COAL GROVE — Stop hate. Stop ignorance. Stop genocide.

That was the message students in the Holocaust class at Dawson-Bryant High School wanted to convey to their peers and teachers for Genocide Awareness Day.

“When I created this class, my intention was to inspire action,” said Derek Parsons, who created the Holocaust class three years ago.

Parsons said this was the first year his students felt compelled to take the knowledge they had learned in the classroom and share it with the school.

On Friday, the class, donning “Genocide Sucks” T-shirts, set up stations is the school’s multipurpose rooms with PowerPoint presentations depicting genocide throughout history and a video with student and teacher interviews. Throughout the day, students from the school visited the presentation.

Parsons said the whole idea came about after watching the 2004 film, “Hotel Rwanda,” about civil war between the Hutu and Tutsi peoples of Rwanda which resulted in the death of nearly one million people by the time the genocide ended in 1994.

“It shocked them to know that this was in the 1990s,” Parsons said.

As participants in the Holocaust class, many of the students admitted the only genocide they knew of was the Holocaust itself. Some were not familiar with the word “genocide,” which means the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group.

“I really didn’t know what genocide was until I took this class,” said student Sydnie Carpenter. Her presentation was about the genocide in Rwanda, which she didn’t know about until she watched the film.

She and some of the other students said they didn’t realize genocide was still a worldwide issue.

“It’s still going on,” Sydnie said. “America doesn’t understand and we’re still not doing anything about it.”

Alexis Conley presented information about the genocide of American Indians.

“I chose it because it was more at home, in our own country,” Alexis said.

“A lot of people don’t think of it as a genocide,” said student Lakin Marcum. “A lot of us don’t have compassion for other people, as that’s how these things begin.”

Simply talking about genocide isn’t enough, the students agreed. Part of the event Friday was to let others know that there are ways to help. They set up a laptop with web pages displaying various organizations that take donations and promote awareness.

Derek Boye, who presented his project on forced famine in the USSR by Joseph Stalin, said he hoped others in the school will have a newfound understanding of the horrors of genocide after seeing the projects.

“I feel like it’s the United States’ duty to help,” he said. “We have all this freedom and we should be using it for good.”

As a final project, the students will also write individual letters to the United Nations.

Parsons said he was proud of his class for taking initiative and wanting to spread awareness.

He told his students, “(genocide) can be just an event we study, or it can be something that inspires us.”