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'A true champion of diversity'

 Educator Sandra Rooks has wona national award for her devotion to teaching the history of African-Americans.

By VANESSA DE LA TORRE
Published June 27, 2006

Sandra Rooks recalled a time, as a student in segregated Tallahassee schools, when she knew little about her history.

Then, in 1967, a college professor changed her life. Since that year, the retired high school English teacher from Clearwater has dedicated her life to teaching both black and white youngsters about local African-American history and culture.

Now her efforts have won her a human and civil rights award from the National Education Association. Rooks will accept the honor this weekend in Orlando.

"Sometimes we take these things for granted, and take efforts for granted," said Pinellas County commissioner Calvin Harris, who credited Rooks with spurring the annual Florida African-American Heritage Celebration through her research into black history. "It's so important for the community to see Sandra recognized by a national organization."

Harris, the first African-American to be elected to the County Commission, was among dozens of community members to give their oral histories to the Pinellas County African American History Museum in Clearwater.

Rooks, the museum's co-founder and executive director, contacted and interviewed Harris, he said, and his story is now archived in a wide collection that includes West African artifacts, and a museum library that has an exhibit on the Black Panther Party. Rooks' three books on the African-American experience in Clearwater, St. Petersburg and Tarpon Springs are in there, too, highlighting the ordinary and anomalous - lives of midwives, laundry washers, doctors.

"A lot of these subjects have been neglected," Harris said. "She's been working to make sure young people understand their history."

But growing up in Tallahassee, Rooks says her own awareness resembled that of the children and teens she now tries to teach - it was limited, at best.

Her father worked in a college maintenance department; her mother was a homemaker raising 10 kids. Rooks attended the segregated Lincoln High School in the early 1960s and at one point was involved in a protest at a Tallahassee movie theater, because she believed her skin color shouldn't preclude her from watching films on the best screens in town. Still, she acknowledges her knowledge of African-American history was narrow.

"We didn't know there were famous black authors," she said Monday. "We didn't see black faces in our books. So by then, you figured it wasn't that important ... I was busy reading the Shakespeare, the Moby Dick. Getting the credits I needed to graduate."

Her mind-set changed while attending Florida A&M University, a historically black college. It was her junior year, about 1967, and a contemporary literature professor gave her class a list of authors to read. All of the writers were black. Dr. Anna Blackwell was white, Rooks said, yet it was the first time a teacher suggested they delve deeply into their culture.

Rooks chose Arna Bontemps, a figure of the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.

She read all of his works and wrote him a letter. Bontemps responded and said she should write a book about him.

Rooks would become a teacher in Clearwater, teaching a decade at Kennedy Middle School and another 20 years at Countryside High School, where she taught 12th-grade English. And she would write her first book, with Randy Lightfoot on the black experience in Clearwater, after retiring in 2000.

Lightfoot, supervisor of social studies for Pinellas schools, and co-founder of the African-American history museum, said showing youngsters about their roots is more than a course in culture. It can lead them to a higher level of achievement across the board.

"If we got them involved in the history, that would propel them to do better in all their work," he said Monday. "Her efforts have been paramount throughout the years."

He called Rooks a hidden gem, a quiet leader who doesn't always get acclaim for her behind-the-scenes "grunt work."

For Rooks, who still teaches writing composition at St. Petersburg College, the recognition from the National Education Association has hardly settled. The Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association nominated her for the honor. NEA president Reg Weaver called Rooks "a true champion of diversity."

The award she will receive this weekend is named after H. Councill Trenholm, who was executive secretary of the all-black American Teachers Association during segregation. In 1966, he helped lead the merger between the ATA and NEA, which had been all-white.

"My first national award," Rooks said quietly. "The biggest thing that has happened to me."

--Vanessa de la Torre can be reached at 727 445-4167 or vdelatorre@sptimes.com.

[Last modified June 26, 2006, 23:14:14]