On Road to Unity With Freedom Writers

Erin Gruwell and her young Freedom Writers have been in a whirlwind: cross-country book tour; magazine and newspaper interviews; TV guest shots.

Even an appearance before Congress.

The interest surrounds the message of hope and tolerance that Gruwell and company are sharing with anyone who will listen. It is at the center of their book, published in October, “The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Group of Extraordinary Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them” (Doubleday; $12.95).

Gruwell is a former English teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach who took her students on a unique classroom experience: a four-year journey from racial prejudice to understanding after encountering racism in her classroom.

Inspired by the diaries of Anne Frank and Bosnian teenager Zlata Filipovic, students in Gruwell’s classes between 1994 and 1998 began keeping diaries. The students, some of whom were gang members or other at-risk teenagers with dim hope for the future, penned gritty personal stories of friends being killed, parents doing drugs and jail time, molestation, parental abandonment, anorexia, homelessness, racism and despair.

They dubbed themselves the Freedom Writers in honor of the ‘60s civil rights activists.

As their racial attitudes changed, they became mentors to younger students, advising them to avoid gangs and to do well in school. They also spoke to aspiring teachers about not making judgments of students based on skin color and clothing. And as graduation drew near, their diaries reflected new-found hopes and dreams.

Today all 150 students are in college.

The Times chronicled the Freedom Writers’ story. So did televisions’ “Primetime Live” and “The View.”

This week, Gruwell and five of her former students will make their first two Orange County appearances.

It’s the tail end of a national book tour that has taken Gruwell and company to more than a dozen cities, including a stop in Ohio where her former students shared their stories with juvenile inmates in a maximum security prison in October.

In November, the congressional leadership committee invited Gruwell and several of her students to speak before Congress.

And in December they made an appearance on the “Rosie O’Donnell” show and taped a segment for “Oprah Winfrey” that has yet to air.

On top of all that, Gruwell decided to run for Congress, declaring herself a Democratic candidate for the 38th Congressional District in December.

“I was encouraged to run solely based on what we’ve been able to do with the success of the Freedom Writers in raising the bar in academics and raising expectations,” said Gruwell, 30, a former Newport Beach resident who now lives in Long Beach, where she is a distinguished teacher-in-residence at Cal State Long Beach.

“By raising the bar, my students were able to raise their expectations and aspire to change themselves and their community,” she said. “I realized if you can change a classroom you can change a community, and if you change enough communities you can change the world.”

Gruwell, the current California Teacher of the Year, said she was encouraged to run for Congress by House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) when she and her students were in Washington in November.

“The amazing thing is that John Lewis, one of the original Freedom Riders, is now a congressman from Georgia,” she said. “We met him, and he and I cried the entire time my students spoke. He said he was so touched that the Freedom Riders of the ‘60s had been able to inspire the Freedom Writers of the ‘90s to follow in their footsteps and to fight the good fight.”

Proceeds from the book’s sales are going to the Tolerance Education Foundation, which was established to help pay for the Freedom Writers’ college tuitions.

Before they met Gruwell, few of her students were bound for college.

“The majority were not even anticipating graduating from high school, let alone living, due to the gang violence in our city,” she said. “Now they’ve turned into scholars and political activists.”

The odyssey of the Freedom Writers began in 1993 when Gruwell, then 23 and fresh out college, was assigned to her first classroom as a student teacher.

One day she intercepted a demeaning caricature someone had drawn of an African American student in class.

Outraged, Gruwell told the students that such stereotyping is what led to the Holocaust. Surprised by the ensuing silence and blank looks, she asked how many students knew about the Holocaust.

Not a single hand was raised.

Because of that experience, Gruwell threw out the regular lesson plan the next school year and fashioned her own, one that focused on tolerance. She received district approval of the new lesson plan, which allowed her to work with most of the same students throughout their high school years.

She took the students on a field trip to the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. She brought in guests such as Miep Gies, the woman who hid Anne Frank and her family during World War II. And she assigned the students to read “Schindler’s List,” “The Color Purple” and other books.

In the process, Gruwell said, she saw grades and attendance dramatically improve.

“One student went from a 1.5 to 4.0 [grade point average] and now wants to be a pathologist,” she said.

While still in high school, the Freedom Writers, with the help of corporate sponsorship, visited Washington, where they hosted the secretary of education at a dinner. They also held a candlelight vigil at the Washington Monument for victims of senseless violence and visited Holocaust museums and war memorials.

During their senior year, the Freedom Writers traveled to New York City, where they received the Spirit of Anne Frank Award. And the year after graduation in 1998, Gruwell and some of her former students visited Auschwitz in Poland, the Amsterdam attic where Anne Frank hid and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Gruwell said reaction to the Freedom Writers’ book, for which she wrote the narrative thread, “has been amazing.”

She’s received letters and e-mails from all over the country, some from school superintendents wanting to make her “teaching tolerance” course part of the curriculum. Other teachers are initiating journal writing in their classrooms.

“It’s struck a chord with so many people,” she said of the book. “I think it’s in a strange way the ultimate Cinderella story where good triumphs over adversity, and it makes people realize that anyone at any time can change.”

Gruwell and five of the Freedom Writers will make a presentation, read excerpts and sign copies of their book at noon Wednesday at the Cross-Cultural Center at UC Irvine, which is Gruwell’s alma mater. Information is available at (949) 824-7215.

They’ll also appear at 7 p.m. Thursday at Barnes & Noble in the Huntington Beach Mall, 7777 Edinger Ave., Huntington Beach, (714) 897-8781.