Rites of Passage Grow Beyond Expectations

Beverly Silverstein had no idea what she was launching in September when she created a Rites of Passage program at Crenshaw High for some of the school’s black students.

Her goal was to encourage the group to study African American history through reading, outside activities and community service over the course of a school year, and at year’s end, to treat them to a ceremony designed to celebrate their entry into early adulthood.

What she did was set in motion a series of events that could lead to a life-changing, extended adventure for 20 11th-graders.

If things go as planned, the young men and women--some of whom have never strayed far from their Los Angeles neighborhoods--will travel 7,558 miles to west Africa this summer for something more than a mere class trip.

At an international gathering of historians in Accra, Ghana, they will present a paper on what they have learned about the influence of Africa in African American life.

They then will travel the country doing research on a spinoff project that will turn them into co-curators of a joint exhibit at UCLA’s Fowler Museum and a museum in Newark, N.J.

In the last six months, the students and Silverstein have raised $42,000 for the Africa trip, just $8,000 short of their $50,000 goal.

When not fund-raising, the students give up weekends and evenings for extracurricular activities required by the program, such as visits to a senior citizens home where they talk about their people’s history with those who have lived it.

During one such recent visit to the Good Shepherd Manor in Leimert Park, they engaged in a lively--and sometimes heated--discussion with 60-, 70- and 80-year-old residents about racism in this country, using as a stimulus readings from Richard Wright’s “Native Son.”

The young men and women also have met with Ghanaian immigrants, seen “Seven Guitars”--August Wilson’s play about an African American blues singer--attended book signings and met with artist John Biggers at the California Afro-American Museum.

Recently, in the lobby of the Vision Theater in Leimert Park, where some of the students were collecting donations, seasoned Africa travelers who happened by their table offered unsolicited advice about everything from what kind of clothing they should take on their trip to what the food will be like.

“You’re going to have the time of your lives,” Azhar Aluquah, a Pasadena filmmaker, told 16-year-old Taaji Madyun.

“Don’t forget to study,” Aluquah added. “Don’t forget what you’re going there for.”

For her part, Silverstein, who is coordinator of Crenshaw High’s magnet school program for future teachers and who operates the Rites of Passage program mostly on her own time and often with her own money, has stopped trying to figure out how and why her project has grown to proportions she did not imagine.

Almost all of it resulted from chance meetings and coincidences that has everybody involved shaking their heads in amazement.

The first occurred when someone told Silverstein about a group that was planning a trip to Ghana for the annual gathering of the Assn. for the Study of Classical African Civilizations.

Silverstein said she forgot the contact person’s name until weeks later when she took her students to a reception for Ghana’s president, Jerry Rawlings, and there was Nzinga Ratabishi Heru, a planner of the trip and the person she had been told about.

“I couldn’t believe it when she just said, ‘Bring your children along,’ ” recalled Silverstein.

The museum project was equally a product of chance, she said.

The exhibit is the brainchild of Doran H. Ross, Fowler Museum’s deputy director and curator of African Collections. The planned exhibit, to be called “Wrapped in Pride,” will focus on the history and usages of African textiles, particularly the colorful Ghanaian Kente cloth.

When Fowler designated Crenshaw High earlier this spring as the local school he wanted to work with him and a group of New Jersey students on the exhibit, he did not know Silverstein’s group would be chosen or that it was planning to visit the very area of Ghana where Kente cloth and other art are made.

It wasn’t until his second meeting with the group that the trip came up.

“I about fell out of my chair,” Ross said this week. “It couldn’t be more perfect, and it’s going to serve the project well.”

Even eerier, Ross will be in Ghana at the same time as the Crenshaw students on an unrelated trip. He has rearranged his schedule to spend some time with them there.

The students, he said, will get to see firsthand how Kente--in wide use today among Africans outside Ghana and among African Americans--is made.

During their senior year, the students will be equipped with tape recorders and cameras to document the use of Kente cloth in the United States, where it is popular as clothing, furniture upholstery, sashes, church choir robes and in Kwaanza ceremonies, among other things. Kwaanza is a nonreligious holiday celebrated by many African Americans at year’s end.

The students also will be trained in museum curator procedures, such as shipping and unwrapping artifacts.

Ross said he hopes to use as much of the students’ writing and photographs as possible in the catalog for “Wrapped in Pride,” now scheduled to debut in the fall of 1998 at the Newark Museum and in Los Angeles at the Fowler the following January.

For Silverstein, that project is a godsend because she deliberately chose 11th-graders for the Rites of Passage program so that, as seniors, they could pass their knowledge on to other Crenshaw students.

Things couldn’t have fallen into place better, she said.

“Nzinga tells me it’s the [African] ancestors pulling us together,” Silverstein said. “I guess she might be right.”