SALT LAKE CITY — In conjunction with Black History Month, Salt Lake Community College is preparing for a special art exhibit featuring photos taken by children that show what they feel is their “beloved community.”
The exhibit is the collaboration between an English professor and someone who lived through the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
Elisa Stone is an SLCC English professor who started teaching students in sixth grade about the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 2015.
“Beloved Community is what Dr. King envisioned, that people couldn’t be fighting over race indefinitely," she explained.
The idea blossomed after Stone met Marian Howe-Taylor, who grew up in Boston in the 1960s, during the early stages of the civil rights movement.
She remembers when Coretta Scott King would organize and perform in concerts to raise money.
"I have this memory of sitting in the balcony of 12th Baptist Church and hearing the song she ended the program," explained Taylor. "Which then was; 'You’ve got to be carefully taught.'”
Taylor believes that teaching children to love over hate will make the world a better place.
“You might be able to tap into how we can go about changing," she said. "Through conversation, through reaching out to one another, to really looking at our community.”
In honor of Dr. King's legacy, students were given cameras to capture images that were important to them in their own communities.
“So we give them this conceptual framework to think about how they fit into Dr. King’s legacy," Stone explained. "Then they use their cameras to go out and express themselves and capture what beloved community means to them.”
The photographs, along with short essays by students about the significance of the photos, will be part of a gallery exhibit premiering Wednesday night at the Salt Lake Community College City Campus on State Street.
