Richard Cooper, of Charlottesville, Va., reads a poem by Reginald Dwayne Betts in Shepherd University's Shipley Recital Hall Saturday afternoon. Tabitha Johnston

SHEPHERDSTOWN — Jefferson County Schools Cultural Diversity and Staff Development Coordinator Tanya Dallas Lewis has already noticed a difference, as the result of a program she has championed over the last two years in the local school system’s fourth grade classrooms.

As Lewis noted, during a lecture and poetry reading for the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherd University’s Shipley Recital Hall Saturday afternoon, all of the students involved in the Black Men Read program have reported a positive response to having a Black man come into their classrooms and read from a novel by Rita Williams Garcia about a Black boy their age, “Clayton Byrd Goes Underground.”

“It has been embraced, over all,” Lewis said. “We’ve gotten some positive feedback from our community, from our superintendent — she was in full support the moment she found about it, as well as students, teachers and, of course, our courageous, intelligent, amazing Black men readers.”

CATF Producing Artistic Director Peggy McKowen, explaining some of CATF’s and Shepherd University’s Contemporary Theatre Studies’ involvement with helping the program flourish, discussed the responses students gave to the book’s subject matter, after-the-fact.

“In the spring is when we do the test model of this, and we’ve only done it for three week [spans of time]. We start in full development in the fall, and will be doing the entire year and the year after that,” McKowen said. “We did do surveys with the fourth grade students, and one of the questions we asked, was, ‘How do you feel similar and/or different to Clayton?’ who is the little boy in the story. In all of those surveys, there was never a mention of the fact that that little boy was a different race, or different to them in any way, culturally. I think it’s very telling, in the way that the students respond to that experience, about how they are sort of learning how to be a community.”

JR Fountain, who is a participant in the Black Men Read program, reads a poem by Reginald Dwayne Betts in Shipley Recital Hall Saturday afternoon. Tabitha Johnston

The event’s lecture was given by Lewis, regarding Black Men Read and the local and national result of desegregation of schools. Lewis explained how, when schools were desegregated, following the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case outlawing segregation in schools in 1954, Black schools were often closed, with their Black students forced to attend schools without Black administrators or teachers, as the white community generally objected to Black teachers and administrators involved in the education of their children. The loss of Black mentors involved in the education of the majority of Black students, which has mostly continued to this day, has resulted in a noticeable decline in the academic performance of the Black student population overall in the public school system. Lewis also noted that non-Black educators fail to understand the nuances of Black culture, causing the educators misunderstand and penalize their Black students’ behavior, thus further injuring Black students’ ability to flourish in the American public school system.

“What in the American classroom speaks to the heart of a little Black boy? What speaks to his purpose? What shows him who he is? What shows him his abilities — from history to mathematics to astronomy — and the roll that people like him played in it?” Lewis said.

“When perception is unchallenged, it becomes reality. And, therefore, all ‘group of people in this category’ are like this, and so on and so on. That’s why I came up with the Black Men Read program — I wanted to be kind of sneaky and have this ulterior motive of creating a school-to-teacher pipeline for boys of color,” Lewis said. “Much of the cross-cultural miscommunication and conflict that we have with one another, is due to the lack of shared experience with one another!”

Lewis’ program seems to have the potential to make a positive difference in how all students see race, based on her survey results, and also on the positive impression the Black men readers involved in the program have shared with her. Three of the readers in her program — Monroe Burger, Richard Cooper and JR Fountain — read some of the works of contemporary Black American poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, before answering questions about their experience in the classroom.

“I became involved with this through church. It was Cheryl Roberts, she had asked one Sunday if I would be interested in participating, and I said ‘Yes!'” Fountain said, mentioning he has seen how the program has even seemed to benefit all-white classrooms he has read in. “It is very good and I would like to continue to participate in it.”

Black Men Read participant Monroe Burger explains his experience with the public school system in Shipley Recital Hall Saturday afternoon. Tabitha Johnston

Eighty-year-old Monroe Burger said he was one of the exceptions to the rule, due to the large Black population where he grew up.

“I was raised in West Virginia in McDowell County. I had all Black teachers, and when I went to community college, I had all Black teachers,” Burger said. “You get a little nervous, doing stuff like this (public reading). But I’m getting better at it, I think!”

Black Men Read is funded by The Rural Arts Collaborative, which is supported by the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation and Fayette County Cultural Trust.

The event was sponsored by the West Virginia Humanities Council and the Marion Park Lewis Foundation, inspired by CATF’s two current plays, “Whitelisted” and “The House of the Negro Insane.”

Jefferson County Schools Cultural Diversity and Staff Development Coordinator Tanya Dallas Lewis talks about the reading program on Saturday afternoon in Shepherd University's Shipley Recital Hall. Tabitha Johnston