The 600 students were all given the same assignment: Tell a story from history that invokes both triumph and tragedy.
Their carefully reasoned answers — ranging from when the polio vaccine came into use in 1955 to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire — went head to head at St. Paul Public Schools' annual History Day competition Saturday.
For Elena Davis, a seventh-grader at Open World Learning Community, Olympic sprinter Wilma Rudolph seemed like the quintessential example of triumph over tragedy.
Rudolph, who was black, survived polio, scarlet fever, an immobilizing childhood leg brace and the searing racial segregation of her era to win three golds in 1960.
"It's inspiring to me because I also wear a brace," Davis said.
Students in grades 6 through 12 packed the halls of Johnson High School to compete in five categories including exhibit board, website, documentary, live performance and paper. Winners advance to the state competition at the University of Minnesota later this spring and potentially nationals in June in Washington D.C.
Wakinyan DeCory, a sixth-grader at American Indian Magnet School and a member of the Sauk tribe, drew from his own community's history.
He explored the 1763 rebellion at the British-controlled Fort Michilimackinac in present-day Michigan, where the Ojibwe and Sauk tribes used a lacrosse game to smuggle in weapons and launch their attack. In his entry, DeCory said the tribes were triumphant in the siege but "The tragedy of the American Indian loss of homelands had just begun."
