Reinventing My Teaching about the Civil Rights Movement

Teaching Reflection by Alana D. Murray

A group of local people and Freedom Summer volunteers sit on a tractor at the fish fry given for the volunteers by local civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer on the Dahmer property in the Kelly Settlement, north of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on July 4, 1964. The gathering marked the official beginning of Freedom Summer in Hattiesburg. Behind the steering wheel is local teenager Doug Smith, deputy director and youth coordinator of the COFO-Hattiesburg project. To his left is Dahmer’s son Dennis. Sitting on the tractor is Freedom School teacher Denise Jackson, and beside the tractor is Lorne Cress. Herbert Randall Freedom Summer photographs, McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi.

My second period class, National, State, and Local Government, was diversity in action. The students were African-American, Salvadoran, Colombian, Korean-American, and Russian; they were the sons and daughters of diplomats, construction workers, teachers, government employees, and other working men and women. This composition did not represent the traditional demographics of the larger Bethesda, Maryland community—affluent, privileged, mostly white people.

Every year in the spring, I teach a unit titled “Equal Opportunity for All.” As part of this, students examine the impact that citizen-led movements have had on national, state, and local government. Like many teachers, I frequently reevaluate the content of my course to determine its relevance to my students’ lives. For the past three years, I have struggled to make the complexity of the Civil Rights Movement accessible, yet not oversimplified for my tenth-grade students.

One day, we were discussing the effectiveness of leadership styles within the Civil Rights Movement. I had given the students reading material containing primary sources on the Movement. As the class examined the documents, we analyzed the tactics and viewpoints of civil rights leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Malcolm X, Bob Moses, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. After a while, Jennifer, one of my more vocal students, announced that after looking at all of the documents she still believed that Martin Luther King Jr. was the most important leader of the Civil Rights Movement.

“Martin Luther King gave really good speeches and motivated people for good,” she stated. Other students shared those sentiments as the discussion continued.

Then Michelle, who could always be counted on for a critical perspective, frantically waved her hand. She argued that Bob Moses was the most effective leader because he went from door to door and personally built trust with people. She added, “You can’t lead without trust.” Her classmates immediately challenged her opinion, arguing that Bob Moses’ approach was “soooo” slow, and not much could be changed with such an approach. Not to be defeated, Michelle responded by telling a story about her father and a particular politician….