Kyra John, a fifth-grader at Ilchester Elementary School, studied for weeks to prepare for the county's third Black Saga Competition, sometimes missing recess to pore over facts about Benjamin Banneker, the Underground Railroad and ancient African empires.
On Saturday, her efforts paid off when Kyra and her teammates, Korliss Britt and Jordan Griffin, took first place among the eight elementary school teams in the event. The students received medals and applause, but Kyra said the true reward was learning about her heritage.
"I really liked to learn about what happened in the beginning of our country, and how people have struggled through a lot of things that made our country what it is today," said Kyra, 10.
The Black Saga Competition, held at Wilde Lake Middle School in Columbia, was modeled as a quiz show that tested teams of three on their knowledge of black history. Two competitions were held, one for elementary students in grades four and five, and one for middle-schoolers in grades six through eight. A team from Cradlerock won the middle school competition.
The Black Saga Competition was created by Charles M. Christian, the Maryland-based author of Black Saga: The African American Experience: A Chronology, published in 1995.
The statewide competitions, which started in 1992, are sponsored by Coppin State University, Towson University and the Maryland Geographic Alliance at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. This year, the state competition is scheduled for March 15 at Towson University Union and Burdick Hall.
Howard County has been holding Black Saga competitions since 2006. This year, elementary teams were added for the first time, said Mark Stout, curriculum coordinator of secondary social studies, who noted that the event has grown so large that it might have to be moved from Wilde Lake Middle School to a larger venue next year.
Teams do not need to win at the county level to move up to the state event. Some teams go straight to the state competition, while some compete at the county level and stop there, Stout said.
At Wilde Lake, to accommodate the growing number of teams as well as the enthusiastic audience of parents, teachers, advisers and principals, the competitions were held at the same time, in separate parts of the building.
The elementary teams, for which the moderator was Running Brook Elementary School Assistant Principal Troy Todd, showcased their knowledge in the school's media center. Middle-schoolers took their question-answering skills to the auditorium stage, where the moderator was Herbert West, social studies team leader at Wilde Lake High School.
Students had studied for weeks, often getting together with teammates on their own time, to answer the questions. "They worked mostly on their own," said Stephanie Noonan, the Cradlerock adviser who had brought two middle school teams and one elementary team to the competition.
One Cradlerock student, Abigail Asamoah, 13, an eighth-grader, said she got involved because she wanted to learn "things about my own culture that I didn't know." Her friend Sapphire Ukairo said she liked "just learning about the history."
Students studied as many as 800 facts on topics as diverse as slave trade and African-American winners of the Academy Award.
Those with the correct answers announced that the Niagara River was the one that slaves crossed to get into Canada, that Harriet Tubman was known as the Moses of her people, that Brown vs. Board of Education was the name of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that ended legalized racial segregation in schools, and that Frank Robinson was the first black manager of a major league baseball team.
"It's been fun," said Todd Garner, the Atholton Elementary School adviser whose team came in second. "We've had it kind of like a club, and we meet twice a week."
Of course, not every question was answered correctly. Middle-school teams were stumped when asked to name two states from which more than a million slaves were sold. No team correctly said Maryland and Virginia and identified the states on a map. And hardly anybody knew that an F.W. Woolworth counter in Greensboro, N.C., was the site of a historic sit-in.
But the Cradlerock team of Ceaira Thomas, Chizoba Ukairo and Alisa Metzger racked up enough correct answers to take first prize. This was especially gratifying to Alisa, who had been an alternate and found out two days before the competition that she was going to be part of the team. "I was really excited, because I had studied a lot," she said.
The team plans to go to the state competition, but Chizoba said that learning about black history has been its own reward. "It's kind of interesting to see what people who are just like us went through so we could have a good life," she said.