What do eighth graders in a small Appalachian town in south-central Tennessee know about the Holocaust? More than you’d imagine.
I just got back from Whitwell, TN, about thirty-five minutes northwest of Chattanooga, where I interviewed co-authors Linda Hooper and Sharon Shadrick about their forthcoming book about Whitwell Middle School’s paper clip project. The Power of a Paper Clip (Lystra Books) gives the history of how the project got started. From Assistant Principal David Smith proposing in 1998 that the eighth graders study the Holocaust to learn more about diversity and tolerance in their tiny white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant world (the town consists of about 1600 people), to principal Linda Hooper giving the green light to the students collecting paper clips to symbolize the six million Jewish lives lost during the Holocaust, to lead teacher Sandy Roberts and David Smith getting the project off the ground. The book details the series of unlikely events that no one involved could ever have predicted when the project began that would lead to the outpouring of over 30,000 letters and more than twenty-six million paper clips being collected by 2000.
Hooper and Shadrick (who was a parent of a child involved in the early years and then later taught at the middle school), take it further than the Holocaust project, however – which has continued each year since its inception in 1998, touching the lives of over 400 students to date, now under the leadership of former student Taylor Kilgore. They include interviews from various people involved. They showcase experiences afforded to students individually and in groups as a result that points to why Linda Hooper insists on saying that this has never been about them, that “it is not our project, [that] this is God’s project,” because of the way pieces fell into place from the very beginning and continue to do so, all these years later.
When I asked what they want people to know about the book, Linda answered quickly, “The thing I wanted, this whole book, is for my grandchildren, really. We want to inspire people to think. It doesn’t matter how little you have. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know anybody – because we didn’t know anybody. If you have a dream, if you have a vision, if you know there’s a need… then why aren’t you doing [anything about] it?”
Sharon explained her involvement. “[Linda] had an outline, what [she] wanted in the book, what stories [she] wanted to be told. So, I ran with that. After we put all of those [pieces] together, I thought, ‘the missing piece is the students. Talking to them about how the paper clips project had affected their lives. How it had changed their lives, how they were living their lives today… The legacy.’”
Throughout my interview, the word “legacy” popped up time after time, and I can understand why. This wasn’t just a three- or four-year project like I thought it was from watching the film Paper Clips, a Johnson Group Production (available to rent on Amazon – and I highly recommend it). It’s something that continues to grow, something students are still learning from, something Linda Hooper and other community members still have hopes invested in. There is still a dream, still something Linda wants to see to fruition, The Whitwell Education & Heritage Center, a place where the legacy of the town’s past can live on under one roof. You can learn more about it online at https://www.whitwellcenter.org/.
The Power of a Paper Clip, by Linda Hooper and Sharon Shadrick, has a target release date of late November. To learn more about the book, follow the project’s Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61561701842468.
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