“Forty-six times?” my middle school students breathed, sitting back in their chairs. “You’ve been arrested 46 times?” They hadn’t been expecting the 60-something-year-old African-American man to give that answer when asked if he’d ever been to jail.
They were surprised to find that he was proud of the statistic. The gentleman, a child of the civil rights movement, was one of several activists who visited our Boston classroom last spring as part of a filmmaking unit on courage and social change.
My students were originally interested in the filmmaking portion of the project; little did they know that the interviewing process would be far more memorable. They were hooked. Better yet, they were deeply engaged in expanding their own historical understanding as our visitor explained that he’d been arrested for his activism in cities around the world. His history of nonviolent protest included standing against apartheid in South Africa and standing up for gay rights in France.
And, yet, while I know my students were inspired by the gentleman’s story, I was mistaken when I assumed that they would connect it to their own lives. I neglected the fact that my students had limited knowledge of social history, almost nothing beyond mainstream facts of the civil rights movement. They, therefore, needed a historical context to properly connect their own lives to this gentleman’s actions.
This fact became apparent in a follow-up conversation during which students shared that they would never have made the sacrifices he and other activists made years ago.
“If I was alive at that time, they would’ve been in trouble,” one young man said. “Because there’s no way I’m going to jail for someone else.”
His statement intrigued me. Through a series of subsequent discussions about this sentiment, my students and I came to some conclusions:
- Laws were unjust decades ago, especially for people of color and women.
- People who did not have voting rights needed other methods to make their voices heard.
- If no one stood up to unjust laws, they never would have changed.
By contextualizing the gentleman’s activism, students were able to better understand his actions. But they still called it “adult stuff,” questioning the role of children.
“You do know that children and teenagers played a huge role in the civil rights movement?” I asked.
Come to find out, they did not. We’d arrived at the root of the situation: Students thought of history and social change in terms of iconic figures, heroes and heroines, instead of common folk. They didn’t know about the leaders behind the scenes, such as Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Septima Poinsette Clark, Bayard Rustin, or the hundreds of child activists in the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963.
The coming weeks in my class included more reading and discussion of young, unacknowledged change agents. I used Ellen Levine’s Freedom’s Children and Elizabeth Partridge’s Marching for Freedom, both nonfiction books about young people’s involvement in the civil rights movement. Students read the story of Claudette Colvin, the 15-year-old girl who refused to give up her seat in Montgomery, Ala., nine months before Rosa Parks did the same thing.
My goal was to explode conventional ideas about who makes history and why. I wanted my students to know that we all make history, even if our names don’t make it into history books. And that these activists were people who made mistakes, had doubts, worried about skin color and their looks and had other experiences to which my students could relate.
Certainly, not all my students walked away with the same content knowledge or with neatly constructed understandings of the 1950s and ‘60s. But they all learned that studying history is difficult, complicated and dependent on the storyteller’s point of view. And they discovered that the great change agents of the past (many of whom were young people) were not so different from those of us living in the present.
As they worked to focus their social justice films on a certain activist or issue, I saw students struggle to articulate what activism means in the context of the social issues that touch their lives. They had to work with their partners and think through what they really believed, what evidence supports their beliefs and how to best communicate those beliefs to others. This struggle, I believe, is where learning truly lives.
Knight teaches at Boston Arts Academy, a public school for the visual and performing arts.
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