Gloria Thatch-Woody, a Mancos resident, shared civil-rights movement history and her personal experience with racial violence with several grades in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday.
During 1953, she said, four white men terrorized her and her teenage friends, while in a predominantly white Chicago neighborhood.
"They started calling us all kinds of really terrible names," she said to a wide-eyed classroom of students.
Then they beat the back of the car with baseball bats and left a bat stuck in the back window as she drove away with her friends.
She asked if this was fair. She was met with a resounding "No."
"I wanted them to feel I wasn't just talking, I knew what it felt like to have someone prejudice come after me," she said.
Thatch-Woody said she is one of three African-Americans in town and wanted the students to have an educational experience that they hadn't had at the annual Martin Luther King Jr. breakfast.
"I have an obligation and a responsibility to allow people to have a firsthand experience with someone who is different, but not different really," she said.
During the course of the day, she spoke to about 198 students and emphasized the importance of nonviolence resistance using the well-known stories of Rosa Parks and lunch counter sit-ins.
"You don't appreciate where you are, until you look where you come from," she said.
