The State of Mississippi is now piloting a program that would require teaching about the Civil Rights Movement at every grade level. (Teaching for Change and the William Winter Institute are training the teachers involved.) It’s the first step in a plan to put the Movement into the curriculum statewide.
This is an effort that is close to our hearts here at Teaching Tolerance. We all have our reasons for doing the work that we do. For me, one major motivator is my own experience growing up in Alabama, where the Civil Rights Movement happened, and where the Movement was not often discussed in the classroom.
I’m sure we were tested on the basics – names and dates and so on. But there was little to no talk about the local angle – about the murder of Willie Brewster in nearby Anniston, or about the attack on the Freedom Riders there. When I first saw the famous photo of the blazing Freedom Riders bus – in a city library book that incorrectly identified the location as “Anniston, Ga.” – I was stunned.
That “burning bus” photo turned out to be more useful to me, as a white Alabamian, than anything I had learned in class. It told me a lot about how the larger world might see me, and it changed the way I saw my world.
The Mississippi pilot program would make this kind of learning experience purposeful rather than accidental. It gives teachers the freedom to plan their own lessons to make the content relevant to their students, and it encourages them to draw on the memories of local residents who participated in the Movement.
Still, I wonder: can teachers truly cover this topic without a state mandate? Is the curriculum now so tightly controlled that we can’t teach a topic unless we are ordered to? How are you making time, in your classroom, to give the Civil Rights Movement the coverage it is due?
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