When, back in the ’50s, Dan Gill was a 9-year-old innocent boy, he experienced something that changed his life forever.
Something that taught him the most important lesson about marginalization and it inspired him to grow up and be the man he is today.
At the time, he lived in a New York apartment building and, one day, along with his best friend, Archie, who happened to be black, they went to a party.
Dan and Archie, happy and with their gifts in hand, arrived at the child’s door. When the mother opened the door, they were devastated by her reaction.
The woman told the boys that Dan, who was white, could enter the house, but Archie couldn’t because there were no more chairs available.
At that point, Dan’s innocent mind couldn’t understand that his best friend was denied entrance because of the color of his skin. So, he offered to sit on the floor or bring more chairs.
The woman, who simply couldn’t let a black boy enter her house, simply repeated that there were no more chairs.
Both boys left the house crying all the way back to their homes.
And, even though at the time Gill could not realize how important that experience would be for his life and how it would affect his character, he already felt different.
Dan Gill went on to study to become a teacher, which he has been for more than 50 years now.
Teaching in Glenfield Middle School, Montclair, over the last decades, he has always tried to teach his students about integration and acceptance and how crucial those are for our society.
“Each year I teach lessons around Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday about the Civil Rights movement,” Gill told TODAY Parents. “I wanted to connect the students in a personal way to what that meant.”
This is why he tells his students his sad story from when he was a kid himself. He knows that children like stories and they remember them more easily.
Besides that, he always keeps an empty seat in the middle of the classroom in order for everyone who enters to feel welcomed. “No more chairs” is not an excuse here.
“Kids work well with symbols,” Gill said “It’s a reminder that they can do better — better academically, socially, and emotionally — but also to make people feel welcome and make this a better place to live.”
Gill, who is planning to retire after the 2022-2023 school year, lost trace of his best friend decades ago, and he recently found out that Archie died last year.
However, he has contacted Archie’s family to share his idea of writing a book dedicated to Archie and to the negative experience of “no more chairs” they had together.
What he hopes is that more teachers in the future adopt the “empty chair” in their classrooms in order to spread the message.
Watch the video below and see how Gill talks about how his 9-year-old incident affected him.
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