Jim Crow, Civil Rights, and the Integration of Schools

byValerie Schwarz

Jim Crow, Civil Rights, and the Struggle to Integrate Schools is a literature based curriculum unit that combines history and language arts. The curriculum unit uses Jacqueline Woodson’s free verse memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming as an anchor text, and provides a framework for making historical connections to the Jim Crow and Civil Rights Eras. The stories of the Little Rock Nine and Davis v. Prince Edward County are told as a way to view the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Throughout the unit, different genres of non-fiction and fiction are brought together to help students make text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world connections.

The unit also includes an interactive hands-on scavenger hunt to teach children about the Jim Crow Era through the use of technology including: iPads and QR codes. A list of related resources, activities, informational texts, and the actual verses with their ties to historical events are included. This unit is sure to engage students from the intermediate grades through high school and can easily be adapted to reach high school English and history classes. It also could be adapted to meet Common Core Standards.

(Developed for Language Arts and Social Studies, grade 4; recommended for English/Language Arts and History, grades 5-9)


Comments (1)

    Rebecca Jean Stanton (Community Health Academy of the Heights, New York, NY)
    Subject taught: English a Second Language, Grade: 6-
    Great resources!
    Thank you so much for sharing this curriculum unit with us. It\'s well developed, and is definitely what we need to be teaching in schools. Thank you

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