Civil Rights Teaching

Two-Day Student Conference on Voting Rights

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With the Voting Rights Act in the national news, students in the McComb School District held a groundbreaking student conference on the Mississippi voting rights struggle with veterans who made history during the 1960s. Over the course of two dynamic days (Feb. 21-22, 2013), there were student led history tours, interactive panel presentations, oral history interviews, and a community forum.

Planned by a high school student group called McComb Legacies, the event was inspired by a fall trip to the Delta. The featured presenters included Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, John Due (joined by his daughter Tananarive Due), Shirley Bates, Michael Nobles, Bobby Talbert, Mrs. Patsy Ruth Butler, Jacqueline Byrd Martin, Ann Harris, and Paul Ortiz.

 

The Freedom Movement in Mississippi – 1963: Teaching About the 50th Anniversary

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The year 2013 marked the 50th anniversary of significant events in the 1963 Civil Rights Movement or Southern Freedom Movement. Some are well known; others have received less attention. All offer opportunities for either framing or focusing study of the Civil Rights Movement.

A key resource for learning and preparing to teach about the 1963 anniversary events is the Civil Rights Movement Veterans website. Created and maintained by veterans of the southern freedom movement, the site features first-person accounts of the struggle, as well as documents, photographs, bibliographies, and other resources. The immediacy and personal nature of the resources make them highly engaging reading.

We begin by sharing dates and resources with a focus on Mississippi. Here are more 1963 anniversary events from other parts of the country.

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McComb, Mississippi Students Take Civil Rights Movement History Tour

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mississippi50freedom

“You read about it and you have it for a minute and then you lose it. When you experience it hands-on it stays with you forever,” said sophomore Sabrina Mays about the 3-day Civil Rights Movement tour in May of 2011 for 44 middle and high school students from McComb, Miss. The video above shows highlights of the tour and you can hear from the students themselves about what they learned.

Students spent the first day in Jackson, Miss., at the Freedom Riders’ Reunion where they met many veterans including Hollis Watkins. Watkins was one of the central figures in the Civil Rights Movement in McComb and continues to be very active today throughout the state in his work with Southern Echo. On the second day in Philadelphia, Miss. they met the town’s first black mayor, James Young (in photo with students) and visited historic sites. On the last day they toured the National Civil Rights Museum and the Cotton Museum in Memphis, Tenn.


Hollis Watkins

Sabrina Mays also had this to say about meeting with veterans: “It is just not the same as reading a book or looking on the internet. When you sit down and you look in these people’s eyes, you have a connection. This is the best way to learn by talking to people that have been through it.”

Students attended the dedication and unveiling of the Mississippi Freedom Trail Marker at the Medgar Evers Home Museum. Randall Wanzo, a sophomore, commented, “When he took off the cover for the plaque, it felt like a historic moment.”

Funding for the tour and the video was provided by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Read more about the tour in an article on the McComb students developed website, McCombLegacies.org in an article by Assistant Project Director Gloria Stubbs here.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Legacy Occupies Wall Street and Washington

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By exploring the historical connections between the dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial in Washington, D.C. and the Occupy (We are the 99%) movementsnationwide, educators can create an important teachable moment to paint a more holistic picture of King’s legacy in terms of his fight for economic justice in America.

The original August 28 date for the Memorial’s dedication commemorated the famous 1963 “March on Washington.” The official name, “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” is often forgotten amid the celebration of the phrase “I Have a Dream” from his famed speech.

Similarly, textbooks and media often skim over the Poor People’s Campaign, organized by King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference  beginning in 1967. The Poor People’s Campaign culminated after King’s death when demonstrators set up a shantytown called “Resurrection City” in DC for two weeks to protest for an economic bill of rights focusing on jobs, income and housing.

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Teaching the Movement Symposium at the University of Utah

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Legacies of the Civil Rights Movement, a month-long symposium on four Utah college campuses, will conclude October 3-4 at the University of Utah with the theme,Teaching the Movement.

Monday, October 3: Keynote address by Dr. Clayborne Carson, professor of history at Stanford University and director of Stanford’s Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute.

Tuesday, October 4: a panel discussion moderated by Robert Goldberg, director of the Tanner Humanities Center. The panel will include Clayborne Carson; Jon Else, a documentary filmmaker who served as producer and cinematographer for the PBS series, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years;Vincent Harding, a Civil Rights Movement veteran, professor of Religion and Social Transformation at Iliff School of Theology, and author of many books including Hope and History; and Judy Richardson, a movement veteran, early staff worker with SNCC, associate producer of Eyes on the Prize, and author of the recently published, Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC

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McComb, Mississippi Students Create Website with Local Civil Rights Movement History

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Students at the McComb School District Business and Technology Complex (B&T) have launched the McCombLegacies.org website. As it states on the homepage, the website is “designed to share the history of McComb, Miss., with an emphasis on the stories of working people of all races, women, and young people and how they have strived for equity in labor, civics, education, economics, and the arts.”

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