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Chris Longo Laurencot Nonfiction essay I chose to read the nonfiction book __The Freedom Writers Diary__. This book is a direct passage into our past. It tells the story of how a teacher and 150 teenagers use writing and tolerance to change themselves and the world around them. These students start out as the ‘at risk’ and ‘sure to drop out’ students of Wilson High School in Long Beach, CA in 1994, during one of the biggest race wars in United States history. The inspiring stories in this book follow these students on their path to self redemption and tolerance in a time where school rooms were separated by blacks, whites, Asians and Latinos, and gives us a first hand account of how these students changed their outlook on life to go on to become better people.

Through reading this book, readers learn how to look past race and the color of ones skin to see the true person inside. Since this book was written during one of the biggest race wars of all time, there are very many stories about young kids being killed solely because of their race in Long Beach, but there are also many entries that tell the story of social humiliation based on someone’s general outward appearance, such as being overweight or ugly. Though not as harsh as being murdered simply for being colored and at the same place at the wrong time, these stories still describe the mental scars these children had to endure, and are still a major role in the life lesson of tolerance.

I believe that, overall, this book teaches people that you can move past anything if you put your mind to it, and also to not judge a book by its cover. These students met people like Miep Gies, the woman who hid Anne Frank in the Holocaust, Zlata Filipovic, a teenage girl from Bosnia, a country at war during this time, who wrote her own diaries about her daily life dodging sniper fire in the streets, Secretary of Education Richard Riley, whom was the first person they showed their book to, as well as many other holocaust survivors and important historical people to learn about tolerance. Their teacher, Erin Gruwell, set up those meetings with Zlata and Holocaust survivors to not only teach her students about tolerance, but to show them that the world around them is not so much different than their own. Though these students were not dodging sniper fire in the sandy streets of Bosnia, or hiding from Nazi patrol troops in an annex, they were still fighting a war. An undeclared war that took place in the streets Long Beach CA, where innocent teenagers were dying based on the color of their skin by people they didn’t even know, who didn’t even know them.

These students walked into their first day of school that fateful day in the fall of 1994 not knowing that their lives would be forever changed for the better by one dedicated woman. Nor did they know, or even suspect, that four years from now they would be listed on Alumni lists in schools like Columbia, Princeton, Stanford, and even Harvard(269). Many of these kids had grown up hearing they wouldn’t be going to college, some of these kids would be the first person in their entire families to even graduate high school. But through writing and tolerance, they went from ‘sure to drop out’ and ‘at risk’ to ‘going to college’, ‘make something out of my life!’ and getting scholarships. Through writing and tolerance they changed themselves and the world around them. They walked in alone, they walked out together.