Teaching the Civil Rights Era: A Student-Active Approach

THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT is the most important historical event of the last fifty years, and it remains central to contemporary society. For many years I have taught courses on the civil rights movement at the freshman, advanced undergraduate, and graduate levels; and I am struck by how woefully ignorant students at all these educational levels are of the events and people that transformed America. For all the purported attention at the elementary and secondary school levels, students and their teachers appear to know very little if anything beyond the names Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. Student ignorance is bad enough, but the lack of knowledge among teachers is more disturbing. I created my course originally as a graduate offering for teachers in our Masters of Education program. I have found teachers in my courses for the most part to be intelligent, highly engaged, and dedicated professionals, but both black and white, their unfamiliarity with this crucial subject in disappointing.' I cannot, of course, speak with authority beyond the students that I have had in my classes, although I venture to think that they reflect national trends. For undergraduates I generally teach the course as an honors offering, either as a senior-level or a freshman-level seminar. The students in these