Civil Rights Movement

The time had come.

It was Dec. 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on the Montgomery public bus. This act led to Parks’ arrest, ignited the Montgomery Bus Boycott and ushered in the new civil rights movement.

I am still thinking about Sam Childs.

And I cannot wait to introduce him to my eighth-graders.

Sam is the 13-year-old narrator of Kekla Magoon’s novel The Rock and the River which this year won the John Steptoe New Talent Award, part of the Coretta Scott King Book Awards.            

On August 28, 1963, at the March on Washington, Dorothy Height sat on the speakers’ platform and listened to Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech. She had helped organize the rally that brought about 250,000 people to the National Mall. In fact, she’d been in the forefront of the civil right struggle for decades as the president of the National Council of Negro Women. 

On February 27, 1960, about 300 college students marched into downtown Nashville to confront Jim Crow segregation. Each of the marchers understood that they belonged to a larger movement of young people. Just three weeks earlier, in Greensboro, N.C., four college students staged a sit-in at the whites-only lunch counter in a Woolworth store. That action desegregated the lunch counter and triggered waves of copycat protests—like the one in Nashville.

A powerful collection of Civil Rights-era photographs is on display now through August 2010 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. If you can’t organize a class trip to the museum, consider taking your students on a virtual tour of the era.

On March 7, 1965, millions of Americans sat watching their television sets in horror. Grainy black-and-white news images from Selma, Ala., showed about 600 mostly African-American protesters trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They were marching to the state capital, Montgomery, to win voting rights in the Jim Crow South.

Teachers searching for new ways to observe Black History Month now have a great resource with "In Performance at the White House: Songs of the Civil Rights Movement.” The concert, which was held last week, can be heard on National Public Radio. You can also check out President Barack Obama’s introductory remarks.

Black History Month gets underway this year by honoring a memorable milestone. Today marks the 50^th anniversary of the Greensboro sit-ins.

Every year around Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the news media start quoting his “I Have A Dream” speech. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a great speech – certainly one of the best ever given in the cause of civil rights.