Michaela Stevens won first place in the 21st Annual Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum Student Essay Contest.
Stevens, a rising junior at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts from Hot Springs, won first place in the ninth- and 10th- grade category. Contestants wrote essays based on the theme of how individuals or communities have shown strength and resilience to overcome challenges and tragedies. The prompt for Stevens’ age category specifically focused on what we can learn from the way communities responded to a tragedy.
Stevens wrote about the Radium Girls, who were women who painted watch faces with paint that contained radium, a toxic substance that was included in the paint so that the watches would glow in the dark. At the beginning of World War I, factories in the United States began producing the glow-in-the-dark watches using the radium-infused paint.
Radium had only been discovered about 20 years before, and its toxic qualities were unknown, Stevens said in her essay. Women working in the factory began becoming ill as they were exposed to the radium, particularly by accidental ingestion when the workers would uses their lips to bring the paint tips to a point in order to paint the smaller surfaces on the watch face.
While several women tried to sue the company while trying to seek answers for their illness, it was not until the late 1930s that one of the victims was successful in a suit, about 20 years after radium was first used in the factories.
“The women fell ill and most died due to the poison of the radium, and the few survivors had to fight long and hard for their voices to be heard,” Stevens said. “The factories fabricated studies that showed the radium was harmless. Most of the women were not able to get justice before they died of their illness. Ultimately, I focused on the importance of listening to small voices. They have the most to lose yet their voices are the most ignored.”
The contest accepts essays from students in the fifth- through 12th-grades, with individual categories broken down into two-year groups: 5th-6th, 7th-8th, 9th-10th, and 11th-12th. The OKC Memorial and Museum received 771 essays from across the United States. Each winner received a cash prize and was recognized at a ceremony at the OKC Memorial and Museum in April.
Stevens said she decided to enter the contest because she enjoys writing and thought the prompt was interesting. She enjoys different kinds of writing, including poetry, songs and fiction.
“Most of that just sits in my Google Drive or Notes app because I just enjoy writing as a form of expression and often use fictional characters to make sense of my own emotions,” she said.
Stevens’ winning essay as well as the top three essays in each category may be read on the museum’s website at https://asmsa.me/okcessay.