The Top 8 Mistakes Teachers Make When Teaching the Modern Civil Rights Era

And a Few Suggestions on How to Fix Them

I am a little concerned that I am biting off more than I can chew with this post, but I feel compelled to address these issues, as I see them often--not just in classrooms that I visit, or stories I hear from kids about what they have learned in their classes, but even in the mainstream media and among adults. 

Jaquelyn Dowd Hall, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill wrote an influential essay in 2005 in The Journal of American History. It is available on Jstor, though you can get the sense of her argument from the second paragraph which I quote below:

Centering on what Bayard Rustin in 1965 called the “classical” phase of the struggle, the dominant narrative chronicles a short civil rights movement that begins with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, proceeds through public protests, and culminates with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Then comes the decline. After a season of moral clarity, the country is beset by the Vietnam War, urban riots, and reaction against the excesses of the late 1960s and the 1970s, understood variously as student rebellion, black militancy, feminism, busing, affirmative action, or an overweening welfare state. A so-called white backlash sets the stage for the conservative interregnum that, for good or ill, depending on one’s ideological persuasion, marks the beginning of another story, the story that surrounds us now.

This is the narrative that many of us teach. And it is not completely wrong. But it is "a" narrative. And, like any narrative, it leaves things out. It hides the nuances and the complications. So I'm going to try to highlight at least 8 of them. (For more on the historiography, you can read this brief article by historian Eric Arnesen, "Reconsidering the Long Civil Rights Movement.")

Mistake #1: Teaching that the Civil Rights Movement Begins in the 1950s

The narrative highlighted above by Hall could not have happened out of the blue. We know this. We are supposed to be teaching cause and effect. So what caused the events of the 1950s--the Montgomery Bus Boycotts and the Brown decision? If you teach about Brown v. Board, you have to review Plessy v. Ferguson. If students studied that as part of an earlier unit on Reconstruction or the post-Reconstruction period, then you will likely need to review.

But the bigger issue is presenting the start of the movement when Rosa Parks was too tired to move to the back of the bus (more on Parks in mistake #2). The best "fix" for this problem I have seen is a lesson by Bruce Lesh described in his fantastic book, Why Won't You Just Tell Us the Answer.

The lesson he describes in chapter 7, "Using the Civil Rights Movement to Teach Historical Significance" is worth the price of the book (and is where I was introduced to the Hall essay I mentioned above). In it, he first asks students to consider what makes something significant. By showing images--some really famous, like the ones on the left and others that are less so like the one below. Students were instructed to pick one or two they thought were most associated with African American civil rights. Then you discuss the criteria they used to decide whether something is historically significant or not. Why is it that the rise of the black power movement in the mid-1960s is not as clearly fixed in our minds as a key moment of the civil rights movement as Rosa Parks on the bus? Having students reflect on that is a powerful way to get them to think about history in general and how we choose which stories become a part of our "national story." Lesh's book offers a more complete discussion of how to go about this, so I urge you to check it out. Click here for the slides I created to go with this lesson, though of course you could create your own.

Following the phase above, students examine a list of key events connected to African American civil rights dating back to the first decade of the 20th century and use the information to complete a chart. (I know--I have criticized the use of such things in earlier posts, but this one is for a worthwhile purpose.

It is not about memorizing a bunch of items; they don’t need lots of detail on the chart. The idea is to get a general idea of all the things that happened involving Civil Rights in the period before Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, which is when most history books start talking about the Civil Rights Movement. Then they apply the criteria you developed in the first part of the lesson when looking at the pictures to decide which time period could best be described as "the birth" of the Civil Rights movement. here's the chart I used (Lesh has a reproducible one in his book that is longer. I designed mine to be more appropriate for my 8th graders, though it is also usable for high school. There's more to the lesson than that, but that is the main idea. Again, check out Lesh's book. 

And also keep in mind that if you have been teaching important aspects of African African history all along, you are better equipped to avoid the mistake of relegating civil rights to only the 1950s and 1960s. (See my earlier post on Blacks and the Progressive Era and this article I wrote for MiddleWeb about teaching Black history all year and not just in February.)

Mistake #2: Overemphasizing the Role of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King

We have done a very good job of teaching about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. So good that when students were asked in a series of studies who are the most famous Americans other than presidents, of the thousands of names that students listed, King and Parks showed up on a quarter of all lists. (Check out this this article by Sam Wineburg and Chauncey Monte-Sano.) But a Civil Rights movement with only Parks and King is a woefully incomplete one. Ava DuVernay, the director of the recent film, Selma, described her focus for the film, "My interest was showing people on the ground in Selma. The band of brothers and sisters who were around King." (quoted here). Her point is well-taken (Though oddly, I'd argue that the film doesn't do that nearly as well as focusing on King. See the segment, "The Man or the Movement?" in the podcast, BackStory: Pop History for a similar view from the historian Brian Balogh.) 

There are plenty of other famous and non-famous folks who made the movement happen. Try this game with fellow history teachers: have them guess who was on the cover of TIME magazine on August 30, 1963 with the banner, "The Negro Revolution to Date." Click here for the answer. 

Surprising isn't it?

Few of our students know about Claudette Colvin, the 15 year old girl who first refused to move to the back of the bus. Focusing on young people can send a powerful message to our students about their ability to effect change. The documentary, Mighty Times: The Children's March, is a good example of this, that works well with students (and is about 40 minutes--good timing.) There is also a wonderful book, Freedom's Children: Young Civil Rights Activists Tell Their Own Stories, by Ellen Levine that I have used successfully. The excerpt by Ernest Green of the Little Rock Nine works especially well to read aloud to middle or high schoolers. Another useful collection of oral histories is Voices of Freedom by Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer. You can also find online collections of oral histories from the Library of Congress, Civil Rights Movement Veterans, The Southern Oral History Program, just to name a few.

Mistake #3: Oversimplifying Martin Luther King

When elementary school students listen to the same part of King's "I Have a Dream" speech every year on Martin Luther King Day, it is no wonder that their understanding of King is so narrow. To quote Jacquelyn Dowd Hall again,

Martin Luther King Jr. is this narrative’s defining figure—frozen in 1963, pro-claiming “I have a dream” during the march on the Mall. Endlessly reproduced and selectively quoted, his speeches retain their majesty yet lose their political bite. We hear little of the King who believed that “the racial issue that we confront in America is not a sectional but a national problem” and who attacked segregation in the urbanNorth. Erased altogether is the King who opposed the Vietnam War and linked racism at home to militarism and imperialism abroad. Gone is King the democratic socialist who advocated unionization, planned the Poor People’s Campaign, and was assassinated in 1968 while supporting a sanitation workers’ strike

I can think of no better resource to help remedy this mistake than "The Fierce Urgency of Now" podcast from the 3 historians at Backstory.org. You can listen to the podcast, or read through the transcript from the website. It offers a lot of insight into the March that will change how you and your students think about it. And they offer some excellent additional resources if you need more. Students should understand what the march was supposed to be about and that other folks were there besides King and the masses (show 'em the TIME magazine cover). If you like, you can have students read all or some of the famous speech by Rabbi Joachim Prinz that was delivered just before King's speech. But most importantly students should know that the "I have a dream" speech has more in it than just the "I have a dream part" they hear year after year. Have students read the first half of the speech!

And then you have to make sure that read more of King than just this speech. King's letter from a Birmingham jail is a classic source for good reason. Here are excerpts from that letter with questions that I used with my 8th graders last year. But we also need to use speeches King gave after the successes of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. You can look at theKingCenter.org to find some of these speeches. His "Beyond Vietnam" speech given at Riverside Church in April of 1967 is a good example. Read more about the speech in this NPR interview with Tavis Smiley.

Mistake #4: So were JFK and LBJ Good Guys or a Bad Guys? 

I actually had a student ask me that question once about LBJ in connection to Vietnam. He had decided (probably based on my flawed Civil Rights unit) that LBJ was a "good guy" because of his role in the 1964 and 1965 legislation. Then came Vietnam, and, well...that's another narrative for another post. But the question is embedded in the way we teach Civil Rights, too. And not just for Johnson, but also for Kennedy. Kennedy's speech of June 11, 1963 (view here): good guy. But Kennedy before that: not so good. (Read a commentary about this shift from The Atlantic.) And the same for LBJ. Ever the master politician, Johnson seems to flip on issues whenever it is politically expedient to do so. For more on Johnson, check out this Terry Gross's interview on Fresh Air with Todd S. Purdum, the author of An Idea Whose Time Has Come. Or even better, put Robert Caro's The Passage to Power on your summer reading list. If there are too many other things on your summer list, just check out the chapters that discuss the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

My point is that neither JFK, LBJ or MLK for that matter are flawless heroes. Life is complicated. Politics are complicated. There is good and bad. Our job is to help students understand multiple perspectives and the fuzzy, gray areas.

Mistake #5: Neglecting to Discuss the Civil Rights Movement in the North

I don't know about you, but last year when I was teaching the Civil Rights movement, I looked at the calendar and realized if I wanted to get to Vietnam, I better get moving! Poor planning can lead us to mention a few riots in the North, mumble something about the appeal of Malcolm X to urban blacks, and then give the unit test and push along. But a Civil Rights movement that starts in Montgomery, moves to Little Rock and ends in Selma is woefully incomplete. It suggests to our students that once segregation officially ended, all was well. I suspect that for those of us who live in the urban North, it is unpleasant to admit that racism was alive and well in the North, too, and still is. But with recent events in Baltimore, this is just...well, urban legend.

Because I am in Chicago, I like to teach about King's summer in Chicago in 1966. If you live in or near a different northern city, I would try to find something from your own city. But if not, Chicago is still a great case study, because the movement was not terribly successful there, pointing out the challenges of solving all the racial and underlying economic problems in the North. (On a side note, I often wonder what it must be like to teach U.S. history in the South--the burden of having to teach the Civil War and about things like Birmingham and Selma. The reading that follows on the movement in Chicago should make Southern students feel better that it was hardly just the South that was "the bad guy"in the 1960s).

The first thing I did when I taught this to students was to show them a pile of nine U.S. history textbooks commonly used in middle and high schools--including theirs--and ask them why they thought only one mentioned King's summer in Chicago. That discussion in and of itself was fascinating (and quite revealing about what the assumptions students make about textbooks). But that was just a brief introduction before reading an article about the campaign in Chicago. Students read the article for homework, and prepared discussion questions which they used in class the following day. The article is adapted from a story in the Chicago Tribune Sunday magazine. The lesson was made even better by the fact that the assistant principal's mother had grown up in Marquette Park, so she (the assistant principal, not her mother) came in to talk about it. Never pass up an opportunity to make history personal. If you can find a guest speaker, or an article about your own city, go for it.

Mistake #6: Teaching MLK and Malcolm X as Opposites and Teaching them out of Context

Try this experiment. Type "Martin Luther King vs" into your browser. Does your browser automatically suggest "Malcolm X" as what should follow? Yeah, mine too. How little Google knows about Malcolm X!

Pitting the two against each other is done far too often in civil rights curriculum materials and out in the real world, too. While a lesson like this one from Edsitement offers some good materials, it posits a dichotomy that is overly simplistic and misrepresents both King and Malcolm X.

Or take this lesson from the Gilder Lehrman Institute (note, you may have to sign up to be a member in order to view the lesson.) After reading just a few excerpts from one speech each of King's and X's, students are asked to write an essay that addresses the following question:

“Choose the leader whose methods and message you found to be the most convincing.” 

What a student in 2015 thinks is the most convincing message does not address a historic question. Most convincing about what? And to whom? Convincing to a 20 year old black man in Watts circa 1965? Or to a Mississippi woman circa 1963? Or to either in 1968?

For a more thoughtful analysis of these two men check out these lesson plans, originally published in the OAH (Organization of American Historians) Magazine in 2005. While you probably don't have time to use the entire set of lessons, you can easily pick and choose from it. Plus it offers a useful conceptual background for you, the teacher, to help remedy this mistake.

I created this handout to help students see the evolution of Malcolm X's views and how they relate to those of King's. I also have had students watch a section from the Eyes on the Prize series mentioned in the OAH lesson above. It's the episode, "America at the Crossroads, 1964-1966," though they don't watch the entire thing. And these are the discussion questions that I use with/after the film. See this lesson from lesson plans mentioned about. I put the quotations into a simple handout for students here. If you find yourself getting the answers all wrong, you'll know you need to do some background reading!

Another idea: I haven't read everything on this link which is a debate about MLK v. Malcom X from debate.org, but I think you could probably do something interesting with it for high school students. Perhaps having them read some of the entries, commenting on them, thinking about historical inaccuracies....?

Mistake #7: Missing the Opportunity to Connect to the Rest of the World

One of the things that makes teaching the 20th century challenging is the skipping around from domestic to foreign policy to domestic again. I remember the same student who asked me the question about LBJ being kind of amazed by the fact that everything we were talking about in Vietnam was going on at the same time as all the stuff in the previous unit on Civil Rights. (No wonder all our presidents' hair turns gray in office!)

Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King arriving in New Delhi.

So the mistake we need to avoid is keeping our unit on the Civil Rights too separate from that of Vietnam. We don't want our students' hair to turn gray, so we probably need to make it two units, but you can at least remind them repeatedly of the connections during both units.But--and here's the bigger mistake, I think: we neglect to connect the Civil Rights era to the Cold War that may precede it in our teaching, but is happening at the same time in real life. An essay by Kevin Gains, "The Civil Rights Movement in World Perspective" is an excellent resource for this. It is worth reading (and only 8 pages.) Looks like may be able to link to it from your local library here. This article gave me some insights that I used to create this lesson on Martin Luther's trip to Ghana and India. We tend to be rather myopic in U.S. history and fail to connect what happens in the U.S. to what is happening elsewhere in the world. This lesson helps remedy that.

It gives me an opportunity to remind students about a major event in world history--decolonization--and connect that to the Cold War and Civil Rights. Examples like African dignitaries coming to segregated Washington, D.C. are revealing. Or John F. Kennedy realizing what bad PR the photo to the left is for U.S. standing abroad, as he tried to portray the country as Leader of the Free World.

Mistake #8: Failure to Connect to the Present

Click here to read the article and for larger image of this chart.

An article in yesterday's Washington Post points out that public opinion about deaths of black men at the hands of police has changed over the past year. The article states, "The end result is that incidents that would have been local news stories a year ago 'now [appear] to fit this larger national narrative.'"
While public opinion is still split and there is still a big gap between blacks, whites, Democrats, and Republicans, the article claims that the shift from December is significant.

It is challenging to discuss these events in class--not just because it is a controversial topic, but because everything is still so current. But this doesn't excuse us from trying. As history teachers, even when we know that there are few "right answers" in history, we feel a little safer in the past. Teaching about today is far messier. But even raising the questions-- in what ways do recent events in Baltimore suggest that inequality between blacks and whites is still a problem? in what ways do they suggest civil rights for young black males in particular are still compromised?-- helps students see connections between what they are studying and what is going on in the world today.

And in this unit in particular, not raising current examples of inequality sends the message that the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s solved everything and was an unqualified success.
You can use this document I created to help dispel that myth.

And here are a few resources for teaching about Ferguson and Baltimore:

• Sociological Research puts Ferguson in Context
• A "Baltimore Syllabus" - links on a Google Doc
• My previous post on Ferguson and Reconstruction - (roughly the middle of the post, some links to Ferguson resources)
• Go on twitter! Seriously. Check out: #BaltimoreUprising, #Fergusonsyllabus, #BlackLivesMatter. There seems to be a bit on #BaltimoreSyllabus, but I don't know if that will evolve into it's own thing or merge with #Fergusonsyllabus.

And a few additional resources for teaching about civil rights:

See this guide to films/documentaries to use when teaching about Civil Rights by the Hasan Kwame Jeffries, history professor at Ohio State University.

• New Jersey State Library
• CivilRightsTeaching.org
• Digital History project lesson plans
• FacingHistory.org
• PBS.org "Eyes on the Prize" resources
• the DBQ I created for 8th grade civil rights unit - please feel free to comment; it's far from perfect
• my last post on connecting the birth of the 1950s Civil Rights movement with the birth of Rock 'n' Roll

Black Migration to the North

Sometimes it is important to address basic questions about our society today--things we tend to take for granted. Isn't that one of the points of studying history, after all? To illuminate how we got to be what we are?

Growing up in the Chicago area, I have always known that Chicago was racially divided and that blacks lived predominately on the west and south sides of the cities. The city has changed in dramatic ways since I was a child (most notably with the rise of a large Latino community throughout the greater Chicago area) but there are still sharp racial boundaries in Chicago. (Check out this AMAZING map --also below--for details. And see the list at the end of the post* for similar information for the rest of the country and other U.S. cities.) How did this happen? And why?

As I mentioned back in October in this post, students should know that slavery existed in the North as well as the South. So there have been African Americans in the North from the beginning. But the numbers grew dramatically beginning in the 1910s with what has become known as, "The Great Migration." The movement of black Americans between 1910 and 1930 from the rural South to Northern cities represented the largest movement of black people since the slave trade.  Approximately 1.5 million blacks made this move. And between 1940 and 1960, there were another 3 million who did so.  Just as slavery created a unique African American culture, the Great Migration created a new urban black culture.

The decision to leave the South was influenced--just like immigration--by what historians sometimes refer to as push and pull factors. Push factors were those that tended to support leaving the South; pull factors were those that attracted blacks to come to the North. The Chicago Defender, a newspaper for African Americans, highlighted stories of blacks who had "made it" in Chicago, inspiring greater numbers to leave the South. The Defender was founded in 1905 and is still published today. Lots of blacks wrote in to the Defender to get advice and assistance. You can use some of these letters with your students to illustrate the kinds of issues migrants faced. See Letters to the Chicago Defender - from History Matters. I have also a few on this handout, which I put together originally to go along with a lecture.  You can also use the sources on that handout as an in-class activity. For example, ask students to read them and consider questions such as the following:

• What does the writing tell you about the level of education of the writers? (interestingly, while there are clearly some grammatical and spelling errors, there is also a certain kind of eloquence that I don't always find in student papers!)
• What do the letters to the Defender suggest about work ethic? about Blacks willingness to work hard in a system in which the traditional paths to success had so often been denied?
• What do the quotations from Richard Wright and from Lucy Jefferson suggest about race relations in the North? And for Jefferson, what do they say about how those relations changed over time?

See also these sources:

• What life was like in the North sources - from History Matters
• Letters from resettled Southerners - from History Matters
• Resources on Chicago and the Great Migration from the Library of Congress

Once they arrived in the North, the experiences that greeted a rural southern people could be daunting. The noise, hustle and bustle, the smokestacks of the urban industries, the big buildings--and the weather! If you were lucky, you arrived in good weather. But even a late spring arrival (as those of us living in Northern cities know all too well) can mean winter jacket weather. Which of course, the migrants did not have.

I like to use the paintings by Jacob Lawrence as a way to "tell the story" of the Great Migration or--how it was sometimes referred to at the time: the 2nd Emancipation or the journey to the promised land.  Jacob Lawrence is an African American painter.  He was 23 years old when he painted the first panel of what became a series of 60 paintings, known as the "Migration Series." They are marvelous to see in person, (which I did when they were first shown together in 2008). Normally, half of them are at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and the other half at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Currently, they are being shown all together in New York, so if you are anywhere near there check it out. Fortunately, you can see all of them online at the Phillips Collection website or the MOMA site wherever you might be. There is also a youtube video:

Alternatively--and this is what I like to do--is assign students to read the captions that Lawrence wrote for each panel. The captions and paintings are excellent tools to describe not just the who, what, when, where and why of the Migration, but the feelings and emotions as well.

For biographical information about Jacob Lawrence, see the Whitney Museum of American Art or the Jacob and Gwen Knight Lawrence virtual resource center. And see this story from NPR on the current exhibit on Lawrence's migration series in its historical context.

The other reason I like to use these paintings is because they create a perfect segue into a discussion of the creation of the urban African American culture I mentioned above. Though Lawrence painted his series in 1940-1941, he grew up in Harlem during the period known as the Harlem Renaissance. (He was born in 1917, so he was a little young). His paintings were said to be inspired by the poem of Langston Hughes, "One-Way Ticket."(See here for the poem, and also a link to a larger collection from Chicago's Newberry Library about the Great Migration. You can also link here to download a recording of Hughes himself reading the poem.) Or I also like to use one of Hughes's other poems, "The South."

I probably don't say it often enough in this blog, so I'll say it now: history is one of the humanities. And the humanities include art, literature, and music. Teaching about the Harlem Renaissance is one of the great opportunities to connect with your Language Arts teachers down the hall. (It is also one of the topics that turned me from an English major in college to a focus on history, ultimately majoring in American Culture!)

One of my non-teaching passions is music, so I'm always looking for excuses to expose students to music they likely don't know and that has historical significance. One of my favorites for this topic, "Down in Mississippi." I post the lyrics up on the screen while playing it.

• Pop Staples, "Down in Mississippi" 
• or this more contemporary version from his daughter, Mavis Staples, "Down in Mississippi" (lyrics for Mavis's version here).
• Alternatively, check out "Times is Gettin' Harder"

Here are just a few more references for you to expand your lesson on the Great Migration to the Harlem Renaissance:

• excerpt from Langston Hughes's autobiograpy, The Big Sea (which is a great read, by the way...check out the whole book.)
• a link to links, and the lesson they came from on readwritethink.org
• Resources on the Harlem Renaissance from the Library of Congress
• Lesson from PBS: The South, The North and the Great Migration: Blues and Literature

With the events of Ferguson this year, and the Black Lives Matter movement (see yesterday's article from the Huffington Post) it is especially poignant to me that I feel the need to follow a lesson on the Great Migration with a lesson on race riots. The Chicago race riot of 1919, the East St. Louis riot of 1917, the Tulsa riot of 1921.... I used to conclude my lesson on migration with just a brief lecture about the Chicago riot of 1919, and conclude by suggesting that while such riots eroded the "myth of the Promised Land" by demonstrating that life did not become automatically better by moving to the North. And it is a critical point to come back to when you get to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, as race riots will once again rattle across Northern cities. Today, I'd be inclined to develop this into a lesson of its own. See here for a good starting place, from the SHEG (Stanford History Education Group).

In order that this blogpost doesn't go on too much longer (and because my kids will be wondering soon what is for dinner!) I will leave you with this parting question about the intersection of history and the present: recently, there has been a reverse migration of African Americans from Northern cities "back" to the South-- what does this tell us race and American today? Here are a few articles to give you the background on that trend (remember, whites are moving out of the cold, snowy North, too!):

• "Many U.S. Blacks Moving to South, Reversing Trend," March 2011 - from The New York Times
• "Why African-Americans are moving back to the South," March 2014 - from The Christian Science Monitor
• "Black Migration is Now from North to South," March 2014 - from Black Entertainment Television

* From the beginning of this post, here are the websites where you can find racial maps of other regions:

• for the whole United States
• for many other U.S. cities (I'm including the link that includes the link to maps about immigration, because they are really neat, too!)
• other interesting demographic maps
• Maps from University of Illinois at Chicago on Great Migration -  (Also check out their fully conceived unit on the topic here.)

No Villain, No Idiot, No Saint: Thinking about Ferguson and Teaching Reconstruction

The title for this post comes from a quotation by W.E.B. DuBois in his book, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880.

One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment. Instead roars the crash of hell...”  

For a variety of reasons, Reconstruction can be a difficult period to teach.  And with troubling news coming out of Ferguson daily, this year it may be even more challenging.

So one way to begin a unit on Reconstruction could be by starting with the present. While reading about Ferguson in the paper yesterday morning, I was reminded of William Faulkner's famous quotation:

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

It came to mind when I saw this editorial cartoon by Walt Handelsman:

Wouldn't that be an interesting way to start off a unit on Reconstruction? I cannot imagine that the subject of what is going on in Ferguson wouldn't come up at some point in a unit on Reconstruction. As a friend just recently put it, "Isn't it sad that the most 'teachable moments' arise from the most egregious acts of human indecency?"

Luckily for teachers, there are a lot of folks out there who have been thinking about this. There is a twitter hashtag, #fergusonsyllabus that is pretty active. In fact, there is a #PTchat (Parent/Teacher) conversation tonight on Twitter at 9:00 pm Eastern time with Marcia Chatelein, a professor of African-American history at Georgetown University who started #fergusonsyllabus back in August. You can read about that here. You can find a lot more on Twitter. Here are just a few sites I found online that I think would be helpful, keeping in mind that some of these are from August and don't reflect recent events:

• other suggestions from Marcia Chatelain in an article in The Atlantic (June 2020 update: see this article about Chatelain as she reflected on her #FergusonSyllabus in the fall of 2016)
• guide from The MorningSide Center for Teaching Social Responsibility on Teaching about Controversial or Difficult Issues.
• suggestions from TeachingforChange.org about Ferguson
• dos and don'ts about teaching about Ferguson from TheRoot.com.
• a thoughtful post from a college-focused teaching U.S. history blog that includes some useful resources and suggestions.

Moving on, but still thinking backwards, I remember the DBQ (documents-based question) I used last spring with 8th graders to conclude our unit on the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This is the question I used:

What were the goals of the Civil Rights Movement and was the movement successful?

Students had to first define what they meant by "success," and they understood that a good answer to the above question had to take into account some of the areas in which the movement fell short. The documents included things like the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, quotations from Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X and some current statistics on income and education.

So when I pulled out my file on the Reconstruction and found the old DBQ I used in that unit, I was struck by the similarities. Here is the question for this DBQ:

To what extent could freed African-Americans regard Reconstruction as a failure?

And then a pile of my notes discussing successes and failures. Both periods--nearly 100 years apart--are so marked with both successes and failures. It is also interesting to me to see how I worded the two questions. The wording seems to suggest that Reconstruction is best understood as a failure, while Civil Rights is better understood as a success. The wording may suggest that, but surely the historic record is surely more complicated.

Either way you look at it, I don't think we can understand the modern civil rights era without first understanding Reconstruction. Frankly, I don't think we can understand race relations in the U.S. today without understanding both.

So how to plan a unit on Reconstructions? A few key issues to consider:

1. What are your dates? 

Do you end with 1877? Or do you also cover the "nadir" period and go on through Plessy v. Ferguson (Ferguson again!)? Both are possibilities. Depends on how you handle the late 19th century. Personally, I like to go up through Plessy v. Ferguson in my Reconstruction unit, and pick the story up again and devote time to the African American experience through the 1910s and 1920s.

2. The corollary to the above, is how much time to you want to devote to the present? 

At one high school I know, U.S. history is taught thematically, so historical issues are always brought up to the present. While I still prefer an overall chronological approach, there is considerable merit to at least referencing the present when we discuss the past. (Wouldn't that be one of the main points for teaching history?)

3. How much depth should you go into about Andrew Johnson's impeachment? 

The year of Clinton's impeachment I spent a LOT of time on impeachment. Certainly, in years where there is a lot of partisan bickering (sigh, is there ever a time when there's not?) it makes sense to devote some time to this and connect it to the larger concept of partisan politics. But always remember that you cannot cover everything. However you decide to teach the impeachment (and I will include some materials for doing an in-class trial), it is worthwhile to allow students to see the texture of the debate. Remember that the lens of partisan politics is not the only way to consider the impeachment.

For background information for you, see this brief article from TeachingHistory.org about how historians have understood Johnson's impeachment. For another view, and background info on Johnson himself, check out the University of Virginia Miller Center's website. (Also check out the Presidential Classroom page, which will lead you to online exhibits and lesson plans. It seems to be especially rich on resources on Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson).

4. How much detail to go into about the horrors of lynching and racial discrimination? 

We cannot ignore the injustice and brutality of life during Jim Crow, but one can err on the other side too. I know, because one year I crossed the line and saw it on my students' faces. I had been reading aloud an excerpt from Leon Litwack's book, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. I had already decided to skip a part that I felt was too graphic and violent. But as I was reading, I saw how upsetting the part I had chosen was -- at least for some of them. I don't mean to suggest that we cannot teach things that are upsetting. (How would that even be possible?) History is full of things that are upsetting. But it is important to think carefully about our pedagogical choices. (For a good resource on this, see the U.S. Holocaust museum's guidelines for teachers. While geared to thinking about the Holocaust, the issues they point out--about contextualizing history, avoiding comparisons of pain, etc.--are wise considerations for teaching about many painful subjects. Definitely work a look.) And of course, it is important to consider the age, experiences and background of your students.

Next post, I will provide some more specific lesson ideas, including some sample documents for the DBQ I mentioned above and for teaching about Johnson's impeachment.
See my most recent post on Reconstruction here.

Ferguson, MO & Emmett Till: How Our Understanding of History Informs Our Present

In this morning’s Chicago Tribune, John Kass writes about the murder of Emmett Till in 1959 and the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. He writes, “If you’re white and you suggest the killing may have been justified, you could be denounced as a racist. If you’re black and you think the cop should be thrown in jail, you could be seen as seeking revenge for the sins of the past.” Perhaps oversimplified, perhaps not. But as he goes on to discuss his meeting with Emmett Till’s cousins, Wheeler Parker and Simeon Wright about the events of August 28, 1955, I was reminded that what happens in the past does not stay in the past. Times change, but what has been going on recently in Ferguson, the murder of Till, the OJ Simpson trial, and the summer race riots in Chicago in 1919 are all part of the same story.

So while I am intending this blog to go chronologically through American history, I hope you are bookmarking articles about Ferguson now so you can use them when you get to Black Migration and Civil Rights later in the year. And--if you are still interested in how to start off your school year, why not try a lesson right now that demonstrates to students how our understanding of the world has been shaped by history? Throughout the year, challenge students to make connections between events of the past and events that follow. It’s not nearly as simplistic as my little diagram below suggests, but emphasizing links such as these will help your students better understand history instead of just memorizing facts about history.

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