Now and then: Kintz and friends at the first conference

May is a big month for reunions. All over the country, people are drawn together, usually by academic class at 10-year intervals, to see old friends, reminisce about old times and—unintentionally perhaps, but inevitably—to assess their own life’s journey. On May 30, 2002, a group of eight young men and women gathered in Coastal’s Wall Building for their own 10-year reunion. Although they looked too young (ages 19 to 21) to be commemorating a decade’s remove from any event more momentous than a grammar school spelling bee, these young adults had created something pretty special before they hit their teens, and this was their time to reunite, reminisce and—deliberately in this case—assess.

It all started in 1992. The early 1990s had been a time of serious racial unrest in the Conway area. Sparked by an incident involving the suspension of a black football player at Conway High School, the situation had grown ugly and irrational on both sides, dividing the community in an unprecedented and seemingly intractable way. In an effort to initiate dialogue, Sally Hare, then Coastal’s dean of graduate and continuing education, helped organize a conference for area educators, “Healing the Wounds of Racism: Education’s Role,” held at Coastal in October 1991.

A few days after this conference, Hare had a visit from nine-year-old Anisa Kintz, a student at South Conway Elementary School. Kintz had the very prescient idea that children should have been included in such a conference. “After all,” she said, “children are the future and new attitudes should start with us.” Kintz was very sensitive to the racial tensions in her school and community and was convinced that the real answer lay in reaching out to young minds before racism takes root. She was encouraged by her mother Ginny Kintz, who was working then as Hare’s part-time assistant.

“Anisa’s idea was of course exactly right,” says Hare. “We talked about the possibility of putting on a race awareness conference exclusively for children, but I felt that, in order for it to have its fullest possible effect and for it to be true to its purpose, the children would have to organize it and be responsible for it in every way possible. Anisa agreed.”

What Kintz and her classmates accomplished in the next few months, called “Calling All Colors: A Race Unity Conference,” would radiate through the community and far beyond, changing lives, changing Coastal, and, in a very real sense, changing the world.

Lee (left) was involved in the Calling All Colors program from elementary school through high school.

Eight members of the original core group of kids Anisa invited to help put on the first Calling All Colors conference, held in January 1992, came back to Coastal for the May reunion. The attendees—Jaziya Cortes, Motobar Fullah, Stephen Garrett, Kintz, Allen Lee, Court Lyerly, Dan Lyerly and Aliyyah Willis—are either still in college or are recent graduates just beginning their careers. Except for brothers Court and Dan Lyerly, the members of the group had not seen each other during their college years, so they had a lot of catching up to do. Their excitement on seeing one another again had a quality—generous and warm rather than giddy and sentimental—that signified their own evolving personal maturity but also communicated a sense of the rare bond they had forged as fellow pioneers of a movement.

Hare designed the reunion to accomplish two goals. First, to allow the participants to assess how Calling All Colors had impacted their lives and to give them the opportunity to recharge their ideals; second, to help her and her staff assess and update the program itself.

Before the formal program began, the participants looked at snapshots of their former selves from 1992. They talked about how Kintz had corralled them into helping her plan this new event about racial harmony for area third- through eighth-graders. They looked for the individual squares they had painted in the four giant handmade quilts that were fashioned by the participants in the first conference.

Then they watched their younger selves in video clips of local news broadcasts covering the first conference. There were lots of sound bites from Kintz and some of the others, and shots of black kids and white kids participating in skits, singing and dancing, talking our their feelings, and just interacting in general. More than 200 students from 20 Horry County schools participated the first year.
“Calling All Colors represents such a pure, pure thing in my life,” says Allen Lee, a recent graduate of Davidson College who is now teaching school in Charlotte. “It was such a frustrating time in Conway back then. For me, Calling All Colors became a ‘safe spot.’ At that first conference I felt an absence of conflict that was refreshing and inspiring.”

“It was so much bigger than we realized at the time,” says Stephen Garrett, who went on to the University of the South and now lives in Charleston. “The idea of making friends with kids of other races—and encouraging other kids to do the same—seems so simple, but it was really profound.”

Now and then: Willis (right) helps organize an early conference.

The first conference was successful beyond its organizers’ greatest hopes. The Associated Press produced a story about the conference that was picked up by several newspapers across the country, sowing the first seeds for the international exposure the conference would soon achieve. Soon after the first conference, Hare’s office began to receive calls from schools and other organizations asking for help in starting their own Calling All Colors program. Accompanied by one or more of the student organizers, Hare responded to requests from communities throughout the Carolinas and beyond to help other kids get started.

When the requests began to come more frequently and from farther away, Hare was glad she had had the foresight to ask David Parker and his staff in Coastal’s media services department to record the conference on video. Parker worked with Jim Rogers, Coastal’s parent and family life educator, to produce a 20-minute educational video on Calling All Colors. To date, more than 2,000 copies of the videos have been sent to fulfill requests for information from all over the world regarding Calling All Colors. (Footage from the reunion will be used to create a new updated video for marketing purposes.)

Suddenly, Kintz was in demand. On July 4, 1992, she traveled to Disney World where she was invited to represent the Point of Light program on a national television special. Later she took part in an international children’s summit organized by Gen. Colin Powell in Philadelphia. But the high point of Kintz’s journey into the limelight was when she addressed a special assembly of the United Nations on non-governmental organizations.

By the time her teenage years rolled around, Kintz was recognized far and wide for her good works—which, she found, had its downside. “My identity was so closely linked to Calling All Colors that I began to feel that the program had taken over my life,” she said. “I didn’t want to be a symbol.”

Kintz, who is in her sophomore year at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., feels differently about it now, and this feeling was reinforced by the reunion. “It took leaving and coming back to make me realize that this is who I am. I don’t worry about the ‘me’ part of it anymore. If the program needs a symbol, I can be that symbol if necessary. The important thing is to recapture and sustain that childhood idealism. Now that we’ve grown up we should be more able and more eager to affect change.”

Calling All Colors has made an impact in many places in the United States and around the world, and it has also had a profound effect on the institution where it was born. Hare’s experience with the program made her realize the need for educational programs that cultivate the human as well as the intellectual potential of Coastal students and of the entire community served by the university.

Just a year after the first Calling All Colors conference, Coastal created the Center for Education and Community as an outreach program of the College of Education. Established by a donation from Grant and Elizabeth Singleton and a grant from the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education, the center has focused on strengthening the community through educational programs that promote teacher formation, parent and family life skills, intergenerational collaborations, and the elimination of racism, sexism, ageism and other forms of prejudice. The center has sponsored subsequent Calling All Colors conferences with local schools as well as such programs as Jump for the Sun, which encourages middle school girls to pursue science, and America Reads, an intergenerational reading program.

Speaking to the students at the end of the reunion, Hare paraphrased anthropologist Margaret Mead’s comment that “ ‘only small groups of people can change the world.’ You have done that. But it doesn’t end here.”

“Every feeling I had at the first conference I felt again today,” said Jaziya Cortes, now a biology major at the University of South Carolina.

“The hardest thing is holding on to the idealism we had as kids,” said Lee. “That’s my biggest battle.”