“Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.” --Jonathan Kozol
Introduction
The system of public education in the United States was nurtured for decades and precariously positioned atop a legacy of de facto and de jure race-based discrimination. Today, six decades after Brown v. Board of Education or Topeka, our nation’s schools are more segregated than they were then. My students are acutely aware of the inequity that seeps into every aspect of contemporary life, but they are lacking when it comes to how we got here from the way things were in the past. The history education that my students have received in elementary school is severely lacking when it comes to painting a rich picture of the legacy of racial discrimination in our nation. If my students don’t know the ways in which laws and common social practices today are maintaining the status quo from the Jim Crow of our past, then how can they dismantle it? Our first unit of study focuses on the contributions of courageous characters to the betterment of themselves and society at large. I hope to use this historical background mini unit of study to bring context to the world my students are thrust into and to empower them to write their own story of how their inner courage can shape their experience despite circumstance. This unit begins with a student novel study of “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” by Mildred Taylor. This story is a narrative told from the perspective of a 10 year old daughter of a sharecropper in the Jim Crow south. Throughout the story the protagonist, Cassie, comes to terms with the racial discrimination she is facing at school and in her community which results in her standing up for herself courageously. Students will need to unpack this idea of Jim Crow laws and the ending of slavery to even access this text to its fullest complexity so we will begin our historical analysis at the ending of enslavement and the transition to Jim Crow de facto and de jure discrimination.
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