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“Break the Silence” by Paris Project participants

By Marisa Barbosa

St. Petersburg-”Stand out, speak up.”

“It takes one to encourage the others.”

These messages appear in some of the paintings done by 100 middle school students as part of a summer project at the Wildwood Recreation Center.  “Break The Silence – The Paris Project” is on display at the Florida Holocaust Museum through September 30.  The artwork is primarily the result of a seven-week program dedicated in memory of Paris Whitehead-Hamilton, the little girl killed in a drive-by shooting on April 2009 in St. Petersburg.

“The Paris Project taught the middle school children from the Wildwood Recreation Center to be ‘upstanders’ to do the right thing and to break the silence,” said the executive director of the Florida Holocaust Museum, Carolyn Bass.

After Paris was killed, nobody talked to the police and detectives struggled to find witnesses.  The same thing happened two weeks later, when another shooting left a 16-year-old critically injured outside a city recreation center. These back-to-back shootings revealed that the code of “no snitching” had to be broken.

“People are told that they are not supposed to snitch,” Tracey Lock, volunteer for the Holocaust museum and the program’s organizer said.

The issue was discussed at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, involving educators, police officers, ministers, residents and young people.  The Holocaust Museum team started “planning how best to respond to this community crisis,” Lock said.

“The museum deals with issues of intolerance and silence every day and reaches more than 70,000 students each year,” Lock said. “We felt that we had to bring those messages to the teens living near where the Paris shooting took place. Our goal was to help teens understand that the intolerance, fear and silence were the root causes of the Holocaust.  And, they are the root causes of problems and conflicts we face every day in our schools and community.”

The program consisted of seven two-hour classes.  Students listened to guest speakers who came to share their experiences. The children listened to a Holocaust survivor and two teenage refugees who fled violence in Central America because no one would speak up for them.

Lisa Brown spoke in the last class. Her 21-year-old son Cabretti Wheeler was murdered in Sept. 2008.  Immediately after the murder, Brown found a rap song about his death that someone left on her car. A year later, nobody was arrested although whoever wrote the song probably knows something, she thinks.

Some of the kids listening to Brown knew her son and didn’t even know he was dead. “I’ve been speaking to different kids every month to prevent this from happening again,” Brown said. “It really feels like I reached these children.  I received about one hundred letters at the exhibit.”

Bass said they noticed at the museum that many students became engaged in the lessons taught and that they will “hopefully take this learned behavior to their homes, schools and communities.”

The children chose which artworks would be the winners to be exhibited at the museum on Sept. 13.  “It’s hard to explain the children’s face when their artwork was chosen,” said John Collins, development consultant of the museum. “One of them said when her artwork was chosen, ‘if we don’t stand up, what is going to happen to us?’”

“We appreciate what the community is doing,” Rose Couch, Paris’ great-aunt said. Couch was at the Sept. 13 event with other members of the family. “We don’t want people to forget.”

The Florida Holocaust Museum is located at 55 Fifth St. S., St. Petersburg, 727-820-0100.  It is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.