Content Objectives
The objective of the unit is to improve understanding of the classical period of the Civil Rights Movement from 1954 through 1965 and its relation to the present. The Civil Rights Movement is often simplified as a progress narrative. It is centered around the federal government’s response to Southern racism through Brown v. Board, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The traditional narrative elevates the role of movement leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., while diminishing the work of the countless people that made it a movement. How we remember individuals and events does not always provide a complete picture. Memory often favors simple stories that move towards progress or decline and offer a sense of resolution.
In exploring this topic, I hope students will see that the ideas of a movement are often simplified by how they are remembered and retold. The demands and often brutal realities of the Civil Rights Movement are reduced to excerpts of “I Have a Dream.” Narrowing the focus of the movement to formal equality allows white memory to frame the story of the Civil Rights Movement as one that arcs towards justice. This frame proves even more compromised when considering the Civil Rights Movement’s calls for economic and institutional reconstruction.6 Evidence of the movement’s focus on systemic inequality can be found in many key events of the movement. For example, Black Americans who organized the Montgomery Bus Boycotts of 1955 were fighting for integration as well as economic equality, demanding that the bus company employ Black people as bus conductors.7 King made his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Through detailed study of the Civil Rights Movement, including its unmet socioeconomic demands, students will understand the limitations of framing history solely in terms of progress or decline.
March by John Lewis will help students address some of the ahistorical simplifications. Specifically, the graphic novel shows readers how the Civil Rights movement was led by ordinary people like themselves.
Student observations and experiences form a key aspect of this unit and are what bring the content to life. As witnesses and participants in the George Floyd protests and other social movements, students will be able to connect the text to their own understandings and experiences. Some of my students will likely have background knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement from their elementary school curriculum or through their home environments. A picture from the March on Washington could be enough for them to evoke connections to the present. Their assessment of America’s progress in addressing inequity will help them explore the outcomes of the Civil Rights Movement as it relates to the ideas of meritocracy and broader racial injustice.
The unit opens with a series of essential questions to establish the content objectives: What was the Civil Rights Movement? How is the Civil Rights Movement significant? How does the study of history help us understand our present? How do social movements begin and end? By the end of the unit, students will be able to reflect on how their responses may have changed.
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