“Daniel was racist”: Individualizing racism when teaching about the Civil Rights Movement

ABSTRACT

This study investigated how racism was represented in a unit on civil rights in three 11th-grade U.S. history classes. Using qualitative methods, I observed classroom lessons in three teachers’ classes, collected curriculum and student work, and interviewed teachers and students to document and explain how racism was represented during the Civil Rights Movement. I found a consistent pattern of representing racism narrowly as individual prejudice across all three classes. Equating racism with individual prejudice was enabled by framing the unit around a Margaret Mead quotation regarding social change and the use of curricular materials that focused on the perspectives, choices, and actions on ordinary people in historical events. I conclude by arguing that equipping students to critically address racism in the United States today depends on enhancing the racial literacy of history teachers.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil Rights Movement
• race and racism
• U.S. history

Notes

1. All three teachers posted links to documentary films and all PowerPoint presentations on their class websites, enabling me to review these sources after leaving their classes.

2. I have consistently used videotaping in previous studies, mainly as a means to capture the content of audiovisual materials shown in classrooms. I have also sometimes used video recordings to generate transcripts to conduct discourse analysis of teacher-student talk (e.g., Wills, 2011). In this case, following past practice, I had requested to videotape in each teacher’s class to again capture audiovisual materials presented in lessons and activities. However, because teachers streamed content on their smart boards that was easily identifiable and accessible online and posted PowerPoint presentations and other materials on their class websites, videotaping proved to be unnecessary. However, because Mr. Garcia granted permission to videotape, I videotaped all observations I made in his class.

3. The only time available to interview students that fit my schedule was before school on Mondays, which was a late start day so teachers could meet in their PLCs. Since teachers had finished their planning of the Civil Rights unit, I decided not to attend their final four PLC meetings for the year and instead used this time to interview students. However, this time was problematic for some students who had volunteered to be interviewed due to before school activities or who had difficulties arranging transportation to school.

4. Teachers referred to this unit as the Civil Rights unit, but the bulk of the six-week unit focused on the CRM and key actors and events in furthering the rights of African Americans. Teachers did discuss Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Movement, the American Indian Movement, and the Women’s Liberation Movement, representing these movements as growing out of the struggle to secure civil rights for African Americans. However, the final paper for the Civil Rights unit focused exclusively on events in the CRM, underscoring that this topic was the main focus of the unit in spite of teachers stating that the unit was about more than African Americans and the CRM.

5. Main events in the CRM covered in the Civil Rights unit included: Plessy v. Ferguson; Brown v. Board of Education; the Montgomery Bus Boycott; the Little Rock Nine and the desegregation of Central High School; Sit-In Campaign; Freedom Rides; Birmingham (King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, church bombing, and the Children’s March); The March on Washington; Freedom Summer; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Selma to Montgomery March; the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

6. This curriculum was a new addition to the Civil Rights unit from the previous year. A ninth-grade English teacher at Palm High School had taught a unit on the Holocaust using materials from Facing History and Ourselves, and she informed Mr. Garcia of this upcoming workshop. Mr. Garcia spoke with the principal, who agreed to pay the registration fee and hire substitute teachers so their PLC could attend the workshop. As a result of attending the workshop the Choices in Little Rock unit became a new component of the Civil Rights unit, as well as the Mead quotation and the final unit essay.

7. Claudette Colvin was 15 years old when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a White woman on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 2, 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks was arrested for doing the same thing. Although the incident was reported in a few local papers, it did not gain the notoriety of Parks’s arrest. Parks was active in the Civil Rights Movement and was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) when she refused to give up her seat to a White passenger on December 1, 1955. Unlike Claudette Colvin, a teenager, Parks was a prominent member of the African American community, and the NAACP believed she was the best person to be the face of the court challenge to the city ordinance segregating buses in Montgomery.

8. On April 12, 2015, Freddie Gray, an African American, was arrested by Baltimore police for allegedly possessing an illegal knife. He suffered injuries to his spinal cord while being transported in a police van and was taken to a trauma center where he remained in a coma until his death on April 19, 2015. His death was followed by protests and violence in downtown Baltimore, which intensified after his funeral on April 27, 2015.