Freedom Riders

• A twelve year old girl trying to help by carrying glasses of water to victims of a firebombed bus while a mob of Klu Klux Klan members surged around her.
• Alabama governor, John Patterson, railing against “outside agitators – black men and white women” who were coming to Alabama to rile up the “good people of local communities” by riding a bus together.
• College students signing their last will and testament before stepping onto a bus headed to Alabama and Mississippi, expecting to be beaten and killed.
• Bull Conner, the police commissioner of Birmingham, cutting a deal with the KKK promising 15 minutes to “burn, bomb, kill, maim, I don’t give a god-damn what you do. I will guarantee that not one soul will be arrested in the 15 minutes” after Freedom Riders got off the bus.
• A reporter not wanting to look black Freedom Riders in the eye as they entered a “Whites Only” waiting area, knowing that death for the Riders was very likely just minutes away. And later stepping between the Riders and members of a Birmingham mob in an attempt to keep that from happening.

The Freedom Rides of 1961 happened a long time ago. And for your students, the events of that summer seem absolutely ancient. But the PBS special, Freedom Riders, that aired last year as part of the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides is an incredibly powerful tool for helping your kids understand the context of the Civil Rights movement.

PBS does a wonderful job of combining oral interviews from participants, photos, news footage, newspaper coverage, and video clips to create a truly engaging and emotional documentary. The film helps put a human face on both those fighting for civil rights and those fighting to retain the entrenched culture of Jim Crow.

At an hour and 51 minutes, the video is too long for a single classroom period. And, normally, I suggest that very few movies are good enough and powerful enough to show in their entirety. While it would be possible to chunk pieces of this story out, Freedom Riders just may be the exception.

PBS has maintained the Freedom Riders site with its access to teacher materials such as a study guide, instructional materials and links to related resources at EDSITEment. You can find tons of background information on the riders, the context of the period, and a handy timeline. The video is showing on PBS throughout the month of February but you can also stream in directly off the PBS site.

Freedom Riders is a story of amazing courage and bravery. Of racism and extreme bigotry, of cruelty. Simple acts of kindness. Of turning the other cheek and turning a blind eye.

Ultimately, it is a story of America. At its best and its worst. And it’s a story that our kids need to hear.

National Archives – Eyewitness Online Exhibit

Over the last few years, the National Archives has been working hard to connect their content with users outside of their traditional brick and mortar buildings. They have Facebook pages, Flickr accounts, Twitter feeds, RSS feeds, YouTube channels and numerous blogs.

Its Education Page is wonderful and NARA has consistently excellent online resources available through its main web site and on the web sites of its regional offices. I talked about one of my favorite online exhibits, Digital Vaults, several years ago.

Another favorite is an exhibit called Eyewitness.

Gripping eyewitness accounts—in the form of letters, diaries, audio and film recordings—chronicle dramatic moments in U.S. history.

Eyewitness provides a wide range of primary sources from a variety of periods. And NARA has packaged the site using Flash so it’s incredibly easy to find and use the materials.

I was browsing through the collection this morning and ran across John Lewis’s account of his participation in the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery and the events of Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965.

His account of the physical and verbal abuse suffered in 1965 would make for an interesting addition to stories published recently concerning the treatment Lewis, now a US representative from Georgia, received during the national health care debates.

The good news about Eyewitness? Tons of great resources.

The bad news? Once you start browsing, it’s tough to leave.

Raising racist kids

Wired Magizine’s GeekDad Jonathan Liu recently highlighted a new book called NutureShock: New Thinking About Children. Authored by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, NutureShock disproves many of our assumptions about how kids grow up thinking about race and race relations.

It is tempting to believe that because their generation is so diverse, today’s children grow up knowing how to get along with people of every race. But numerous studies suggest that this is more of a fantasy than a fact.

According to Liu and the research in NutureShock, here’s how to go about raising racist kids:

Step One: Don’t talk about race. Don’t point out skin color. Be “color blind.”

Step Two: Actually, that’s it. There is no Step Two.

Congratulations! Your children are well on their way to believing that <insert your ethnicity here> is better than everybody else.

What Nutureshock documents is that most white parents don’t really talk with their kids about race.

The attitude (at least of those who think racism is wrong) is generally that because we want our kids to be color-blind, we don’t point out skin color. We’ll say things like “everybody’s equal” but find it hard to be more specific than that. If our kids point out somebody who looks different, we shush them and tell them it’s rude to talk about it.

More research:

• Only 8% of white American high-schoolers have a best friend of another race. (For blacks, it’s about 15%.)
• The more diverse a school is, the less likely it is that kids will form cross-race friendships.
• 75% of white parents never or almost never talk about race with their kids.
• A child’s attitudes toward race are much harder to alter after third grade, but a lot of parents wait until then (or later) before they feel it’s “safe” to talk frankly about race.

Basically . . . silence is not golden if what we want is for kids to be tolerant and open-minded of others. So how does this apply to the classroom?

I think we’re often afraid of discussing potentially uncomfortable topics with our students because, well . . . it’s just easier not messing with it. This includes the topic of race relations.

So perhaps the best advice? Talk about differences, provide examples of positive collaboration, read authors from a variety of experiences, be honest about the past and be open to discussion.

A good place to start would be the Legacy of Brown site created several years ago as part of a Teaching American History project. You’ll find both print and web resources on race relations, lesson plans and document-based question strategies.

Because it’s too easy to ignore the important stuff.

Photo – University of Haifa

Black History Month resources and lesson plans

Update 2/8/2013 – I’ve updated the list! When you’re done here, head over to the 2013 version.

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Finding Black History Month lesson plans and teaching resources is not that tough. Finding good ones . . . a bit more difficult.

Bessie Coleman, first ever licensed African-American pilot at Bio.com

So I’ve spent some time over the last few days, trying to sift through the hundreds of places that are posting Black History Month materials. And I think I’ve come up with a pretty good list. The stuff from the National Archives and the Library of Congress seems especially good.

African American History Month from the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:

pays tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society.

NARA has its own Black History Month site. New resources are clearly marked and all look great!

ThinkFinity, the great metasearch tool from the Verizon Foundation, put together a series of nine lesson plans.

eHow created an interesting take of the Black History Month lesson plan idea called How to Write Lesson Plans for Black History Month.

Education World offers a wide variety of resources including lesson plans, activities, games, recipes, sounds and resources.

The Teach-nology people have developed a very nice list of over 50 lesson plans, biographies and numerous worksheets that could lead to great conversation.

I also like the very extensive list of lesson plans posted by the LessonPlansPage. They also have nice list of additional resources.

And finally, the Bio.com folks have an awesome, interactive site with biographies, timelines, videos, games, photos and basic historical background section.

Good luck! And enjoy.

Blatant nepotism & Library of Congress Depression pics

For the last few weeks, I’ve been pushing my 16 year old to write more – hoping to convince him to start posting things online.

Well . . . Jake has finally starting writing stuff. It’s a work in progress and, so far, not yet a deep site. But it’s encouraging to read the thoughts of a high school kid and I’m excited about watching and reading more as he learns to write for a more public audience.

I’m also excited because he just found me some new primary source documents I need.

One of the things on my plate this fall is to run a small grant focusing on the 1930s co-sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Midwest Center for Teaching with Primary Sources. And Jake’s most recent post highlights a select group of 14 color photographs taken during the Depression by the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection and hosted by the Library of Congress.

Just the kinds of stuff that our mini-grant will be messing with this fall!

Jake also mentions a LOC collection of photographs taken during the ’30s and ’40s documenting various Jim Crow signs enforcing racial discrimination. I’m already finding ways to integrate all of these documents into our grant activities.

Plus, it was a great reminder for me to spend more time at the newly revamped Teacher’s Page at the Library of Congress. It’s always been a bit difficult finding things at the old LOC site (part of the reason I missed the documents Jake mentions, I’m sure!) but the new look Teacher’s Page makes things a little easier.

So . . . a good day so far – the kid’s writing more, I found some new resources and LOC’s site is easier to use.