OWINGS, Md. — On March 14, the Mount Harmony Elementary School (MHES) Mustangs celebrated the women of American history at the second annual National Mall Night. The event was organized by MHES teacher librarian Dr. Melaney Sánchez and art teacher Jacqueline Williams and attended by about 700 students, parents and community members.
“It’s the second National Mall Night,” Sánchez said. “It started with Literacy Night. I attend a lot of teacher institutes, so I’d been to Williamsburg and Mount Vernon, and so our next one was Hamilton Night.”
Fun Side Story: One of the students, George, attended as “The REAL George” to add a playful touch to the evening. Another student, coincidentally named Lincoln, embraced the theme as “The REAL Lincoln.” It was a fun and creative way to celebrate the event!
The next big history night was in honor of George Washington and had a record 800 visitors. The following year was dedicated to Frederick Douglass. Williams helped students create more than 600 portraits of the abolitionist orator, Sánchez said. Students wore T-shirts featuring some of this artwork and a quote from Douglass: “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
“The students wore that on Thursdays and always did some reading each morning when they got to school, very specifically, intentionally for that,” Sánchez said.
This year, Sánchez and Williams wanted to center National Mall Night on a woman or group of women. When they started looking for a monument on the National Mall to visit, they ran into a problem.
“We talked about ‘but could we do something about a woman? Let’s pick one!’” Sánchez said. “There was nothing to go and see. It was so glaring. It was the elephant in the room, in my opinion.”
Women are sometimes included in other monuments or memorials. For example, Eleanor Roosevelt is depicted in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial includes a statue honoring the women who served in the Vietnam War. The Women’s Suffrage National Monument Foundation reports that of the 40 commemorative works on the National Mall, 22 are dedicated to singular, specific men. These include the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. At time of publication, there are no works that commemorate singular, specific women from American history on the National Mall.
“When we started talking about that, I saw kids’ jaws drop,” Williams said. “Boys and girls. Like, ‘Well, my mom’s important. There are females in my life that matter. Why isn’t there a monument to a woman that mattered?’”
“I did say to them while I was teaching, I said, ‘Alright, let’s look at history, and let’s take out the women. Would we still have the same stories?’” Sánchez said. “And they said, ‘Well no because women did many things.’ I said, ‘But what did they do? Who wrote it down? Why wasn’t it written down? Why wasn’t it acknowledged?’”
Sánchez and Williams arranged for six field trips to D.C. last fall, one for each of the K-5 grades at MHES. The trips and curricula leading up to National Mall Night were meant to get students thinking about three questions: What are the key features and qualities in the present monuments? Who is missing from the National Mall? What is her name?
Ahead of these trips, MHES students were visited by National Park Service Ranger Jennifer Epstein, or Ranger Jen, as the students call her.
“Ranger Jen is our ranger, Ranger Jen and Ranger Bethany [Bagent],” Sánchez said. “We say that we are their school. When they were here Friday night, she brought her big group from D.C. They loved that. They were like, ‘Yeah, we are the National Mall National Park Service school!’”
Students were enthusiastic about honoring and commemorating American women, Sánchez and Williams said. Top figures among MHES student projects were Sacagawea, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Amelia Earhart and Helen Keller.
“These were women who were of course amazing in history, but they were also on our PebbleGo app, in our database so that they could research them age-appropriately,” Sánchez said. “That was really important. And some were not chosen, which was fine. We did try to give a broad choice.”
In addition to researching women from American history, Sánchez and Williams guided students through selections from “Monument Maker: Daniel Chester French and the Lincoln Memorial,” a picture book written by Linda Booth Sweeney. The book describes the life and work of Daniel Chester French, the sculptor who created the statue of Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial.
“In the book it talks about how he made different models of the Lincoln until it became his final design,” Williams said. “We talked in art class about how we were making sketches and that’s like a model versus going into the three-dimensional aspect with the older students. It was an amazing book.”
Sweeney visited MHES during the day for classes and stayed for a two-hour book signing at National Mall Night, Sánchez said. Sweeney also played the fife for students, which she had learned at their age growing up in Concord, Mass., and she encouraged students to keep making art and engaging with history.
“She talked about when she was young and how she already had notebooks and journals, and how they are makers,” Sánchez said. “They made these monuments. If you write these things down, you never lose them. And I said, ‘That’s what I always tell them!’ If you write it down, it’s not lost forever or misconstrued later by someone else.”
“And she also discussed how a lot of her things that she has written down, later on she’s gone back to them and turned some of them into books, so don’t lose that,” Williams said.
“They learned a lot from her,” Sánchez said. “It was so great because it reinforced the things that we had talked about.”
“I also loved that it was full circle,” Williams said, “because we talked about the book in the beginning, but then to also see and hear from the actual author who made the book is just powerful.”
Sweeney wasn’t the only outsider who took an interest in National Mall Night. Representatives from the U.S. Mint, which is running a series of quarters commemorating women in American history, and the Women’s Suffragist Monument Foundation both teleconferenced with MHES students. D.C. native and founder of the WWII Women’s Memorial Foundation Raya Kenney also visited the school after making contact with Sánchez. Kenney was inspired to design and construct her own monument, dedicated to the women who supported the American homefront in World War II, when she was in fifth grade after her own school took a trip to the National Mall.
“She saw the news story and reached out to me,” Sánchez said. “I went to respond to her and I said, ‘Wait, who is she?’ I clicked on all her links and I realized it was her, and I was like, ‘Is it really you? Is it really really you, Raya?’ She came the other night and toured. It was so good. We’re going to schedule a Zoom with her once we catch our breath.”
Kenney also provided some resources and a list of next steps for students who really wanted to see their monuments built in D.C., Williams said.
Sánchez invited the Calvert County commissioners and school board members. Commissioners Earl Hance, Mike Hart and Todd Ireland attended National Mall Night. At the Board of County Commissioners meeting on the following Tuesday, March 18, all three praised Sánchez and Williams for their enthusiasm and their dedication to providing excellent education for their students.
Sánchez and Williams expressed thanks to all the individuals and groups that made this year’s National Mall Night possible: Jackie Williams, Linda Booth Sweeney, Jason Patton, Angie VanBavel, the National Park Service park rangers, the Women’s Suffragist Monument Foundation, Northern High School NJROTC, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the U.S. Mint, Allison Summey, Jessica Meador and all the volunteers who gave their time.
The two had extra special thanks for Jennifer Franco, the president of MHES’ PTA.
“We would not be able to be where we are without the PTA that we have,” Williams said. “There’s no way I could have ever had the artwork up the last two years to support National Mall Night.”
“She’s a phenomenal PTA president,” Sánchez said. “She literally works full-time hours.”
Despite just finishing this massive undertaking, Sánchez and Williams are already making plans for next year’s National Mall Night, another round of field trips to D.C., and continuing MHES’ partnership with the National Mall National Park Service.
“Our goal is to incorporate the three branches of government. We’re very excited,” Sánchez said. “And somehow still work with Ranger Jen, because we can’t let our rangers go.”
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