‘Freedom Writers’ is a
tear-jerker for all

Erin Washington

4 **** out of 4 — Last year we had yet another movie about the inexperienced teacher trying to tame a group of students from the ghetto. But “Freedom Writers” is different. This story is real. This story is full of hope. This story will touch everyone on a basic human level.

In the fall of 1994, when Southern California is still reeling from the Rodney King riots, Erin Gruwell (Hillary Swank) stepped into her room 203 of the recently integrated Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach. The daughter of a civil rights activist, she was determined that teaching underprivileged children of color was her part in helping society. But, as the familiar story suggests, taking this on as her first teaching job was not going to be easy.

Gruwell presents a curriculum to her supervisor, Margaret Campbell (Imelda Staunton) that begins with the reading of Homer’s Odyssey. The only Homer these freshmen had heard of was Homer Simpson. Every day the teacher puts a big smile on her face and tries to teach these teens as she would an honors class, to no success, and plenty of disrespect in the air.

These teens are in a war, in and outside of the classroom. Integration at this school has done nothing to quell the relations between black, Latino, Asian and white students. As a child, the Latina protagonist, Eva (April L. Hernandez), saw a friend get shot as he washed his car across the street. It then tore her apart to see her father dragged off to jail because of it. He taught her to stick by her own, and up until she met Gruwell, she did. Later she witnesses the shooting of a Cambodian student, the boyfriend of one her classmates. As if the tension weren’t high enough in room 203, now it is cutting.

Finally, in one emotionally-charged class, the teacher finds out just how hard her students’ lives are, what exactly they are going through. And she realizes that they barely know the world history that directly relates to their situations: the Holocaust.

Soon Gruwell is asking Campbell to use the schools supply of books that her students could better identify with than the Odyssey: books such as “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “Romeo and Juliet.” But they are not yet ready. It takes a field trip to the Museum of Tolerance, a forum for information on the Holocaust, that gets to the students. They now know that they are not alone in their experiences of violence and hate on the street. These children, having been victimized for so long and as products of a non-caring school committee, now have a jumping-off point.

In their sophomore year, still with Mrs. Gruwell, they read Anne Frank’s diary. One student was so moved by this story and the heroism of Miep Gies, who helped Frank hide from the Nazis, and was partially responsible for her diary getting published. Gruwell decides that the students should all write letters to Gies about how the diary affected them, as a class project. But, on learning that Gies is still alive, they end up actually sending the letters to her. Furthermore, Gruwell is able to have Gies (played by Pat Carroll) visit their class. One student remarks to Gies that she is a true hero. “I’m not a hero,” she replies. “I did what I had to do because it was the right thing to do.”

The words of Jewish rapper E-shy sum it all up in his song, “Blacks and Jews:”

“What’s the difference between blacks and Jews? … What’s the difference? We both seem the same. We’ve seen age-old hate. We’ve seen age-old pain. We’ve seen our ancestors killed on the street. We’ve seen starving children steal just to eat. To our oppressors we haven’t forgotten the slavery, the beatings, the lynchings, the cotton. The ghettos, the gases, the patches, the lashes, the axes of people you sent to attack us...;”

Over the years the students were required to write about their lives, or anything they liked, in journals. Gruwell said she would only read them if they wanted her to, which they did. Their journal entries were combined into a book called “The Freedom Writers Diary,” published in 1999. The title is a play on words from the Freedom Riders of the civil rights era, who also inspired them.

For more information on this true story, visit www.freedomwritersfoundation.org.

Hillary Swank is the determined Erin Gruwell.