Writing Monumental Memory

Ira David Socol
NWP Write Now
Published in
8 min readJul 26, 2020

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SpeEdChange.at.Medium

Maybe it is five years ago now, but at one of the high schools where I worked then, our most “at-risk” high school, a Language Arts teacher and a Librarian collaborated on a project about building monuments. This was even before the 2017 Charlottesville right-wing riot with its in retrospect focus on monuments and meanings. Even before our more famous version of this project.

One of the Monument Projects from Albemarle High School

I watched one young man building the model of his monument and asked him to tell me about it. “It’s a monument to front porches,” he said — and what he was building was a very long porch with many places to sit — “because that was what my grandma had, and I loved the conversations [we had] there, and I think we don’t have that much [anymore].”

I thought about the kid as I thought about John Lewis, the legendary Civil Rights leader, who died last week and how he is an American worth remembering for as far into any future as I can project.

Lewis risked his life, over and over and over, in pursuit of simple humanity — the idea that the laws and norms of this nation not allow people to be treated differently because their skin color could not be described as “white.” And then he continued to fight for racial justice, racial equality, and the absolutely necessary concept of racial equity in these United States — a nation whose leadership has not once formally apologized for enslaving a massive percentage of its population. He lived his life attempting to make the lives of others better, to make us all better.

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Author, Dreamer, Educator: A life in service - NYPD, EMS, disabilities/UDL specialist, tech and innovation leader for education. Co-author of Timeless Learning