20 years later, Columbus elementary school families reunite for 9/11 flag project memories
Michele Hughes choked back tears as she gazed up at the giant handmade American flag that she brought to fruition two decades ago.
“There are so many emotions,” she told the Ledger-Enquirer. “I remember each square.”
During the autumn of 2001, her last name was Boyd. She and six other women sewed together those squares — actually, 678 14-by-12-inch cloth rectangles decorated by Blanchard Elementary School students and staff — to create a 39-by-24-foot flag weighing 83 pounds and uplifting countless souls.
The project started as a constructive way for the Blanchard families to express their grief in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. It also became a magic carpet.
A dozen Blanchard parents, teachers and students showed the flag on Valentine’s Day 2002 to New York Public School 142, about a mile from where the World Trade Center towers collapsed after two hijacked jets slammed into them.
Then, on Flag Day 2002, another Blanchard group brought the flag to Washington, D.C., for a ceremony at the Pentagon, where a third hijacked jet had caused similar horror.
Twenty years later, about two dozen project participants gathered in the Lumpkin Center at Columbus State University, the flag’s home since its travels because it’s too big to fit in Blanchard’s gym. And they had a bittersweet reunion as the momentous 9/11 anniversary approached.
Hughes was heartened by the turnout.
“It means as much to them as it does to me,” she said. “They all have a piece of it. … The fact that, 20 years later, they’re still passionate enough to be here, that says a lot about the impact.”
Just ask Blanchard kindergarten teacher Elizabeth Graham and former student Katelynn Rammage.
Graham, who taught prekindergarten back then, started crying when she saw the flag again.
“Everybody wanted to do something in some way,” she told the L-E. “We were so far away from where everything happened. It was such an unbelievable event, like Pearl Harbor. How is this happening in our country? So it was something that everybody got to take part in, and you felt like it was meaningful and you could express emotions, your grief.”
Recalling the reaction from the PS 142 students and staff, plus firefighters from a nearby station, Graham said, “They were so grateful. I mean, it was just like open arms.”
Rammage, whose last name was Phillips when she was a Blanchard fourth-grader, has a son the same age she was on 9/11.
“I want him to know that you can make statements in ways that impact many people,” Rammage, 29, a paralegal at Hagler, Jackson & Walters in Columbus, said.
Rammage performed the sign language for the Blanchard chorus at the Pentagon. She recalled the streaks of red-white-and-blue bleeding down the flag during the rainy ceremony.
“It was like it was crying,” she said.
Then she recalled the optimistic message she wrote on her swatch for the flag: We will unite in prayer. Dear Jesus, be with the people at war today. Your friend, Katelynn.
“There’s no telling how many people read that,” she said, “and it gave hope and inspiration, and it shared love, and it showed there are people who support them.”
This story was originally published September 10, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
