The recent memorializing of the Henry Highland Garnet School Media Center in the name of Emma L. Grason Miller opens a new door into Chestertown’s African American history and a long-overdue appreciation for the school’s founding on Calvert Street.

One hundred six years ago, across College Avenue from Bethel Church, Emma Miller started a school for Black children that offered a curriculum beyond the 6th grade, for years the standard grade level in Kent County’s dozens of African American one-room schools.

It was an uphill battle. Keeping the schools open was challenging enough with low attendance during harvest season when boys were needed to help in the fields, and funding was scant.

Undeterred, Miller extolled the value of education to the children’s families and convinced them to contribute anything they could from their meager income. But the educator knew this was unsustainable and looked beyond the County for help.

She wrote an appeal to the State Legislation, followed by a visit to Annapolis to state her case for the future of education in Kent County. Legislators were impressed, and funds were forthcoming. The first structure of Henry Highland Garnet School across from Bethel Church was founded in 1916. The current Garnet was built in 1949.

As Karen Somerville tells the Spy, “Without Emma L Grason Miller, there would have been no Henry Highland Garnet School.”

The arc of Emma Miller’s life and fervent advocacy for the education of Kent’s Black youth is also a story about another woman, Mary Elizabeth Lange (1789-1882), a Catholic nun who founded the Oblate School for Colored Girls—later the Saint Frances School for Colored Girls—in Baltimore, the first religious congregation of women of African descent in the United States.

Lange fled Haiti to Cuba after the slave insurrection against French colonial rule, finally settling in Baltimore in 1813, when the free African-American population outnumbered enslaved people. Despite the many Protestant organizations providing services for the burgeoning free African-American population, “Mother Mary” Lange saw a greater need to address illiteracy and “empower youth with the ability to overcome obstacles in the face of hopelessness.” Currently, documents about the educator are at the Vatican to consider for canonization.

Near the end of Mother Mary Lang’s life, Emma Miller would have been a young student and imbued with the same zeal to serve her community. She did so, from Virginia to Talbot County and finally to Chestertown where she would become supervisor of schools and pave the way for the founding of Garnet School.

The Spy thinks it is not beyond the pale to consider further recognition for Emma L. Grason Miller. Henry Highland Garnet’s esteemed legacy as an abolitionist, orator, and educator could be shared with the woman who devoted her life to the school’s founding.

The Spy recently talked with Karen Somerville about Emma Grason Miller’s path to Chestertown, Mary Elizabeth Lange, and Miller’s attendance at the Hampton Institute in Virginia. Last Spring, Somerville spearheaded the project to name the Garnet School Media Center after the educator and recently received a grant from the Chesapeake Heartland Institute at Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience to create a biographic video about Miller’s life and pioneering service to education in Kent County.

Born and raised in Kent County, MD, Karen Somerville is renowned for her singing appearances at the annual Women Helping Women concerts at The Garfield Theatre, the Chestertown Jazz Festival. She currently works with Hope Fellowship in Chestertown.

This video is approximately fifteen minutes in length.

The history of enslavement—and dramatic escapes—is part of the Eastern Shore’s DNA. Go no farther than Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass to recognize their celebrated quests for freedom and to understand subjugation on the 19th Shore, an inequality still a burning thread in the fabric of our lives.

Chestertown has its own chapters to add to the growing canon of great escapes. One of them is the story of Issac Mason, an enslaved man who fled his bondage in 1846, now told in a new musical as a reading.

The original musical “ISAAC: A Musical Journey,” written by Kent County native Marlon Saunders will premiere at Washington College’s Gibson Arts Center on June 24, 25, and 26 and promises to be one of the season’s most heartfelt and entertaining theatrical events.

KCA states, “This production will feature Paris Nesbit (Broadway: Book of Mormon) as ISAAC, Sue Matthews as Enslaver Hannah Woodward, and Kelly Sloan as the Ancestral Goddess. The reading will be supported by musicians Marlon Saunders (Composer), David Inniss and Eric Brown. The premiere is being directed by Biti Strauchn and produced by John Schratwieser.”

Commissioned by the Kent Cultural Alliance (KCA) for the Chesapeake Heartland Project at Washington College, “ISAAC” is based on the autobiography “Isaac Mason as a Slave.”

New School Jazz writes,” Marlon Saunders, former professor and alumnus of Berklee College of Music, is the founder and CEO of The Seamless Voice, a vocal and artist-coaching studio in New York City. As a vocal coach, Marlon works with artists from all major recording labels and has Broadway artists currently in Hadestown, Ain’t Too Proud, Frozen, Kinky Boots, Beautiful, The Lion King, and Book of Mormon. Marlon has toured with Stevie Wonder on The Songs In The Key of Life Tour. He was also the vocal contractor for Sam Smith and Bastille, Logic and Mondo Cozmo.”

In a recent interview with the Spy, Marlon Saunders talked about his youth in Chestertown, his early musical influences, life beyond Kent County and entering the professional world of musicians, and, of course, the composing of “ISSAC: A Musical Journey.”

For more about Kent Cultural Alliance and tickets go here. For more about the Chesapeake Heartland Project, go here.

Twenty-two years after the first performance of The Laramie Project, its message about bigotry and intolerance is needed more than ever and the Garfield Theatre is doing its part by offering the play three weekends starting this weekend on Friday May 22.

Based on the 1998 murder of 21-year-old gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, the play evolved out of six trips to Laramie, Wyoming by actors from New York’s Tectonic Theatre Group. Ten members of the acting group spent hundreds of hours interviewing the community hoping to understand the social environment that led to Shepard’s kidnapping, mutilation, and death.

The collection of interviews became a verbatim script for the play formed in the tradition of documentary theatre and requiring each of the ten actors to play multiple parts.

“I love the concept of it as something you don’t normally see on stage. In my production there are ten people and those ten people portray anywhere from five to seven people,” Director Michael Moore says. To help them prepare for multiple character portrayals, Moore had each actor write in a journal to help define their unique identities.

Moore believes in the power of the production and hopes that it will rekindle conversations about hate crimes, break down stereotypes and challenge our current political environment where in 2022 alone 240 anti-LGBT bills have already been filed.

The Spy recently dropped in on a Garfield rehearsal for The Laramie Project and talked with Director Michael Moore.

“The Laramie Project” by Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project. Directed by Michael Moore. Produced by special arrangement with Dramatists Play Service, Inc. Performance Dates: April 22, 23, 24, 29, 30, May 1, 6, 7, 8, 2022

This video is approximately minutes in length. For more information and tickets please go here.