I recently learned about one more inspiring story that deserves your attention. At lunch the other day, one of our talented editors, Kimberlee Morrison, told me about her experience as a Freedom Writer. If you don’t know about the Freedom Writers, sit tight, the story is coming to a theater near you. 

The Freedom Writers story is a remarkable true-life tale of inspiration, innovation, hard work, courage, and the spirit of determination to change lives. It was a unique experiment between a racially diverse class of skeptical students at Wilson High in Long Beach, California and their twenty-three-year-old English teacher, Erin Gruwell. Inspired by Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo, the first year teacher “undertook a life-changing, eye-opening, spirit-raising odyssey against intolerance and misunderstanding.” Students were given the assignment to record their thoughts, fears, and dreams in a daily diary – and to do so anonymously.

Over the years from 1994 to 1998, they wrote and in doing so, “they learned to see the parallels in these books to their own lives, recording their thoughts and feelings in diaries and dubbing themselves the ‘Freedom Writers,’ in homage to the civil rights activists ‘The Freedom Riders.’”

This simple school assignment to write a daily diary changed the lives of the students in the class, of which our Kimberlee was a part. From the Freedom Writers web site,

“We began writing anonymous journal entries about the adversities that we faced in our every day lives.  We wrote about gangs, immigration, drugs, violence, abuse, death, anorexia, dyslexia, teenage love, weight issues, divorce, suicide, and all the other issues we never had the chance to express before. We discovered that writing is a powerful form of self expression that could help us deal with our past and move forward.” 

In 1999, the anonymous diaries were compiled in a book, entitled “The Freedom Writers Diary : How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them”

And on January 12, 2007, the story of Kimberlee and her fellow Freedom Writers will come to a theater near you in a full-length feature film called Freedom Writers and stars Academy Award winner Hilary Swank as the inspirational teacher, Ms. Erin Gruwell. 

Like many of the best ideas and most remarkable events, Freedom Writers did not set out to write a book, create a foundation, or inspire a full-length feature film. Rather it started as a method for survival that then turned to understanding, healing and maturity for those that participated. And clearly its success is not measured by book sales or box office receipts. Its success is measured by the wonderful and successful students that grew from a sometimes dangerous and hopeless world and found purpose, education and inspiration to reach higher. How grateful we are that Kimberlee had an opportunity to develop her immeasurable talents and delightful personality as part of this remarkable experiment.