is really a big thing to have (won) out of all those hundreds of entries, including Beverly Hills, and they have their own art teachers,” she said.

Another Mayflower winner was a diorama by fifth- and sixth-graders to illustrate the book “The Secret Garden,” she said. That project came in second in the sculpture and three-dimensional category.