And a Child Shall Lead Them

While Rev. James Dobson beats a drum against teaching tolerance, the students at Whitwell Middle School in Whitwell, Tenn., "a picturesque village nestled in the green Appalachians," took on a Holocaust-awareness project in 1998 that will warm your heart (even if its normal temperature is sub-zero). The kids at Whitwell, trying to grasp the enormity of 6 million human beings snuffed out by the Nazis during World War II, began collecting paper clips, one for each of those 6 million Jews. The idea came from a movement among Norwegians during the war of wearing paper clips on their clothing in defiance of the Nazis and in solidarity with Jews.

Whitwell, Tenn., mind you, is just about 100 percent Protestant. No Jews, few Catholics, majority Southern Baptist ... but those kids warmed to the project, which actually took years to complete. Several classes came and went, and the project went on, each succeeding class adding new dimensions, new information ... and, incidentally, new layers of media attention. We remember seeing an article in the Washington Post at least four years ago about what Whitwell Middle School was trying to accomplish.

Over those years, as news of the project spread, paper clips began to flow in from all over the world. Donors sent money too. Holocaust survivors came and spoke at the school. Students and local churches joined forces to build a Holocaust museum on the school grounds, using a railcar that once transported Jews to the Nazi death camps during World War II. The railcar was acquired by two German journalists in Washington, and the money the students raised paid to have it shipped intact from Europe. That railcar now stands on the Whitwell Middle School grounds holding not only the 6 million paper clips the students set out to gather but another 5 million to represent the many other groups persecuted by the Nazis (including, with all due respect to Rev. Dobson, German homosexuals) ... a neat encapsulation of the enormity of a crime based on bigotry.

The Whitwell project attracted documentary film makers from Washington, who had their own prejudices and stereotypes of Southerners, particularly Southern mountaineers. They came to Whitwell Middle School to talk the principal, Linda Hooper, into letting them film the students and teachers. At first Principal Hooper refused, fearful of the stereotyping power of those cameras. When she relented, she warned the film makers, "If I let you make this film and you make my children look like a bunch of rednecks, I will eat your heart for breakfast. And if you make the people in this town look like a bunch of hicks, I will eat your heart for breakfast."

Whatever stereotypes of rednecks and hicks the film makers brought with them, they shed them over the months they filmed in Whitwell, and the result of their efforts, a documentary film titled simply "Paper Clips," premiered in Los Angeles last November 24th to kudos. It would be a wonderful thing if it came to Boone and other small towns in Appalachia, where kids sometimes wait a lifetime to see anything positive reflected about them in big-city media. And this is positive.