From a School Project to a College Essay

The front page of this site explains how it came to exist. A class at Doris M. Johnson High School won a Save Our History grant in 2004 to document the neighborhoods of northeast Baltimore. A later grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, distributed by Associated Black Charities, let the class turn to the civil rights movement in Baltimore and Cambridge. By 2007 the work had grown into ten pages of signed student essays, a timeline, a list of interviews, a printed book and a website. The original credits page carried the students' photographs and short self-introductions; this restoration left those out because they were personal. This note is not about those students, whose later paths are not recorded here and are not ours to guess at. It is about a general question that any project of this kind raises when it ends: which part of it belongs in a personal statement or a scholarship essay, and how to write that part honestly.

What a project like this involves

It helps to name the work plainly, because applicants tend to describe it vaguely. The home page describes students reading newspaper clippings in the Maryland Historical Society's vertical files, using the Enoch Pratt Free Library, listening to older oral history recordings, and then conducting interviews of their own. The interview list shows what that meant in practice: a student and a named adult, on a stated date, between April 2006 and April 2007. The adults included a judge, two ministers, a department store executive, a former Black Panther, two members of Baltimore CORE and the leader of the Cambridge movement. The essays then had to be written, footnoted, and published under each student's name where anyone could read them.

The teacher's own account of what the interviews did is the most useful sentence on the site for anyone thinking about an application essay.

Experiences like these, I think, help my students to understand, for maybe the first time, what it was like to be an African American during the time of the Movement.

Notice what that sentence does and does not claim. It does not say the students were transformed. It says they understood something for the first time, and it ties that understanding to a specific kind of experience: sitting across from a person who was there. That is the scale at which a good application essay operates.

Why readers of applications care

Admissions and scholarship readers are not, for the most part, judging the topic. A project on Maryland civil rights is no more impressive to them than one on local water quality or a school's own archive. What they are looking for is evidence of behavior: that an applicant can sustain an effort over months, handle sources that disagree, speak to adults as a researcher rather than a pupil, and put their name on something public. A project of the kind this archive records happens to produce that evidence in unusually concrete form. There are dates. There are endnotes. There is a page that still exists. The essay's job is to point at that evidence without restating all of it.

Choosing the one moment

The common failure is the summary essay: we did research, we interviewed people, we built a website, I learned a lot. It is true and it is weightless. The alternative is to choose one moment and let it carry the rest. The Morgan State essay on this site shows what such a moment looks like in a source. Julia Davidson-Randall, interviewed on March 31, 2007, recalled being jailed with about 300 others after the Northwood Theatre protests, four days in all, and that her father came to visit but could not afford to get her out. A student who heard that in a room, rather than reading it, has a moment: not the fact itself, but the experience of being told it by the person it happened to, and whatever they did next with their notes.

Other moments are quieter. Finding that two newspapers reported the same event differently. Discovering a source that contradicted a draft already written. Reading, on a page about school integration, that one of the first Black students at Poly later said he "wasn't the only one who went home and cried at night," and deciding how to handle a line like that with respect. Any of these can anchor an essay. Advice on writing personal statements tends to converge on this point: one experience, rendered closely, with the reflection growing out of the detail rather than announced in advance.

Honesty and specificity

Honesty in these essays is mostly a matter of scale. A small student website is a small student website; it is not a digital archive serving the state of Maryland. An interview is one conversation, not an oral history program. The restoration preserves the students' writing as it was, even its "occasional slips in spelling or grammar," as the archive note puts it. An applicant writing about comparable work should hold to the same plainness. Say what you did. Say what the teacher and the archivists did. Say what you did not finish. Readers who have seen thousands of essays can tell inflation at a glance, and a modest claim backed by a specific detail outperforms a grand one every time.

Specificity means nouns. Not "primary sources" but a clipping from the Evening Sun of February 27, 1952 in a folder labeled "Streets O-P." Not "a community leader" but a judge who, at sixteen, recruited a busload of classmates for a restaurant sit-in. Not "I learned about injustice" but the fact that a grand jury heard more than one hundred witnesses after the 1931 Salisbury lynching and no one was ever tried, and what it was like to read that in a reading room. Scholarship essays add one further requirement: the funder usually has a stated purpose, and the essay has to connect the work to it without pretending the work was done for that reason. A guide to how to write a scholarship essay is useful on that connection, and on the difference between answering the prompt and merely mentioning it.

A short checklist

• Pick one moment from the project, not the project. Make sure it is one you can describe in physical detail: the room, the document, the sentence.
• Name the sources and the people accurately, with dates, and give credit to the adults who guided the work.
• State the outcome at its true size. A published page, a footnoted essay, a recorded interview. No more.
• Let the reflection be smaller than the detail. One honest sentence about what changed in how you read, or listen, or write.
• Read the finished essay against the prompt and against the record. If the two disagree, fix the essay.

What this archive leaves out, and why it matters here

The credits page as restored lists interviewees, sponsors, assisting organizations and staff, and ends with thanks to Clarence Logan and to Teddy Greene, who is thanked for getting the class safely and on time to the Historical Society. What it no longer carries are the students' own introductions of themselves. The note on this archive explains that they were removed because the material was personal, and the decision is a reasonable one for a site rebuilt from Wayback captures by an independent archive with no connection to them. But it also makes a quiet point about application essays. The students' introductions are gone; their work is not. Ten pages of essays with endnotes, a timeline, and a list of interviews are still here, still signed, and still readable nearly two decades later. For anyone deciding how to present a project like this to a college or a scholarship committee, that is the right order of priority. The work is the record. The essay only has to describe it truthfully.

Questions

Also at the Research Desk: Researching Maryland Civil Rights History from This Archive · A Publisher and a Plaintiff: Carl Murphy and Donald Gaines Murray