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A Talk to Teachers - By: James Baldwin             What does James Baldwin mean when he states:P.287 “The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.”        

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A Talk to Teachers - By: James Baldwin             What does James Baldwin mean when he states:P.287 “The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.”        

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Let's begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced, not by Khrushchev, but from within. To any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible - and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people - must be prepared to "go for broke." Or to put it another way, you must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won't happen.

Since I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself, and in some ways am fairly easily intimidated, I beg you to let me leave that and go back to what I think to be the entire purpose of education in the first place. It would seem to me that when a child is born, if I'm the child's parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize that child. Man is a social animal. He cannot exist without a society. A society, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone within that society takes for granted. Now the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians. The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it - at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.

Now, if what I have tried to sketch has any validity, it becomes thoroughly clear, at least to me, that any Negro who is born in this country and undergoes the American educational system runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic. On the one hand he is born in the shadow of the stars and stripes and he is assured it represents a nation which has never lost a war. He pledges allegiance to that flag which guarantees "liberty and justice for all." He is part of a country in which anyone can become president, and so forth. But on the other hand he is also assured by his country and his countrymen that he has never contributed anything to civilization-that his past is nothing more than a record of humiliations gladly endured. He is assumed by the republic that he, his father, his mother, and his ancestors were happy, shiftless, watermelon-eating darkies who loved Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann, that the value he has as a black man is proven by one thing only - his devotion to white people. If you think I am exaggerating, examine the myths which proliferate in this country about Negroes.

All this enters the child's consciousness much sooner than we as adults would like to think it does. As adults, we are easily fooled because we are so anxious to be fooled. But children are very different. Children, not yet aware that it is dangerous to look too deeply at anything, look at everything, look at each other, and draw their own conclusions. They don't have the vocabulary to express what they see, and we, their elders, know how to intimidate them very easily and very soon. But a black child, looking at the world around him, though he cannot know quite what to make of it, is aware that there is a reason why his mother works so hard, why his father is always on edge. He is aware that there is some reason why, if he sits down in the front of the bus, his father or mother slaps him and drags him to the back of the bus. He is aware that there is some terrible weight on his parents' shoulders which menaces him. And it isn't long - in fact it begins when he is in school - before he discovers the shape of his oppression.

Let us say that the child is seven years old and I am his father, and I decide to take him to the zoo, or to Madison Square Garden, or to the U.N. Building, or to any of the tremendous monuments we find all over New York. We get into a bus and we go from where I live on 131st Street and Seventh Avenue downtown through the park and we get in New York City, which is not Harlem. Now, where the boy lives - even if it is a housing project - is in an undesirable neighborhood. If he lives in one of those housing projects of which everyone in New York is so proud, he has at the front door, if not closer, the pimps, the whores, the junkies - in a word, the danger of life in the ghetto. And the child knows this, though he doesn't know why.

I still remember my first sight of New York. It was really another city when I was born - where I was born. We looked down over the Park Avenue streetcar tracks. It was Park Avenue, but I didn't know what Park Avenue meant downtown. The Park Avenue I grew up on, which is still standing, is dark and dirty. No one would dream of opening a Tiffany's on that Park Avenue, and when you go downtown you discover that you are literally in the white world. It is rich - or at least it looks rich. It is clean - because they collect garbage downtown. There are doormen. People walk about as though they owned where they are - and indeed they do. And it's a great shock. It's very hard to relate yourself to this. You don't know what it means. You know - you know instinctively - that none of this is for you. You know this before you are told. And who is it for and who is paying for it? And why isn't it for you?

Later on when you become a grocery boy or messenger and you try to enter one of those buildings a man says, "Go to the back door." Still later, if you happen by some odd chance to have a friend in one of those buildings, the man says, "Where's your package?" Now this by no means is the core of the matter. What I'm trying to get at is that by the time the Negro child has had, effectively, almost all the doors of opportunity slammed in his face, and there are very few things he can do about it. He can more or less accept it with an absolutely inarticulate and dangerous rage inside - all the more dangerous because it is never expressed. It is precisely those silent people whom white people see every day of their lives - I mean your porter and your maid, who never say anything more than "Yes Sir" and "No, Ma'am." They will tell you it's raining if that is what you want to hear, and they will tell you the sun is shining if that is what you want to hear. They really hate you-really hate you because in their eyes (and they're right) you stand between them and life. I want to come back to that in a moment. It is the most sinister of the facts, I think, which we now face.

There is something else the Negro child can do, to. Every street boy - and I was a street boy, so I know - looking at the society which has produced him, looking at the standards of that society which are not honored by anybody, looking at your churches and the government and the politicians, understand that this structure is operated for someone else's benefit - not for his. And there's no reason in it for him. If he is really cunning, really ruthless, really strong - and many of us are - he becomes a kind of criminal. He becomes a kind of criminal because that's the only way he can live. Harlem and every ghetto in this city - every ghetto in this country - is full of people who live outside the law. They wouldn't dream of calling a policeman. They wouldn't, for a moment, listen to any of those professions of which we are so proud on the Fourth of July. They have turned away from this country forever and totally. They live by their wits and really long to see the day when the entire structure comes down.

The point of all this is that black men were brought here as a source of cheap labor. They were indispensable to the economy. In order to justify the fact that men were treated as though they were animals, the white republic had to brainwash itself into believing that they were, indeed, animals and deserved to be treated like animals. Therefor it is almost impossible for any Negro child to discover anything about his actual history. The reason is that this "animal," once he suspects his own worth, once he starts believing that he is a man, has begun to attack the entire power structure. This is why America has spent such a long time keeping the Negro in his place. What I am trying to suggest to you is that it was not an accident, it was not an act of God, it was not done by well-meaning people muddling into something which they didn't understand. It was a deliberate policy hammered into place in order to make money from black flesh. And now, in 1963, because we have never faced this fact, we are in intolerable trouble.

The Reconstruction, as I read the evidence, was a bargain between the North and South to this effect: "We've liberated them from the land - and delivered them to the bosses." When we left Mississippi to come North we did not come to freedom. We came to the bottom of the labor market, and we are still there. Even the Depression of the 1930s failed to make a dent in Negroes' relationship to white workers in the labor unions. Even today, so brainwashed is this republic that people seriously ask in what they suppose to be good faith, "What does the Negro want?" I've heard a great many asinine questions in my life, but that is perhaps the most asinine and perhaps the most insulting. But the point here is that people who ask that question, thinking that they ask it in good faith, are really the victims of this conspiracy to make Negroes believe they are less than human.

In order for me to live, I decided very early that some mistake had been made somewhere. I was not a "nigger" even though you called me one. But if I was a "nigger" in your eyes, there was something about you - there was something you needed. I had to realize when I was very young that I was none of those things I was told I was. I was not, for example, happy. I never touched a watermelon for all kinds of reasons that had been invented by white people, and I knew enough about life by this time to understand that whatever you invent, whatever you project, is you! So where we are now is that a whole country of people believe I'm a "nigger," and I don't, and the battle's on! Because if I am not what I've been told I am, then it means that you're not what you thought you were either! And that is the crisis.

It is not really a "Negro revolution" that is upsetting the country. What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity. If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you would be liberating not only Negroes, you'd be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history. And the reason is that if you are compelled to lie about one aspect of anybody's history, you must lie about it all. If you have to lie about my real role here, if you have to pretend that I hoed all that cotton just because I loved you, then you have done something to yourself. You are mad.

Now let's go back a minute. I talked earlier about those silent people - the porter and the maid - who, as I said, don't look up at the sky if you ask them if it is raining, but look into your face. My ancestors and I were very well-trained. We understood very early that this was not a Christian nation. It didn't matter what you said or how often you went to church. My father and my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother knew that Christians didn't act this way. It was a simple as that. And if that was so there was no point in dealing with white people in terms of their own moral professions, for they were not going to honor them. What one did was to turn away, smiling all the time, and tell white people what they wanted to hear. But people always accuse you of reckless talk when you say this.

All this means that there are in this country tremendous reservoirs of bitterness which have never been able to find an outlet, but may find an outlet soon. It means that well-meaning white liberals place themselves in great danger when they try to deal with Negroes as though they were missionaries. It means, in brief, that a great price is demanded to liberate all those silent people so that they can breathe for the first time and tell you what they think of you. And a price is demanded to liberate all those white children - some of them near forty - who have never grown up, and who never will grow up, because they have no sense of their identity.

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn't stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. That's all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That's how the country was settled. Not by Gary Cooper. Yet we have a whole race of people, a whole republic, who believe the myths to the point where even today they select political representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper. Now this is dangerously infantile, and it shows in every level of national life. When I was living in Europe, for example, one of the worst revelations to me was the way Americans walked around Europe buying this and buying that and insulting everybody - not even out of malice, just because they didn't know any better. Well, that is the way they have always treated me. They weren't cruel; they just didn't know you were alive. They didn't know you had any feelings.

What I am trying to suggest here is that in the doing of all this for 100 years or more, it is the American white man who has long since lost his grip on reality. In some peculiar way, having created this myth about Negroes, and the myth about his own history, he created myths about the world so that, for example, he was astounded that some people could prefer Castro, astounded that there are people in the world who don't go into hiding when they hear the word "Communism," astounded that Communism is one of the realities of the twentieth century which we will not overcome by pretending that it does not exist. The political level in this country now, on the part of people who should know better, is abysmal.

The Bible says somewhere that where there is no vision the people perish. I don't think anyone can doubt that in this country today we are menaced - intolerably menaced - by a lack of vision.

It is inconceivable that a sovereign people should continue, as we do so abjectly, to say, "I can't do anything about it. It's the government." The government is the creation of the people. It is responsible to the people. And the people are responsible for it. No American has the right to allow the present government to say, when Negro children are being bombed and hosed and shot and beaten all over the Deep South, that there is nothing we can do about it. There must have been a day in this country's life when the bombing of the children in Sunday School would have created a public uproar and endangered the life of a Governor Wallace. It happened here and there was no public uproar.

I began by saying that one of the paradoxes of education was that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. And on the basis of the evidence - the moral and political evidence - one is compelled to say that this is a backward society. Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker, I would try to teach them - I would try to make them know - that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal. I would try to make each child know that these things are the result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him. I would teach him that if he intends to get to be a man, he must at once decide that his is stronger than this conspiracy and they he must never make his peace with it. And that one of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it and for destroying it depends on what he decides he is worth. I would teach him that there are currently very few standards in this country which are worth a man's respect. That it is up to him to change these standards for the sake of the life and the health of the country. I would suggest to him that the popular culture - as represented, for example, on television and in comic books and in movies - is based on fantasies created by very ill people, and he must be aware that these are fantasies that have nothing to do with reality. I would teach him that the press he reads is not as free as it says it is - and that he can do something about that, too. I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger - and that it belongs to him. I would teach him that he doesn't have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, any given policy, any given morality; that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything. I would try to show him that one has not learned anything about Castro when one says, "He is a Communist." This is a way of his not learning something about Castro, something about Cuba, something, in time, about the world. I would suggest to him that his is living, at the moment, in an enormous province. America is not the world and if America is going to become a nation, she must find a way - and this child must help her to find a way to use the tremendous potential and tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a way to use that energy, it will be destroyed by that energy.

Delivered on October 16, 1963, as "The Negro Child-His Self-Image ", published in The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963, reprinted in The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985, Saint Martins 1985.

James Baldwin (Aug. 2, 1924 - Dec. 1, 1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic.

Born in Harlem, Baldwin was a "witness to the truth" about racism and homophobia through his novels, plays, essays, and poetry including Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Notes of a Native Son (1955), Giovanni's Room (1956), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), Another Country (1962), The Fire Next Time (1963), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985). Baldwin was active as a writer, speaker, and ally of the southern Civil Rights Movement. He participated in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Freedom Day in Selma in 1963, and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March.

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A Talk to Teachers - Zinn Education Project

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Article. By James Baldwin. October 16, 1963. Baldwin addresses the challenges of education to prepare children to grapple with the myths and realities of U.S. history.

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Black Like Me - By: Renee Watson p.294-298         P.296“There was a shame that came with owning up to the parts of me that fit the stereotypes and assumptions of what people expected Black children to be like. In middle school I learned that some adults saw me as an “exception to the rule.”  Think back to a time when you may have experienced something similar. What happened? How can we ensure children don’t ever have to feel this way?                          

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Black Like Me - By: Renee Watson p.294-298         P.296“There was a shame that came with owning up to the parts of me that fit the stereotypes and assumptions of what people expected Black children to be like. In middle school I learned that some adults saw me as an “exception to the rule.”  Think back to a time when you may have experienced something similar. What happened? How can we ensure children don’t ever have to feel this way?                          

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When I was in middle school, I was bused to the other side of town for my education. Portland Public Schools wanted to integrate middle schools in Southeast Portland. This meant that a handful of black students-most of us from Northeast Portland who had attended elementary school together-boarded a yellow school bus before sunrise to ride across town. We sat at the back of the bus laughing at the boys stinging on each other with yo momma jokes. My best friend and I shared the headphones to her Walkman so that we both could sing along to Bell Biv DeVoe and Mariah Carey. For the 30-minute ride we were ourselves and there was no shame in the way we talked or related to each other. No one made a big deal about seeing my hair in braids one day and straightened the next. We bragged about how well our mommas cooked and shared our leftovers with each other at lunchtime, even though one day a white girl loudly whispered to her friend that "black food smells bad."

We had pride and there was a care we took with each other. Though there were normal middle school cliques and dramas, there was also a strength and loyalty among us. On that bus, we were family. I felt like I belonged.

But when I got to school, I felt invisible. Which is ironic because I was a plump dark-skinned girl with hair that would kink and curl at one drop of rain.

I stood out.

So how is it that I felt no one saw me?

Being seen-truly seen-is to feel that all parts of who I am are recognized not as compartmentalized pieces of myself, but blended truths of my identity. So when my white friends told me they didn't see me as a black girl that meant they didn't see me. When white teachers seemed shocked to hear me speak black vernacular in the hallway with my friends when I "spoke so well in class," what they didn't understand is that code-switching came natural to me-I talked both ways and I wasn't trying to fit in with my friends or impress my teachers. I was being myself.

One day, on our way to a field trip to see the Oregon Symphony, a teacher tried to assure me that if I "gave the music a try" I might really find that I liked it. I told her that I loved classical music. That I loved jazz, too. Her smile told me that she thought this was a good thing. When she said, "Well, that's good because that rap stuff is not music," I told her that I loved hip-hop and R&B and gospel and country, too. My family was a musical family. We had a collection of records that included Tennessee Ernie Ford, Mahalia Jackson, Marvin Gaye, and the Jackson 5. My sister played in a jazz ensemble that traveled to Europe. My grandfather played the piano at church.

She didn't seem to value the variety of music I enjoyed. There was clearly one that was better than the others and I took this to mean that the black parts of me were better off hidden. There was a shame that came with owning up to the parts of me that fit the stereotypes and assumptions of what people expected black children to be like.

In middle school I learned that some adults saw me as an "exception to the rule." To be called confident for an overweight, dark-skinned black girl was to say that overweight, dark-skinned black girls had low self-esteem. If I was smart for a black girl that meant the rule was black children weren't normally smart.

It was one thing to feel different, to be different. It was another thing to be judged on those differences. To realize that people had expectations of me because of what I looked like or the neighborhood I was from.

I often excused racist or insensitive remarks and actions, and instead blamed myself or thought that maybe I was taking it the wrong way.

But there was no excusing away what my 7th-grade science teacher said the day she passed out the tests we had taken a few days before. She walked to the front of the room and yelled, "I am so disappointed in all of you!" She paced the floor, walking between our desks. "None of you passed the test. You will be taking it again. Right. Now."

I looked down at my paper. Saw the capital A scribbled in red ink across the top of the page.

"I will give you a chance to look through your notes and then you will retake the test."

I looked back at my paper. "But I have an A," I said. First to myself and then out loud when I raised my hand and asked, "Do I have to retake the test?"

"Oh, that's right," my teacher said. "You got an A." She turned her back to me and addressed the rest of the class. "And this is why I am so disappointed in all of you. You let Renée Watson come all the way over here from Northeast Portland and get a better grade than you in science!"

I have often replayed that day in my mind. I have thought of new endings where I stand up for myself and walk out of class refusing to be humiliated. I have wondered what would have happened if she asked me to be a tutor for the other students in class. What if she taught me-and the rest of the class-about black scientists and their revolutionary discoveries? What if she had allowed space in her narrative for black children from Northeast Portland to be capable of meeting high expectations, of achieving academic success?

What if she really saw me?

As an educator, I try to see my students. I encourage them to embrace all parts of their culture-where they come from, what they eat, the music they enjoy, the joyous and disastrous parts of their neighborhoods and families. I strive to learn their individual and collective histories. I share my stories with them, and we grow and heal together. We laugh at ourselves for sometimes being the stereotype. We proudly proclaim that we are more than the stereotype. We mourn and rejoice over our ancestors-their struggles and victories, their shortcomings and strengths. We commit to sharing our true selves. We commit to seeing each other.

black like me

and suddenly everyone would see

how black i am.

black like collard greens & salted meat simmering on a stove.
black like hot water cornbread & iron skillets, like juke joints & fish frys
black like soul train lines & the electric slide at weddings and birthdays
black like vaseline on ashy knees, like beads decorating braids
black like cotton fields & soul-cried spirituals.

my skin is black

like red kool-aid, red soda, the red blood
of the lynched and assassinated and the african man
those skinheads killed with a baseball bat when i was in the fifth grade.

i am as black as he was.
my science teacher knows this. she sees
my black and is blind to my brilliance.
can't believe i passed the test with an a
when all the white kids failed.

and when she says to the white students,
"you ought to be ashamed of yourselves . . ."
what she really wants to say is, "i can't believe this black girl is as smart as you."

all the white kids look at me
and this is when we learn that the color of our shells
come with expectations.

i stop being good
at science and math.

my english teacher gives me books and journals
and i read and write the world
as it is, as i want it to be.
i read past my black blues, discover that i am black
like benjamin banneker and george washington carver
black like margaret walker and fannie lou hamer

i am not just slave and despair.
i am struggle and triumph. i learn
to live my life in the searching, in the quest:

can i be black and brilliant?
can i be jazz and gospel, hip hop and classical?
can i be christian and accepting?
can i be big and beautiful?

can i be black like me?
can anyone see me?

-Renée Watson

Renée Watson ( reneewatson.net) is an author, performer, and educator. Her children's books have received several honors, including an NAACP Image Award nomination. She teaches poetry at DreamYard in New York City.

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A poem-and the history behind it-about being invisible, yet stereotyped, as an African American student bused to a predominantly white school.

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Black Boys in White Spaces - By: Dyan Watson p.306-309       P.308“I wish his teacher told him about allies, about the various people of all races committing to stand up against injustice. I wish the teacher noticed everyone staring at my son. I wish that she would have explicitly prepared the class for an age-appropriate conversation about difference.”                                                    Suggestion Given: “They deserve teachers who will hold the learning space as sacred in all aspects and think through who their students are as they plan lessons and activities. How do we prepare teachers to do this?  What can we put in place so this happens in every classroom? What does her experience in school and her wishes for her son reveal about the responsibilities of educators of Black children?      

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Black Boys in White Spaces - By: Dyan Watson p.306-309       P.308“I wish his teacher told him about allies, about the various people of all races committing to stand up against injustice. I wish the teacher noticed everyone staring at my son. I wish that she would have explicitly prepared the class for an age-appropriate conversation about difference.”                                                    Suggestion Given: “They deserve teachers who will hold the learning space as sacred in all aspects and think through who their students are as they plan lessons and activities. How do we prepare teachers to do this?  What can we put in place so this happens in every classroom? What does her experience in school and her wishes for her son reveal about the responsibilities of educators of Black children?      

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One Mom's Reflection

By Dyan Watson

Illustrator: Erin Robinson

Erin Robinson

Right away I recognized her. Ruby Bridges. The courageous girl who defied white racists and became the first to integrate an all-white elementary school. My 7-year-old son pulled a handout out of his backpack with her face on it. He is in a bilingual, two-way immersion program at our local elementary school. As is our custom on Friday, we emptied his backpack and sorted the contents. We determined what needed to be recycled, what would be hung on our whiteboard, and what needed to be stored in my Things-to-take-care-of box by the fridge. I smiled, because as a former history teacher and lover of Black history, I was happy to see my son learning about this important historical moment. And then, I took a closer look and saw that it was in Spanish. I was elated as it dawned on me that my son truly is emergent bilingual. "Caleb, what's this about? Did you read this in school?"

I frowned and looked him in his eyes "Why not? What do you mean?"

"Everyone stared at me when we read it because I'm the only Black kid in my class."

"Oh sweetie. I'm so sorry. What did the teacher do? What did she say?"

"Nothing."

"Did anybody say anything to you?"

"No, they just stared at me. I didn't like it."

I didn't know what to say. My eyes welled up with tears. I put my arm around him as I tried to figure out what reaction would best serve him. Should I show him my anger? Do I simply weep and say nothing? Should I offer him a snack and ignore it altogether?

I was so disappointed in my lack of words and that I didn't know what to do in that moment. It wasn't a secret to Caleb that we're Black and that on some level that makes us different from most of the people around us. We attend a white church. We live in a white neighborhood. We shop in white stores. And even though his bilingual class is 40 to 50 percent Latino, most of their faces are white or light-skinned. So far, I haven't had any planned conversations about race with my boys. Not sure what I'm waiting for or even that I am waiting. Race is funny that way. As a reality, it's ever present; as a topic it slips in and out of our lives, attaching to everyday things like hair and clothes, to speaking, to how my boys comport themselves in a grocery store. And like many difficult topics about life, the explicit conversations and lessons often come in reactionary waves.

Once I was really angry with both of my sons. Can't remember what it was exactly but I remember having this colossal adult tantrum yelling at them about not listening to me. Through tears I shouted, "Don't you get it? Do you think these white people are going to care that you're good kids or that I love you? They will shoot you without even thinking!"

Then there was the time that Caleb came home and reported that two kids were making fun of his skin color in the lunchroom. Teasing him that he must eat a lot of chocolate and that's why his skin is black. As soon as my son told me, I ran upstairs and emailed his teacher:

Caleb came home today and told me that Santiago and Matt were teasing him about being Black. Santiago and he seem to have had trouble all year long. I haven't said anything to you because I was encouraging Caleb to learn to problem-solve and to speak up for himself but clearly it hasn't worked and this time it's gone too far. It happened in the lunchroom and Caleb said he raised his hand to tell the teacher but she never called on him. I asked Caleb to talk to you about it tomorrow. It has been tough being the only Black kid in his class. I am trying to prepare him for this life since he lives in Oregon and this will be a regular occurrence. But I also want others to be accountable for their actions. If you could please check in with the boys about this and let me know what you find out and decide to do, I would really appreciate it.

Turns out the kid who "said it first" was from a different class. Caleb's teacher followed up with the boys to find this out and spoke to the other teacher, who subsequently had a class meeting. I don't know the details of this meeting but am glad she acted. She also spoke with Santiago and two other kids who were there when it happened. I applaud her for not letting this go and dismissing it as "boys will be boys," or "good-natured teasing," or "I'm sure they were just joking around." All of which are responses I have heard over the years.

So yes, race is not a stranger to us and we talk about it. But in this moment, with my little boy expressing his sadness and feeling invisible yet overly seen, I was speechless. And then I was sad. And then I was angry.

Here's what I wished would have happened instead.

I wish Caleb's response to my enthusiasm about him learning a moment in Black history would have been him saying, in his own excited voice, "And you know what else we learned? We learned that even though there were white people who didn't want Ruby Bridges in that school, there were some who did." I wish his teacher told him about allies, about the various people of all races committing to stand up against injustice. I wish the teacher noticed everyone staring at my son. I wish that she would have explicitly prepared the class for an age-appropriate conversation about difference.

I wish I felt comfortable asking him my customary "And how did that make you feel?" But I was afraid of his response. And my reaction.

If the teacher had been more thoughtful about the implementation of the lesson, maybe his answer would have been that he felt good. Maybe he would have felt validated if she had talked with him prior to the lesson and explained that sometimes when we're the only one, it can feel lonely and embarrassing, but she was there. That she cared about him. That she would protect him.

Don't misunderstand me. This teacher is thoughtful and definitely cares about my son. But she was not skillful in this circumstance. Part of me wants to be quick to forgive. Here I was, also not knowing what to do. Is it OK for me to criticize the actions of a teacher who has too many students and has perhaps been undertrained in how race mediates teaching and learning?

I choose to forgive her.

But I will also hold her accountable for the learning that took place that day. And the learning that should have taken place.

I wish that later that evening, when he was in bed closing his eyes to sleep, he was fantasizing about wildly unrealistic adventures he and his brother would have with the Six Million Dollar Man, how maybe they'd be social justice superheroes righting the wrongs of racism. He could have imagined what he'd do the next day, what he'd get to eat for snack, or if he'd be able to go over Uncle Kevin's house and play on his old Wii. But instead, I have a feeling that he thought about how he didn't want to go to school the next day. How he "shouldn't have been there."

I want Nehemiah and Caleb, my Black sons, to be free to dream, to go to bed with nothing on their minds but how much they are loved and cared for. Black boys deserve to be boys - to be young, carefree, and nurtured.

To be seen as human - capable of being hurt, bullied, and afraid. They deserve a school system that will educate them with intentional love. They deserve teachers who will hold the learning space as sacred in all aspects and think through who their students are as they plan lessons and activities. We all deserve schools that will think about how race plays with learning - everyone's learning. White students, especially, deserve to have teachers who will empower them as white allies.

Every neighbor, every teacher, all of the church members and friends of our family have a role in my boys' development. As I think about the conversations I am having with my sons, I wonder what conversations white mothers are having with their sons and daughters. What are they saying - or not saying - that results in their children staring at someone who looks different from them, or teasing a Brown boy's chocolate skin, or accent, or hair texture.

When I asked Caleb how his day went, at some point he answered, "I shouldn't have been there that day." The truth is, son, no one should have been there. No student - Latinx, white, or Black - was served well that day. At the same time, he should have been there; I just wish he was better served and felt like he belonged.

Dyan Watson, an editor for Rethinking Schools, is an associate professor in teacher education at the Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling. She is also co-editor of Rhythm and Resistance: Teaching Poetry for Social Justice and Teaching for Black Lives, from which this article is excerpted.

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Black Boys in White Spaces - Rethinking Schools

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Right away I recognized her. Ruby Bridges. The courageous girl who defied white racists and became the first to integrate an all-white elementary school. My 7-year-old son pulled a handout out of his backpack with her face on it. He is in a bilingual, two-way immersion program at our local elementary school.

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Raised by Women - By: Linda Christensen p.311-319 Who Were You Raised By? Take a few minutes and try to create a poem that explains you and who you were raised by.

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Raised by Women - By: Linda Christensen p.311-319 Who Were You Raised By? Take a few minutes and try to create a poem that explains you and who you were raised by.

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Building relationships through poetry

By Linda Christensen

Illustrator: Katherine Streeter

Illustration: Katherine Streeter

When I first read "Raised by Women" by Kelly Norman Ellis, I knew the poem would be a hit with my students. I love Ellis' celebration of the women in her life, her use of home language, and the wit and wisdom of her rhythmic lines. And from reading student tributes to their mothers over the years, I knew most of my students - predominantly African-American, in an 11th-grade African-American literature class at Grant High School in Portland, Ore. - would relate to the topic. "Raised by Women" also had the qualities I look for in poems I use to build community and teach poetic traits: A repeating line that lays down a heartbeat for the students to follow, delicious details from the writer's life that could evoke delicious details from my students' lives, and a rhythm so alive, I want to dance when I read it.

Part of my job as a teacher is to awaken students to the joy and love that they may take for granted, so I use poetry and narrative prompts that help them "see" daily gifts, to celebrate their homes and heritages. Ellis' poetry provides a perfect example. As she wrote, "I was just lucky enough to have been born into a loving southern, black family. I want these poems to stand as witness to the beauty and abundance of that life: a black southern woman's life, a good life, a proud life, a life as rich and sweet as the pies I bake with Mississippi pecans. There are others like me, folks raised in the brown loving arms of family."

I also use poetry to build relationships with students and between students. Ellis' smart and sassy poem helped launch our year-long journey to establish relationships as the students and I learned about each other.

In each stanza of the poem, Ellis lists the kinds of women who raised her - from "chitterling eating" to "some PhD toten" kind of women. Ellis' poem follows a repeating, but changing pattern. She writes that she was raised by women, sisters, and queens. She includes both description and dialogue in most stanzas:

I was raised by
Chitterling eating,
Vegetarian cooking,
Cornbread so good you want to lay
down and die baking
"Go on baby, get yo'self a plate"
Kind of Women.

The full poem, as well as a video clip of Ellis reading the poem, can be found at the Coal Black Voices website, which was developed by Media Working Group to "honor contemporary African-American culture and celebrate regional expressions of the African Diaspora through the works of the Affrilachian Poets"

Filling the Bucket with Delicious Details and Style

After reading "Raised by Women" twice, I asked students, "Who were you raised by?" Although Ellis discusses only women, I wanted to open other possibilities. I salted the pot by generating a few: mother, father, coaches, church. But I also wanted them to reach out beyond the traditional, so I encouraged them to think about neighbors, neighborhoods, musicians, novelists, civil rights activists, the halls at Grant. After students wrote their lists, we shared them out loud so they could "steal" more ideas from each other. I pushed students to get more specific as they shared. For example, when Melvin said, "Coaches," I asked which coaches raised him - all of them? What did his football coach say or do that helped raise him? When Alex said the men at the barbershop, I asked which men and what did they contribute. Because the best poetry - and writing in general - resides in specific details, I pushed students to move beyond their first response and get deeper.

We also looked at other verbs they could use besides "raised." Students generated a list: brought up, taught, educated, nurtured. I wanted them to see that they weren't limited by the original verb, raised.

When we completed our initial brainstorming about the repeating line, we went back to the poem and noticed the specific kinds of details that Ellis included: The first stanza was about food, the second stanza focused on hair, the third was about physical appearance - skin color and clothes - the fourth about choices, the fifth about music, the sixth about attitude, and the seventh about professions. Because I didn't want each poem to turn out the same, I used those as potential categories. We also brainstormed others: cars, songs, languages. I encouraged them to create a list of categories like Ellis' - food, clothes, music - and to fill in each category with specific details. After they brainstormed, we returned to the form - looking at the repeating, but changing line - and the use of dialogue that gives Ellis' poem so much flavor. We also noted that she named specific people - Angela Davis and James Brown - which was something they could do in their poems. Students pointed out that Ellis used home language rather than standard English. Because I knew that some students' home language was Spanish, I encouraged students to experiment with language in their poems. Students started their poems in class and completed them at home.

The Read-around:
Structuring Response

Before the students read their poems, we arranged the desks in a circle, so students could see and hear the reader. I asked students to pull out a piece of paper to take notes on what they learned about each classmate through their poem: "Who raised them? What's important to them? Who's important to them?" I discovered that students pay more attention during the read-around if I give them a specific task. For the most part, student poems were stellar, and even those that lacked the style and sassiness of their classmates' gave us a glimpse into their lives.

Students found their own ways into the poems by celebrating more than one person. Anaiah Rhodes, for example, wrote a stanza each for her mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, church folk, music, cousins, and track. Her classmates loved how she used language and details to capture each one in turn, but they especially loved how Anaiah wrote about her church:

I was taught by a tongue talkin'
Sanctified, holy ghost filled, fire baptized, shoutin'
"'Member to keep God first, Baby!"
Kinda church folk

Some aisle runnin', teary-eyed, joy jumpin',
Devil rebukin', seed sowin'
"How you doin, Baby?"
Type of church folk

Ellis' poem provided an opportunity for us to celebrate the brilliance and linguistic richness of my students' cultures. Destinee Sanders, who also chose to write about a variety of people in her family - mother, aunts, sisters, and "abuelita" - switched languages throughout her poem:

I was raised by Mi Abuelita,
Es mi abuela favorita,
Ella es mi corazón, mi amor, mi amiga
Mi noche, mi todos los días, mi siempre.
Yo amo a mi abuelita

[I was raised by my Grandma,
My favorite grandmother
She is my heart, my love, my friend
My night, my everyday, my always.
I love my grandma]

Like Destinee, students shared information in the poem that helped us know their family and backgrounds. Jessica Chavez wrote about her "tortilla making/Grease usin'/cumbia dancin'" family. Adiana Wilmot wrote, "I was raised by that/curry goat and chicken cookin'/ 'Eat your vegetables, pickney,'/type of Jamaican woman." Kirk Allen wrote about his family - the Allens - rather than selecting out individuals:

I was raised by the gas, brake dipp'n,
Cadillac whip'n, Wood grain grip'n,
Old school, big body, pimp'n,
Ain't you bullshit'n Allens

I was raised by the show stopp'n,
Calla poll'l
Hater droppin',
Hat tilted to the side,
Look like a bad mutha,
Shut yo mouth Allens

In this and all class writing, I encouraged students to abandon the prompt and my suggestions and find their own passion and their own way into the assignment. Shona Curtis did that and forged her way to a poem about music instead of people:

I was raised by smooth jazz
Make you want to sit down and
Cry kind of music

Some move your feet and shake
Those hips feel like you dancin'
Down the streets of Argentina
Kind of music

When students wrote at the end of the assignment, many pointed to Shona's straying from the prompt as a strength in her poem.

Details from poems brought shouts of laughter or nods as students recognized their own family in Destiny Spruill's description of her family's "Found Jesus/Church goin'/You mouth can get you in trouble" and "Gumbo makin'/Hat wearin'/Mother of the church/Kinda grandmothers." They understood Ebony Ross' "I was raised to get the belt/If I was talking that lip." But it was Jessica's repeating line, "I wasn't raised by my daddy" that brought the most affirmations from other students.

Framing Reflection:
Milking the Learning

After students shared, I handed out 3×5 cards and asked them to look back over their notes and write about what they learned about each other and poetry through our lesson. Kayla Anderson wrote that she learned "that you can completely change a poem but still keep the meaning. Shona made her poem fun by using words like 'hip-hoppin,' pop lockin', shake your dreads.'" She noted that many students used strong verbs and imagery. Shona pointed out that "when you say your poem with attitude it sounds better."

But it was students' revelations about each other that made me realize this poetry assignment is a keeper. Students wrote about how much they learned about each other in a short amount of time. "I learned that Adiana is from Jamaica, that Bree was raised by foster parents, and that a lot of us have been let down by our fathers." Destinee wrote:

I learned that I have something in common with every single person in this room. I realize that we have all been through a lot of the same things. I learned that most of us weren't raised by our dads. I learned that Shaquala loves soul food. I learned that although Bree is Latino like me, she was raised by different types of Latinos, and I can relate to that... I learned that we're different... yet we're the same.

Out of the 30 students in the class, the majority were raised without fathers. This became a repeating "aha" for most of the class. Virginia Hankins, for example, wrote that she "learned a lot about my classmates that I would have never known. I was surprised that so many of us were raised without our fathers."

One lesson isn't enough to build the kind and caring classroom I'm striving for, but knitting together poetry that teaches about our lives as well as the craft of writing starts to build the kind of caring, risk-taking community I hope to create by the end of the year.

Raised by Women
By Kelly Norman Ellis

I was raised by
Chitterling eating
Vegetarian cooking
Cornbread so good you want to lay
down and die baking
"Go on baby, get yo'self a plate"
Kind of Women.

Some thick haired
Angela Davis afro styling
"Girl, lay back
and let me scratch yo head"
Sorta Women.

Some big legged
High yellow, mocha brown
Hip shaking
Miniskirt wearing
Hip huggers hugging
Daring debutantes
Groovin
"I know I look good"
Type of Women.

Some tea sipping
White glove wearing
Got married too soon
Divorced
in just the nick of time
"Better say yes ma'am to me"
Type of sisters.

Some fingerpopping
Boogaloo dancing
Say it loud
I'm black and I'm proud
James Brown listening
"Go on girl shake that thing"
Kind of Sisters.

Some PhD toten
Poetry writing
Portrait painting
"I'll see you in court"
World traveling
Stand back, I'm creating
Type of queens

I was raised by women

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Raised
By Anaiah Rhodes

I was raised by a lovin'
Church goin', home cookin', belt whoppin',
Non-stop children bearin'
Money arguin',
"You're going to be something great one day,"
Mom and Dad

I was raised by a Jesus lovin', behind tearin'
Bomb cookin', hair pressin', garage sale givin'
Grandma

I was brought up with that hold on,
Wait on God, don't give up,
Weepin' may endure for the night,
But joy comes in the mornin'
What a friend we have in Jesus, music

Raised.

Some jump up and down slam to
The beat of the rock
Kind of music

I was raised by music

I Was Raised by Video Games
By Seth Lee

Some x tappin'
Joystick swirlin'
"Drive me crazy til I
throw my controller"
type of videogames.

I was raised by cuts and bruises.

Some knee scrapin'
bone breakin'
fallin' out of trees
and landing on my head
kinds of cuts and bruises.

I was raised by roughnecks.

Those country music listenin'
playing football on the gravel road
pickin' blackberries from the neighbors
wrestlin' in the mud 'til dinner's ready
kind of roughnecks.

I was raised by transformers.

I was raised by sports.

Those ball kickin'
ball throwin'
ball hittin'
stick fools so hard they cry
for their mamas sort of sports.

I was raised by martial arts

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By Linda Christensen Illustrator: Katherine Streeter When I first read "Raised by Women" by Kelly Norman Ellis, I knew the poem would be a hit with my students. I love Ellis' celebration of the women in her life, her use of home language, and the wit and wisdom of her rhythmic lines.

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What is the School to Prison Pipeline? How do we dismantle it?

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What is the School to Prison Pipeline? How do we dismantle it?

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Georgia Appleseed Center for Law & Justice

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What is the school-to-prison pipeline? How do we dismantle it?

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SECTION FOUR- DISCIPLINE, THE SCHOOL-TO-PRISON PIPELINE, AND MASS INCARCERATION: How does “Haniyah’s Story (pp. 256-263)”deepen your understanding of what it means to teach Black students whose parents have been incarcerated? How might you teach your students using this story?

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SECTION FOUR- DISCIPLINE, THE SCHOOL-TO-PRISON PIPELINE, AND MASS INCARCERATION: How does “Haniyah’s Story (pp. 256-263)”deepen your understanding of what it means to teach Black students whose parents have been incarcerated? How might you teach your students using this story?

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In Meridian, Miss., police routinely arrest and transport youths to a juvenile detention center for minor classroom misbehaviors. In Jefferson Parish, La., according to a U.S. Department of Justice complaint, school officials have given armed police "unfettered authority to stop, frisk, detain, question, search and arrest schoolchildren on and off school grounds." In Birmingham, Ala., police officers are permanently stationed in nearly every high school.

In fact, hundreds of school districts across the country employ discipline policies that push students out of the classroom and into the criminal justice system at alarming rates-a phenomenon known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

Last month, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., held the first federal hearing on the school-to-prison pipeline-an important step toward ending policies that favor incarceration over education and disproportionately push minority students and students with disabilities out of schools and into jails.

In opening the hearing, Durbin told the subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, "For many young people, our schools are increasingly a gateway to the criminal justice system. This phenomenon is a consequence of a culture of zero tolerance that is widespread in our schools and is depriving many children of their fundamental right to an education."

A wide array of organizations-including the Southern Poverty Law Center, the NAACP and Dignity in Schools-offered testimony during the hearing. They joined representatives from the Departments of Education and Justice to shine a national spotlight on a situation viewed far too often as a local responsibility.

"We have a national problem that deserves federal action," Matthew Cregor, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, explained. "With suspension a top predictor of dropout, we must confront this practice if we are ever to end the 'dropout crisis' or the so-called achievement gap." In the words of Vermont's Sen. Patrick Leahy, "As a nation, we can do better."

What is the School-to-Prison Pipeline?

Policies that encourage police presence at schools, harsh tactics including physical restraint, and automatic punishments that result in suspensions and out-of-class time are huge contributors to the pipeline, but the problem is more complex than that.

The school-to-prison pipeline starts (or is best avoided) in the classroom. When combined with zero-tolerance policies, a teacher's decision to refer students for punishment can mean they are pushed out of the classroom-and much more likely to be introduced into the criminal justice system.

Who's in the Pipeline?

Students from two groups-racial minorities and children with disabilities-are disproportionately represented in the school-to-prison pipeline. African-American students, for instance, are 3.5 times more likely than their white classmates to be suspended or expelled, according to a nationwide study by the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights.

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Policies and practices that favor incarceration over education do us all a grave injustice.

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DISCIPLINE, THE SCHOOL-TO-PRISON PIPELINE, ANDMASS INCARCERATION - What are some things that restorative justice is not? What are some of the origins of restorative justice practices? (1999)

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DISCIPLINE, THE SCHOOL-TO-PRISON PIPELINE, ANDMASS INCARCERATION - What are some things that restorative justice is not? What are some of the origins of restorative justice practices? (1999)

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Article Read, Biggest take away, and what does it mean in our district?

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Article Read, Biggest take away, and what does it mean in our district?

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For educators who teach math or science, how can they teach social justice in their classrooms? Why is it important for teachers who don’t teach language arts?

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By Gretchen Kraig-Turner

When I think of Black Lives Matter, what comes to mind first is police brutality and the resulting lost lives of young men and women in recent times. But as a science teacher, I know that racism in the United States also has roots that extend deep into the history of medical research.

Medical apartheid, the systematic oppression and exclusion of African Americans in our healthcare systems, has existed since the time of slavery and continues today in medical offices and research universities. What care people receive, what diseases are studied, and who is included in research groups are still delineated by race.

The term medical apartheid is explained in Harriet Washington's 2007 work, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Washington documents how "diverse forms of racial discrimination have shaped both the relationship between white physicians and black patients and the attitude of the latter towards modern medicine in general."

Medical apartheid is a reality that many of my students and their families face. I teach in the only predominantly African American high school in Oregon. Being talked down to by doctors is a common experience, as is leaving the doctor's office without receiving adequate care. One of my students told us that her uncle's treatment for a heart condition was so substandard, her family sued the hospital for discrimination. Critically examining the history of medical research is a way to bring the experiences of my students and their families into the classroom, and a way to connect our study of bioethics to the often hidden history of African American men and women who fought for their dignity and rights against a medical system that treated them like lab rats.

So I begin my Research and Medicine course, a senior-level course in our Health Sciences and Biotechnology Program, with an exploration of bioethics, a theme that continues throughout all of the units. We focus on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (TSS), a chapter of scientific and medical history rarely discussed in high school. Particularly as a white educator, I am conscious that leading the school year with a unit on a deeply painful example of Black oppression needs to be done with care. is is the capstone course of the program, and I already know the students when the class starts. Without a level of trust and mutual respect already established, this unit would not be as successful. If I did not know my students well, I would wait until later in the year, after a safe space had been created. Another reason to wait is that the TSS leads to discussions about cell types (particularly types of bacteria) and epidemiology, which are typically covered later in the year.

Day one of the unit starts with me asking a simple question: "In what ways are you in control of your health and in what ways are you not in control?" I list a couple examples: "I'm in control of how often I exercise but I'm not in control of air pollution in my neighborhood." The students do a think-pair-share with the question, scribbling down answers and then sharing with their lab bench partner.

As we start to answer the question as a whole class, I write their answers on the whiteboard under the headers "In Control" and "Not in Control." Pretty quickly, someone disagrees about the appropriate header.

"One way I'm in control of my health is what food I eat," Robert says. I write "foods" under In Control.

Charene asks, "What if good food isn't available?"

Kia yells out, "Our school lunch is terrible but it's free. Is that a choice? I don't eat that junk!"

After more examples are generated, I ask: "Who does have a choice about what food they eat? Why do some people have different levels of access to doctors? How come some neighborhoods have better air quality? Why can't some people go running safely at night?"

Soon nothing in the In Control column is safe from my kids' scrutiny. We talk about each item through a social justice lens. For example, going to the doctor regularly is tied to insurance-which is tied to job and education level-and access to transportation. Exercising is linked to living in a safe neighborhood, child-care, money for gyms, air quality, and concern about what police see when a middle-aged white woman is running vs. a Black or Brown youth. The class inevitably concludes that health and healthcare are a complex mix of choice and circumstance, and that those with more social and economic power have a different level of choice.

Sade sums it up: "None of this is a choice for poor people, just for people who can buy whatever they choose, and who has that kind of money isn't always fair."
The Tuskegee Mixer
My students' insights on these intersections in our healthcare system lead into a mixer on the TSS. The TSS exemplifies how race, class, and healthcare have intersected in this country, all themes the students raised during our warm-up.

The "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male" (now formally known as the "U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee"), which began in 1932 in rural Alabama, spanned most of the 20th century. African American men with syphilis (the sexually transmitted disease or a different strain of the bacteria known as yaws) were observed, yet received no treatment. They were denied standard treatment-heavy metal treatments at first, and later penicillin-and forbidden to seek medical treatment elsewhere. The architects of the study went as far as barring the men from the World War II draft, where they would have been treated with penicillin. The study continued into the early 1970s, when a whistle-blower, fed up with trying to get the attention of his superiors, took the story to a journalist. After the article appeared, Congress held hearings that suspended the study and led to passage of the National Research Act, which includes a mandated code of ethics for research on human subjects.

"We're going to look at a time in medical history when informed consent didn't exist," I tell the students as I introduce the mixer. I give each student the role of a study subject, a doctor, a public health official, a widow, or a journalist. There are roles that show the damage inflicted, and also roles that show the resistance and whistleblowing that ultimately exposed and ended the study. For example:

Charles Pollard was a participant who later became an activist:

I am a Macon County farmer, and I started in the Tuskegee Study in the early 1930s. I recall the day in 1932 when some men came by and told me I would receive a free physical examination if I came by the one-room school near my house. So I went on over and they told me I had bad blood. . . . And that's what they've been telling me ever since.

I was at a stockyard in Montgomery, and a newspaper woman started talking to me about the study in Tuskegee. She asked me if I knew Nurse Rivers. That's how I discovered I was one of the men in the study. Once I found out how those doctors at Tuskegee used the African American men of Macon County in their study, I went to see Fred Gray. He was Rosa Parks' and Martin Luther King Jr.'s attorney. He took our case and sued the federal government for using us as guinea pigs without our consent.

Being in this study violated my rights. After I found out about the real purpose of the study, I told reporters, "All I knew was that [the doctors and nurses] just kept saying I had the bad blood-they never mentioned syphilis to me, not even once."

Other roles include Nurse Eunice Rivers and Dr. Eugene Dibble, both African Americans who worked as researchers in the study, supporting the study perhaps as a way to bring both money and prestige to Tuskegee. Roles of the white doctors who designed and orchestrated the study include upsetting quotes. For example, Dr. Thomas Murrell, an advisor to the study's leaders, said:

So the scourge sweeps among them. Those that are treated are only half cured, and the effort to assimilate into a complex civilization drives their diseased minds until the results are criminal records. Perhaps here, in conjunction with tuberculosis, will be the end of the Negro problem. Disease will accomplish what man cannot.

Once the students read, understand, and are prepared to play the person in their role sheet, I ask everyone to walk around the room, telling people who they are and learning about other participants in the drama.

Their initial curiosity quickly changes to disbelief for some and hardening anger for others. They fill out a question sheet as they meet the other characters, and then spend a few minutes reflecting on questions raised by the mixer, and what surprised, angered, or left them hopeful. "Why did they do this? What did they learn?"

"Why didn't they give the men penicillin?"

"How long did this last?"

Students start to make the connections between the study and the pre-World War II eugenics movement they studied previously. As David points out, "This is a lot like what the Nazi doctors did in Auschwitz."
Whistle-blowers
Then we transition into reading the article that brought national attention to the study. In 1966, Peter Buxtun, a U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) venereal disease investigator, tried to alert his superiors about the immorality and lack of scientific ethics of the study, but they would not listen. In 1968, William Carter Jenkins, an African American statistician at PHS, called for an end to the study in a small anti-racist newsletter he founded. Nothing changed. Finally, Buxtun went to the mainstream press, and Associated Press journalist Jean Heller broke the story in the Washington Evening Star. She begins:

Washington, July 25 [1972]-For 40 years the United States Public Health Service has conducted a study in which human beings with syphilis, who were induced to serve as guinea pigs, have gone without medical treatment for the disease and a few have died of its late effects, even though an effective therapy was eventually discovered.

Officials of the health service who initiated the experiment have long since retired. Current officials, who say they have serious doubts about the morality of the study, also say that it is too late to treat the syphilis in any surviving participants.

The students also read the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's description of syphilis, including the progression of the disease and recommended treatment, and a summary I created of other relevant information.

Then I assign some writing: Using these resources and what you learned from meeting everyone in the mixer, write a first-person testimony that could have been used at the congressional hearings that followed Heller's story. You can be the same person you portrayed in the mixer, or someone else. Explain why you think the study happened, your understanding of the disease itself, and if reparations are appropriate or not. Explain your reasons.

These are quick-writes, not final pieces, but aimed at getting students to understand the human lives behind the medical facts. Lejay writes from the perspective of a widow of one of the men in the study:

I am Ruth Fields and I became a widow during the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. My husband passed away from the effects of syphilis. . . . In the early 1920s, syphilis was a major health issue and concern. In 1932, a study was conducted of 399 men with syphilis and 201 without, the men were given occasional assessments, and were told they were being treated. In 1936, local physicians were asked to help with the study, but not treat the men, and to follow the men until death. Penicillin became a treatment option for syphilis but the men in the study couldn't receive it. . . .

I endured so much hurt, pain, and loss because of this study, and I just want everyone who was involved to be punished for their actions, because they hurt and killed and destroyed so many lives.

Shirene writes from the point of view of one of the men in the study:

I am Roy Douglas. Poor, uneducated African American men like myself experienced an outbreak of syphilis. We were sent to hospitals for having "bad blood." Doctors didn't know how the STD worked, the side effects, or the symptoms. To get the information that they needed, they used us as test dummies. Over 400 of us were denied help, medicine, and the proper treatment for years. Some men suffered from mild symptoms like rashes, then spots appeared on the surface of their skin. With time, their nerves, brains, and more shut down. . . . In 1945, penicillin was finally accepted as a treatment for syphilis.

After more than 30 years of researching, the study finally ended in 1972. I personally feel like the study was a small version of a genocide. . . . It was unnecessary and wrong to use poor, Black men as guinea pigs for experiments. Out of the whole dehumanizing study, the only positive outcome was the cure. ere should have been more rules or procedures set up to maintain the health of the sick men. No one deserves to die when there is some type of medicine to cure them. I believe that every person that lent a hand in the study should have gone to prison.

Where Do We Go from Here?
There is so much of the TSS that is hard to swallow. The sheer length-more than 40 years-is astounding for any longitudinal study, let alone one that watched men die from a brutal infection that attacks the nervous system. The fact that researchers went to great lengths to keep the men from finding out that there was a simple cure shows the purpose was not to find treatment. That the study continued throughout and after the Civil Rights Movement is perplexing and contrary to a narrative of racial equity so often spun in history books. But my students' anger is often more personal.

The students are not paranoid. The United States has a history of funding unethical studies on vulnerable populations. We read articles about similar cases in which U.S. doctors and scientists took advantage of vulnerable populations-from sterilizing female prisoners in California to infecting prisoners in Guatemala with syphilis.

It's at this point that I ask students to write up their own code for bioethical human research: If you were in charge of how and what research could be conducted, what limitations would you place? How would you define informed consent? How would you guarantee informed consent? Is anyone off limits? If not, how do you guarantee that they are not being taken advantage of by unscrupulous researchers?

After writing their own codes, I distribute copies of the Nuremberg Code and the Belmont Report. The students then write a reflection on how their codes differ and what might be missing from each of the lists: How is your code similar to the Nuremberg Code and the Belmont Report? How is it different? What did you mention that should be added to those codes?

With their bioethical codes hung in the hallway leading to my classroom and armed with the knowledge that science isn't always ethical, I give students their first major assignment of the year: a research paper on a bioethics topic of their choice.

Before we began this course with a study of the TSS, I read papers about artificially extending life or genetically modified creatures that sounded more like science fiction than real issues affecting my students and their families. But now that we begin with an exploration of bioethics rooted in the history of the TSS, the papers have become more interesting and personal. I still give the students a list of bioethics topics from the CDC website, but through conversations in class and students opening up about their own experiences, the topics have increased in relevance and student engagement. Now students write about why mortality rates of cancers are different for people of different races. They explore how U.S. scientists have engineered studies taking place in Latin America. One young woman wrote a history of gynecology in the United States, from unanesthetized surgeries of women who were enslaved through much more recent forced sterilizations of women of color. Another student wrote about medical experiments by Japanese doctors in Chinese prisoner of war camps during World War II. They now write about subjects that tomorrow's doctors and researchers need to understand in order to combat the idea that the health and healthcare of some do not matter as much as that of others.
RESOURCES Tuskegee Syphilis Study Mixer Materials [PDF]
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2016. Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs): Syphilis. cdc.gov/std/syphilis.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2016. U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee: The Tuskegee Timeline. cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm.

Tuskegee University. 2016. About the USPHS Syphilis Study.

tuskegee.edu/about_us/centers_of_excellence/bioethics_center/about_the_usphs_ syphilis_study.aspx.

Washington, Harriet. 2006. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. First Anchor Books.

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Medical Apartheid: Teaching the Tuskegee Syphilis Study

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Students in a bioethics class are horrified to learn about the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, during which African American men were denied treatment for syphilis. They draw connections to other medical injustices and write their own codes of ethics for medical research.

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What resonates with you when you read this quote? What happens when students read about the person behind the science, math, moment etc… ?

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Beyond Just a Cells Unit: Group Work Quote Analysis:                                                                           “A woman with brown skin as smooth as the back of a chocolate bar, thick long hair as strong as rope, who made sure her nails were always done, painted with bright red nail polish, was brought into the world August 1, 1920.” This sentence is not what one typically thinks of as “science writing,” and yet it captures how my students see  Henrietta.

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Beyond Just a Cells Unit: Group Work Quote Analysis:                                                                           “A woman with brown skin as smooth as the back of a chocolate bar, thick long hair as strong as rope, who made sure her nails were always done, painted with bright red nail polish, was brought into the world August 1, 1920.” This sentence is not what one typically thinks of as “science writing,” and yet it captures how my students see  Henrietta.

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What My Science Students Learned from the Story of Henrietta Lacks

By Gretchen Kraig-Turner

Illustrator: Keith Henry Brown

Every year when I distribute The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot to my biotechnology class, I am greeted with "Turner, this isn't English class!" And every year I tell my students, "I promise you: This book is going to change the way you think about science. Give it a chance."

I make this promise to my students because I know the beginning of the story will pique their interest. Skloot brilliantly describes the beginnings of both Henrietta Lacks, the woman, and HeLa, the first immortal cell line, in a way that gains the interest of a wide swath of students. Henrietta's daughter, Deborah, is quoted on the first page: "When I go to the doctor for checkups I always say my mother was HeLa. They get all excited, tell me stuff like how her cells helped make my blood pressure medicines and anti-depression pills . . . but they don't never explain more than just sayin, Yeah, your mother was on the moon, she been in nuclear bombs, and made that polio vaccine. . . . But I always thought it was strange, if our mother's cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can't afford to see no doctors? I used to get so mad. . . . But I don't got it in me no more to fight. I just want to know who my mother was."

Students who take my class out of a pure interest in science get what they came for in the descriptions of lab science and discoveries about cells and cancer. And, students who take my class because a family member or teacher said they should be in the biotech program get drawn in by family stories, the tales of Henrietta being shuffled around amongst family members and her children growing up without a mother - all with the ease of reading a well-told, captivating story. And students who have not seen themselves in science history hear the voices and stories of Black women front and center - sometimes for the first time - from the very beginning of this book.

When students come back the second day after getting the book, they are excited, saying: "OK, this book is alright" and "I didn't think I'd like it this much" and "She's Black?" and "Wait, her cells are still alive?"

Rebecca Skloot was a high school student at an alternative school in Portland, Oregon, when she first heard a story about a Black woman whose cells have immeasurably changed our understanding of the very basics of biology. Skloot was taking a community college course when an instructor mentioned Henrietta Lacks during a lecture on cell division. He told the class that Henrietta's cells had led to great discoveries, that her cells continued to live decades after her death in labs around the world, that her cells were the first to do this, to be immortal, and he told the class she was Black. At that point, this was about all that the scientific community really knew of Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose cancer cells, which grow and divide very quickly and remain a laboratory staple today, would be used to add volumes to our understanding of cells, genetics, and a host of other fundamental areas of science. Skloot remained curious about Ms. Lacks as a person, and went on to write a book that told the story of Henrietta, her family, and how the cells came into the hands of doctors, scientists, and Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951.

Skloot's book on Henrietta Lacks is a fascinating account of her previously hidden story. The writing expertly weaves the journey of the Lacks family's tireless work to uncover the story of Henrietta's cells with both scientific and African American history. The basic narrative is that Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman from Baltimore, sought care for cervical cancer in a segregated hospital, and in the process of doing so, white doctors and scientists took her cancer cells with dubious consent, believing that the patients of the "colored ward" were essentially trading being research subjects for health care. The impacts of this incident specifically, and inequalities in health care more generally, affected Henrietta's children and grandchildren immensely. The importance of her cells to the scientific community cannot be overstated, and yet the Lacks family never saw any of the money generated from the innumerable discoveries from the cells. Henrietta's descendants struggled with poverty, including battles with getting proper health care, and were left in the dark - the consent forms then were rudimentary, at best - about what doctors and scientists both took and found. One can infer that had Henrietta been white with more resources, either her cells would never have been taken in the first place or her family would have received recognition for their mother's profound contribution to science.

The book combines the science behind why her cells are so important with personal narrative in a unique way. As a science teacher in the only majority African American high school in Oregon, I thought my students would find the story an engaging way to learn about cells (particularly cell growth and cancer), how research protocols have evolved over the last 100 years, and about the intersections of institutionalized racism and biomedical history. We typically spend about six weeks on the book, and the richness of the story, both in science content and my students' ability to relate to the Lacks family, make this relatively long unit worthwhile.
Reading the Book to Teach the Book
Before reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, I had never considered using a book that more resembles a novel than an academic science text in my classes. I initially thought we could maybe read a section of the book before doing some more serious work on how cells grow. The story would be a small feature of a cell unit, not cells being a section of a book unit. But, after reading the book, I couldn't pick out just one section or one passage and contain the powerful story to a mere sidenote to a cell unit.

As a science teacher, I had no idea how to teach books - this wasn't ever addressed in our pedagogy courses, nor did I have examples from other science teachers of how to do this. I wanted the process to be familiar to my students, so I worked with English teachers at my school to learn how they taught books. I learned how to do dialogue journals and teach students to take notes with a final paper in mind. When I read the book, I thought about what I would do if I were asked to write a paper on the story, and I picked several themes: Medical Apartheid (a term coined by Harriet Washington to describe racial inequity in health care), Informed Consent, Lab Science, and Scientific Discoveries. Then I re-read the book, this time keeping a dialogue journal with quotes on one side and my comments on the other. I divided my notebook into five sections with the themes listed above and a fifth one titled "Family." I created discussion questions for each chapter and found supplemental readings about cell culturing, cancer growth, and rights to one's own tissues and genetic codes (in subsequent years, the amount of supplemental articles on Henrietta exploded and this became easier). I also kept an eye out for when I could do labs alongside the reading to bring to life what the scientists did in the book.

As the unit developed over the years, more research has come out about Henrietta's cells, including bioethical violations such as publishing the genetic code of HeLa (which was a violation of her family's rights to their own genetic codes). Continuing to monitor the New York Times science section (where Rebecca Skloot has published updates to the initial narrative, including "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the Sequel" in 2013) helps tremendously with making sure the supplemental readings I give my students are current.

Other supplemental materials stemmed from students wanting to know more about the examples of medical apartheid discussed in the book. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, a long-term study conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service on untreated syphilis in Black men that went on decades after the cure was found, is referenced several times throughout the book, but the most chilling descriptions of how African American people were treated comes in a chapter called "Night Doctors." This chapter outlines much of why African American people have reasons to distrust the medical establishment and includes stories of enslaved people being used for "gruesome research," Black people being kidnapped off the streets to be used in medical studies and as cadavers, and more recent studies looking for genes that could predict criminal behavior by studying Black families. Dr. Harriet Washington's book Medical Apartheid is an excellent resource for students wishing to learn more, as is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's website on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
Cell Culture
Cell culturing is central to the beginning of the book. Scientists tried for decades to grow human cells outside of the human body before finding Henrietta's immortal cells. While we obviously can't grow human cells in the classroom, the process of even much more basic cell culturing was new to my students. I designed a lab on yeast culturing, a eukaryotic cell often used in genetics experiments, that we did as we read about the first ventures of human cell culture. The lab was a simple exploration into how to maximize growth and minimize contamination. And the supplies to do such labs are actually relatively inexpensive. I used baker's yeast from the grocery store for my cell source, and ordered basic petri dishes and a yeast-peptone-dextrose (YPD) media. Students made a media with 25g of YPD and 10-15g of agar per liter of distilled water and poured this into the petri dishes, which then sat overnight to solidify. We mixed a small amount of the yeast with table sugar in warm water (just as you'd do when baking bread) and then poured that mixture onto the plates. We grew the yeast at both room temperature (25 C) and in an incubator at 37 C (human body temperature). When growth didn't occur or contamination from bacteria took over the yeast growth, I tell my students, "These issues are the same as what the scientists in the book faced. This is real science." We work to problem-solve the issues and compare growth at different temperatures. We also discuss how contamination occurs and why sterile environments are so important. I ask, "Why do you think contamination can occur if we keep the lid open too long?" or "How come yeast grows best at body temperature instead of room temperature?"
Teaching About Cancer
As we continued to read the book, I found that students needed to know more about cancer and what happens when the mechanisms of the cell cycle go awry. My students had a lot of questions: "Why can't the scientists use any of her cells? Why only the cancer ones?" I answer that "Only the cancer ones have the mutation that causes the cells to divide uncontrollably." Another student, Ny'osha, wanted to know "If Deborah (her daughter) gets cancer, will those cells be immortal too?" "Not necessarily," I responded. "This could depend on if her cancer was purely genetic or due to viruses." And Marti, somewhat indignantly, wanted to know "If her husband hadn't been messing around, would Henrietta have even gotten that cancer?" "Probably not!" I answered. "Let's talk about oncoviruses!"

The first year I taught this unit I did a review on mitosis and then directed my students to the National Institutes of Health's websites on cancer. Each student did a worksheet on mitosis and wrote a generalized summary of how cancer works. Henrietta's cancer was more robust than most cancers, the vast majority of which would not survive outside the human body. The disruptions to the cell cycle that her cancer caused are representative of many cancers and it's important for the students to understand how cancer cells generally differ from healthy cells. For the last few years of teaching this unit, I also use an article titled "UW researchers report on genome of aggressive cervical cancer that killed Henrietta Lacks" and show a PowerPoint on HPV and cervical cancer by Lydia Breen and Rebecca Veilleux from an MIT/HHMI Summer Teacher Institute.

My students write short responses to questions such as: What was the "perfect storm" that went wrong in Henrietta's cervical cells? What is a haplotype and what unique information does it give scientists? Why was publishing Henrietta's genome problematic for her family? Why must participants give materials (like cells) for research to occur? Explain the relationship between telomeres and cancer cells' immortality.
Bioethical Issues
The cell culturing and cancer portions take up about the first four of the six-week unit. I teach these as short units that cover basic reviews of cell function and division. As well as diving deeper into those subjects, we set aside time to have discussions around the bioethical questions raised in the book. Discussions take place as a whole class and in small reading groups that I establish when we first start the book. The reading groups meet weekly and discuss a set of questions (some of which are from Random House's Teacher Guide) for each section. I write out the questions and give them to the students before they read the corresponding chapter. In these groups, the students are able to relate the science they learned in class to the Lacks family story. The book details Henrietta's life, from being raised, along with her cousins, by her grandfather after losing her mother at age 4, to having five children with one of these cousins. Her life started on a tobacco farm in rural Virginia and ended in Baltimore.

While Henrietta is most famous for her immortal cells, my students relate to her on a human level. One student, Asianique Savage, opened her final essay with: "A woman with brown skin as smooth as the back of a chocolate bar, thick long hair as strong as rope, who made sure her nails were always done, painted with bright red nail polish, was brought into the world August 1, 1920." This sentence is not what one typically thinks of as "science writing," and yet it captures how my students see Henrietta.

Deborah Lacks, Henrietta's youngest daughter, is a central character in the book. Her anger at losing her mother and not fully understanding the science behind why her mom is so famous creates some tension throughout the book. In response to the question "What does Deborah mean when she says (p. 235), 'I do want to go see them cells, but I'm not ready yet'?" Keisha said that she sees "why Deborah is always so mad and she's stressed all the time. She doesn't have her mom, the doctors disrespect her and her family, and they're poor while all those people make money off of drug patents. She didn't even really know what a cell was, let alone why her mother's were still alive. It's complicated for her."

Through the story of the Lacks family, my students are also able to explore the deeper questions of how race intersects with medical history as a whole. Questions like: "Describe HL's medical history. Why do you think she cancelled appointments, stopped treatments, and refused tests?" "How were HL's tissues obtained? Did she consent? Does it matter?" and "Why did the doctors in the '50s use patients from public wards for research?" were designed to get students to think about how Henrietta, as a Black woman, could have been fearful of going to the hospital. Henrietta's distrust in medical institutions is still seen today in Black culture as described by Vann R. Newkirk II in a 2016 article in The Atlantic titled "A Generation of Bad Blood":

Research has long suggested that the ill effects of the Tuskegee Study extend beyond those men and their families to the greater whole of Black culture. Black patients consistently express less trust in their physicians and the medical system than white patients, are more likely to believe medical conspiracies, and are much less likely to have common, positive experiences in health-care settings. These have all been connected to misgivings among Black patients about Tuskegee and America's long history of real medical exploitation of Black people.

My students understand this at a personal level: "They would never take the cells from a white woman like that," claims Ty. "But look at what was accomplished with them. They shoulda asked her and gotten her permission though," adds Aliyah. Near the end of the book, I ask my students, "Do the scientists owe the Lacks family anything? Does the lack of consent impact your thoughts on reparations to the family?" Many of my students wrestled with this question as part of their final paper.
The Culminating Paper
Once we are about two-thirds through the book, I have the students start to work on their final papers. The students' composition books were divided into the same categories that are choices for their final papers: Medical Apartheid, Informed Consent, Lab Science, Scientific Discoveries, and a fifth category, Family, as this theme is so critical to the story that my students could not write any paper without including the story of the Lacks family. As they read the book they jotted down their notes in these five sections, and for most students, one of the categories eventually emerged as the one they are most interested in. This category was then the students' focus as they finished the book. We use class time for writing the five- to 10-page final paper, and I encourage students to utilize their reading groups - and me - to go through outlines and drafts.

Many students pick one of the first two themes: Informed Consent and Medical Apartheid. This speaks to how my students related and were interested in the parts of the book that spoke directly to racial biases in medical care and research.

The criteria for these themes are prescribed in my directions to the students. Each section has four to five content-based criteria. Many of my students are not used to writing papers that blend both academic and conversational voices, and I have noticed that without content-specific criteria, my students tend to leave the science out of the science papers!

I have found the students are much more comfortable deeply explaining the family issues and generalizing the science content. But the papers that are written using the content-based criteria sheets reflect the understanding of the undeniable contributions to science from using Henrietta Lacks' cells with the perspective and acknowledgement that the matriarch of an African American family is at the very center of these scientific advances and discussions.

Here is an excerpt from Desiree' DuBoise's paper:

The misuse of Henrietta Lacks' cells, as well as the mistreatment of her family, was unethical. A big reason for the lack of information given to the Lacks family about the use of Henrietta's cells was the fact that there was no precedent for how to go about using and profiting from cell research; it hadn't been done before. The fact that the cells came from a poor Black woman only heightened the unlikelihood of doctors and researchers taking time out to meet the needs of the family (Johns Hopkins). The name of the owner of the cells went unknown for decades. The HeLa cells were thought to belong to either Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane, or Helen Larson (Skloot, 1). Many have wondered why none of Henrietta's family recognized her picture in articles written or knew about the studies using her cells. The Lacks family was poor and Black and living in the South; most of them had no more than a middle school education, so they wouldn't have had access to articles and journals that were talking about the use of Henrietta's cells.

Giving the cells a name and a story validated my students in a way that is not often seen in our science classrooms. Black students are frequently pushed out of classrooms in a multitude of ways; we need to seek ways to bring Black students' voices into every subject, and particularly into STEM classes where Black students are underrepresented. Terri Watson, in an Education Week web series on "Black Girls and School Discipline," said, "I think Black girls are seen as either invisible or they're problematized." Henrietta Lacks and the story of her cells exemplifies both. As a Black woman, Henrietta was separated into the "colored ward" of the hospital where her cells were seen as payment for her health care, and her cells were identified as hers only after decades of invisibility. Dedicating significant time to learn the story of a Black woman to whom biomedical research owes a great deal was time well spent. What we learned was more than the sum of Henrietta's story and the science content of the book.

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A science teacher includes Black voices and Black history in her classroom by building curriculum around The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. In doing so, she shows how nonfiction books should not be relegated to language arts but can be effective in a science classroom.

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What resonated with you? What would you change about the lesson? What would you use?

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Teaching SNCC By: Adam Sanchez (p.123-131)

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Teaching SNCC By: Adam Sanchez (p.123-131)

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By Adam Sanchez

Illustrator: Danny Lyon (Magnum)

"That's the problem with Black Lives Matter! We need a strong leader like Martin Luther King!" Tyriq shouted as I wrote King's name on the board.

I started my unit on the Civil Rights Movement by asking my high school students to list every person or organization they knew was involved. They replied with several familiar names: Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Emmett Till. Occasionally a student knew an organization: the NAACP or the Black Panther Party.

"Has anyone ever heard of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee?" I asked while writing the acronym on the board.

"S-N-C-C?" students sounded out as my black expo marker moved across the whiteboard.

"Have you ever heard of the sit-ins?" I prodded.

"Yeah, weren't they in Alabama?" Matt answered.

"No, Mississippi! Four students sat down at a lunch counter, right?" Kadiatou proudly declared.

This is usually the extent of my students' prior knowledge of SNCC, one of the organizations most responsible for pushing the Civil Rights Movement forward. Without the history of SNCC at their disposal, students think of the Civil Rights Movement as one that was dominated by charismatic leaders and not one that involved thousands of young people like themselves. Learning the history of how young students risked their lives to build a multigenerational movement against racism and for political and economic power allows students to draw new conclusions about the lessons of the Civil Rights Movement and how to apply them to today.
You Are Members of SNCC
Pedagogically based on Rethinking Schools editor Bill Bigelow's abolitionist role play, and drawing content from the voices of SNCC veterans and the scholarship of Howard Zinn, Clayborne Carson, and other historians, I created a series of role plays where students imagined themselves as SNCC members. In their roles, students debated key questions the organization faced while battling Jim Crow. My hope was that by role-playing the moments in SNCC's history where activists made important decisions, students would gain a deeper understanding of how the movement evolved, what difficulties it faced, and most importantly, an understanding that social movements involve ordinary people taking action, but also discussing and debating a way forward.

I taught the role play in my U.S. history class at Madison High School in Portland, Oregon, and more recently in a course about the Civil Rights Movement at Harvest Collegiate High School in New York City. Both schools serve a diverse mix of Black, Latina/o, Asian, and white students - unusual examples of diversity for both public school districts. They also house a large population of students who come from low-income families.

To introduce the role play, I created a handout that situates students in the role of an SNCC member through providing background on what led up to the formation of SNCC. Before reading the handout out loud as a class, I told students they would be writing from the role of an SNCC member and should highlight any information - particularly about historical events - they might want to include. The role begins with historical background:

In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Boynton v. Virginia, and several other court cases, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled Jim Crow segregation unconstitutional. But from movie theaters to swimming pools, parks to restaurants, buses to schools, almost every aspect of public life in the South remains segregated.

In 1955, 50,000 African Americans in Montgomery (Alabama's second-largest city) participated in a boycott to end segregation of the city buses. . . . But after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the movement struggled to move forward. Segregationists launched a massive campaign of terror that prevented further gains. . . . While the protests of the 1950s gave you a sense of pride and power, it increasingly became clear that larger, more dramatic actions would be necessary to break the back of Jim Crow. You were prepared to act and you were not alone.

The handout continues by discussing the initial sit-ins that spread quickly across the South and led to the formation of SNCC. After reading about the sit-ins and SNCC's founding conference in April of 1960, we quickly moved on to another crucial event that shaped SNCC's early history: the Freedom Rides.
Freedom Rider Letter
To introduce the Freedom Rides, I edited together two clips from the PBS documentary Freedom Riders. The first part introduces students to the concept of the Freedom Rides, a series of bus trips organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) though the South to protest segregation in interstate travel facilities. The clip also takes students through the burning of one Greyhound bus in Anniston, Alabama, and the attack on the Freedom Riders in a second bus by a white mob in Birmingham.

The second part reveals that after the violence in Birmingham, the first round of Freedom Riders decided to fly to New Orleans and head home. It then turns to the Nashville students in SNCC who decided they couldn't let the Freedom Rides end in failure. As SNCC leader Diane Nash explains in the video:

If we allowed the Freedom Ride to stop at that point, just after so much violence had been inflicted, the message would have been sent that all you have to do to stop a nonviolent campaign is inflict massive violence. It was critical that the Freedom Ride not stop, and that it be continued immediately.

After the clip, I tell students that to get in the role of an SNCC member, they will be writing letters to their parents as if they were planning to join the Freedom Rides. Together we read a short assignment that reiterates some of the basic facts about the Freedom Rides and gives them more information about what to write: "Describe for your parents the experiences that led you to risk your life in order to end segregation in the South. You can choose your gender, your race, your age, your social class, and the region where you grew up. Give yourself a name and a history. Be imaginative. In vivid detail, tell the story of the events that made you who you are now: a Freedom Rider." While in reality, many Freedom Riders chose not to tell their parents, this activity allows students to think through what makes someone willing to take great risks for a just cause.

Whether giving this assignment as homework or giving students in-class time to work on it, I often get back incredible letters. Marquandre wrote passionately about why he felt the need to join:

Dear Mom and Dad,

I have made the decision to join the Freedom Riders. I know it's a big risk, but I feel I need to do this. I'm sure you've heard about the bus that was burned in Anniston and the attack on the Freedom Riders in Birmingham. We can't let this violence be the end. We need to show them that their violence can't stop our fight.

Now I know you'll be angry with me for dropping out of school to join the Freedom Rides. I really appreciate all you have done for me, and how hard you worked to get me to college. But seeing you work so hard for so little is why I'm doing this. I remember how you worked 10 or 12 hours a day just to pay the bills and put food on the table for me and my sisters.

I know you wanted a better future for me. But I've heard that nearly all of last year's graduates fell short of their dreams to be doctors, lawyers, journalists, and so on. They say "knowledge is power," but what's the point of an education when I'm still going to end up in a low-wage job because I'm Black? I want Lily and Diana to know that their brother fought for their future. I want my children to grow up in a country where segregation doesn't exist. . . . If not now, when? This is our time.

After students finished working, I had them read their letters to each other in pairs or small groups. Sometimes I asked the class to form a circle and read each letter aloud one by one. I was never disappointed when I took the time to do this. It helps students gain a deeper connection to their roles and creates a rich aural portrait of a social movement.
Organizing Mississippi
When students finished sharing their letters, we watched the movie Freedom Song. Freedom Song is an indispensable film that gives a gripping narrative based on SNCC's first voter registration project in McComb, Mississippi. I've found that the film helps give students a deep visual understanding of SNCC's organizing efforts that grounds the role play that follows. While watching Freedom Song, I asked students to pay attention to what leadership looks like in SNCC and how SNCC makes decisions. I also point out that in the last scenes of the film, some of the students from the local community where SNCC was organizing join SNCC and move to organize other parts of the state, while others stay behind and maintain the voter registration classes that SNCC began. In other words, as the best organizers do, SNCC organized themselves out of a job - they built a local movement that not only could sustain itself once they left, but could also help spread the movement to other parts of the state.

Next I distributed a handout containing three key questions that SNCC debated during their fight for racial justice in Mississippi:

1. Should SNCC focus its efforts on voter registration or direct action?

2. Should SNCC bring a thousand mostly white volunteers to Mississippi? If so, should SNCC limit the role of white volunteers?

3. Should SNCC workers carry guns? If not, should SNCC allow or seek out local people to defend its organizers with guns?

Each question is accompanied with some historical context that helps students understand why this has become a debated question within SNCC, as well as short arguments for both sides. Here's an example from the handout:

Situation: While SNCC has always been a Black-led, majority-Black organization, there has always been a small number of white SNCC members. But Northern white students have been increasingly getting involved. At SNCC's 1963 conference, one-third of the participants were white. Some staff members are now proposing to bring 1,000 mostly white students from all around the United States to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 to help with voter registration efforts. This plan has sparked discussion in SNCC on the role of whites in the movement.

Question: Should SNCC bring 1,000 mostly white volunteers to Mississippi? If so, should SNCC limit the role of white volunteers?

Arguments: Some Black SNCC members are concerned that instead of Black volunteers helping to build local leadership to organize their own communities, whites tend to take over leadership roles in the movement, preventing Southern Blacks from getting the support they need to lead. Many Northern whites enter SNCC with skills and an education that allow them to dominate discussions. If SNCC does decide to bring down white volunteers, these organizers insist that white activists should focus on organizing the Southern white community. After all, isn't it the racism in white communities that is the biggest barrier to Black progress? Other SNCC members argue that too many local activists have been murdered for trying to organize and vote and the majority of the nation will only care when their white sons and daughters are in harm's way. Bringing student volunteers from all around the country will mean increased attention on Mississippi's racist practices from the family and friends of the volunteers, as well as the media. This spotlight might force the federal government to protect civil rights workers and Blacks in Mississippi trying to register to vote. In addition, some local organizers argue that if we're trying to break down the barrier of segregation, we can't segregate ourselves. Moreover, Black people are a minority in the United States and can't change things alone.

I gave students the handout the class period before the actual role play and asked them to jot down initial answers to each question for homework. This is especially helpful for students who don't feel as comfortable speaking in class discussion or who take longer to process their thoughts.

I explained to students that we would run our meetings in the same manner that SNCC ran meetings. We would choose a chair to call on other students and try to reach informal consensus. I echoed what I was told by SNCC veteran Judy Richardson: "Each one of us is putting our lives on the line, so we want to try to make sure that we come to a decision that we all feel comfortable with." Once we chose a facilitator (or one for each question), I concluded with another insight I learned from Richardson: "Now the last thing you need to know about how SNCC ran meetings is that if things got really heated, someone would start singing and then others would just join in to remind everyone what they meant to each other and all they'd been through together. So, I'm going to teach you a song that they might have sung, and if our discussion at any point gets really contentious, we can sing to remind us that we are all in this together." I sang for students "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around," and encouraged them to sing with me the second and third round. This was a little out of my comfort zone as a teacher, and singing in a social studies class can be out of students' comfort zone, but it became an essential and beautiful part of the role play. In addition to when the debate got heated, we sang the song to refocus after a lockdown drill, and I even heard a few students singing it in the hallways after class.
Students Run Their Own Meeting
To start the role play students sat in a circle. I encouraged them to read the entire question out loud - including the situation and the arguments - before jumping into each debate. This way, students who weren't present when I gave out the questions or who didn't have a chance to read them for homework could still participate in the discussions. Students ran the debate, though occasionally I did jump in to the discussion to play devil's advocate, ensure they were taking all sides seriously, or re-emphasize the historical context that had provoked the question they were debating. When I did jump in, I always did so as an equal - raising my hand and waiting to be called on by the student facilitator. In general, I've been blown away by the seriousness and passion students bring to these discussions. Here's a sample from our class debate on the first question: Should SNCC focus its efforts on voter registration or direct action?

Dwell: I think we should focus on voter registration because if we had some sort of political power we could take out the racist politicians.

Jade: I disagree. I think direct action is more useful. We've seen that the Brown v. Board decision didn't actually desegregate schools. It took direct action. Action moves things forward faster and we want change now.

Giorgio: I agree with Dwell, focusing on voter registration is going to create a permanent change that will come from the government, not just changes in a few small places.

Rachel: But at the end of the day, it was the protests that pushed the government to make new laws. And isn't it suspicious that the Kennedys are saying they will help us secure funds if we focus on voter registration? Whose side are they on? Do they just want these new voters to vote for them?

Shona: I see voter registration as direct action. As we saw in Freedom Song, SNCC members get beaten up whether they are doing sit-ins or voter registration. Both are forms of nonviolent disobedience. Why can't we focus on both?

The time frame for the debates has varied depending on the pacing of class discussions and how much wiggle room I had built into the unit, but it has always taken at least one or two class periods. As we go, I have students jot down the decisions the class made, whether they agreed or disagreed with those decisions, and why.

When students finished debating the last question, I gave them a short reading adapted from several sources that explains how these debates played out in reality. Naturally, after debating the questions themselves, students were eager to know "what really happened." Either for homework or as a debrief in class, I asked students to compare the decisions we made in class with SNCC's ultimate decisions on those topics, write about what decision they found most interesting or surprising, and think about how SNCC's experience in Mississippi changed the organization. While most students tended to agree with the decisions SNCC made, debating these questions as a class allowed them to look at the decisions more critically and not see them as inevitable. Imari wrote: "While SNCC chose not to limit the role of white volunteers I disagree with this decision. In class we discussed how white college students would tend to dominate discussions and reinforce Southern Blacks' sense of inferiority. While I agree with SNCC that they shouldn't segregate Black and white SNCC members, I think they could have placed some limits on white volunteers."

Adeola's comments about how organizing in Mississippi transformed SNCC were particularly insightful: "I think SNCC members felt like they couldn't be safe without being armed. They would get violently attacked by whites for trying to get the most basic things like the right to vote. They probably began to see nonviolence as more of a tactic than a policy."

After debriefing the role play, we watched part of an Eyes on the Prize episode that covers Freedom Summer [season 1, episode 5, Mississippi: Is This America?], when more than 1,000 volunteers joined SNCC organizers to dramatically increase voter registration in Mississippi. We also learned how during the summer, activists form the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party at the Democratic National Convention of 1964. The organizing involved in creating the MFDP was tremendous, full of valuable lessons, and worth spending time on in the classroom. I've often used Teaching for Change's phenomenal lesson " Sharecroppers Challenge U.S. Apartheid " to cover this complicated effort with students.
Case Studies in Organizing Alabama
After learning about Freedom Summer, we return to the role play. Students are again seated in a circle and run their own meeting. This time, however, I split the class into three circles - groups large enough to still have a diverse group of vocal peers and small enough that they could get through questions a bit quicker. Armed with background about SNCC's work in Mississippi, I wanted to move student discussions away from SNCC's internal and more philosophical debates and toward more concrete problem-solving that happens during an organizing campaign.

I chose two "case studies" that further draw out SNCC's history and unique contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. The first case study looks at the famous 1965 voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, from the perspective of SNCC. Several of my students had seen the movie Selma, but even for them, looking at the campaign through the eyes of SNCC was a new experience. I started with a short reading that gave students background about SNCC's long work in Selma and the new campaign launched by Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The reading explains the difference between the two organizations' organizing methods: "SNCC projects emphasize the development of grassroots organizations headed by local people. SNCC organizers work, eat, and sleep in a community - for years, if necessary - and attempt to slowly develop a large local leadership that can carry on the struggle eventually without SNCC field staff. . . . The SCLC led local communities into nonviolent confrontations with segregationists and the brutal cops and state police who backed up Jim Crow laws. They hoped to bring national media attention to local struggles and force the federal government to intervene to support civil rights activists."

I explained to students why I've put them in multiple circles, have each circle pick their own facilitator, and hand out five "problem-solving" questions SNCC faced during the Selma campaign. In their circles, students debate and decide on answers to the five questions. Some of the questions ask students to decide whether they should support the efforts of the SCLC, while others are more open-ended and require students to come up with creative solutions. Here's a short excerpt from one student discussion on whether SNCC should support the 50-mile nonviolent march from Selma to Montgomery that will go through some of the most violent areas of Alabama:

Aris: No, no, no! First, it's a 50-mile march! Then King's going to take them through these violent racist places. And he's nonviolent, so that means that if they want to snatch our people up, we're gonna have to let them!

Nakiyah: But King brings a lot of publicity with him. You think they are going to attack us while the cameras are on us?

Aris: It's a 50-mile march. The cameras can't be on us all the time.

Elian: But the troopers just shot a protester, we have to respond in some way and we're stronger if we respond with King.

After students finish debating the questions, we read what really happened in a short excerpt I adapted from Clayborne Carson's In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Students often leave this case study a little frustrated with King's actions in Selma - a stark difference to how students feel after watching the movie, Selma. Aris commented, "The first march he wasn't there. The second march he's there, but turns it around. What's up with this guy?" In our debrief discussion, we return to the philosophical differences between SNCC and SCLC to answer this. I point out to students that at least in this instance, the SCLC's strategy worked and the Voting Rights Act was introduced out of the crisis in Selma. But my student Francisco would not let SCLC off the hook: "But they came in after SNCC had been working in Selma for two years. So who's to say SNCC's strategy didn't work?" The point of this case study is not to answer these questions for students - but to get them to grapple with different organizing models for social change.

The next day we started on the second case study, which takes students through the SNCC organizing campaign in Lowndes County, Alabama. The format is identical to the previous day's, so students come ready to dive in. One question asks students how SNCC will respond to increasing white terror. Another question, set after the Voting Rights Act, asks students now that most official barriers to Blacks voting have come down, should people vote for the Democratic Party? Especially given that Alabama's Democrats have a slogan that touts "white supremacy?"

In addition to the voting rights campaign in Lowndes, the debrief reading for this case study takes students through the birth of the original Black Panther Party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), and their impressive showing in the 1966 elections. In less than two years, Lowndes County went from a place that had not one registered Black voter to a model of independent Black organization that others aimed to emulate across the country.
Why Learn SNCC?
Probably the most important part of SNCC's legacy is not its nonviolent direct action tactics, but its base-building through community organizing. SNCC was influenced by the communities in which they organized, just as SNCC influenced them. The debates throughout SNCC's various organizing campaigns reflect this relationship with the communities in which they organized. Playing out these debates in the classroom shows students that social movements aren't only about protest - but also about tactics, strategy, and the ability to hold a debate and move forward together. Tracking SNCC's ideological transformation can also help highlight how social movements can quickly radicalize, as what seemed impossible only a few years before is made possible through protest and organization.

Too often, the experience of SNCC is ignored when we teach the history of the Civil Rights Movement. Instead, the movement is often taught with a focus on prominent movement leaders. The "Rosa sat and Martin dreamed" narrative not only trivializes the role of these activists, it robs us of the deeper history of the Civil Rights Movement. It's not enough for students to simply learn about the sit-ins or Freedom Rides. SNCC's organizing campaigns need to be at the center of civil rights curriculum. In today's racist world, students need to grasp that social change does not simply occur by finding the right tactic to implement - or waiting around for a strong leader to emerge - but through slow, patient organizing that empowers oppressed communities. This crucial lesson of the Civil Rights Movement will help us plot a course for our movements today - and may help students imagine playing a role in those movements. As my student Nakiyah wrote me in her final course evaluation, "Learning about SNCC was so interesting because SNCC was so effective. Knowing that the racism they experienced still exists in a similar but different way today made me want to make a change and gather my generation to fight."
Resource
For Adam Sanchez's SNCC handout and role play, go here: http://bit.ly/2ihBTwa

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Teaching SNCC: The Organization at the Heart of the Civil Rights Revolution

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Teaching the history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee helps students see the Civil Rights Movement as being fueled by thousands of young people like themselves instead of a few charismatic leaders. "Without the history of SNCC at their disposal, students think of the Civil Rights Movement as one that was dominated by charismatic leaders and not one that involved thousands of young people like themselves.

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What is something you just learned that you didn’t already know?

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Claiming and Teaching the 1963 March on Washington (p.132-136)

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Claiming and Teaching the 1963 March on Washington (p.132-136)

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By Bill Fletcher Jr.
August 28 will mark the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Publicly associated with Dr. King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech, this march brought more than 250,000 people to the nation's capital. The day went down in history as a powerful show of force against Jim Crow segregation. Over time this great event has risen to levels of near mythology. The powerful speech by Dr. King, replayed, in part, for us every January on Martin Luther King Day, has eclipsed all else-so much so that too many people believe that the March on Washington was entirely the work of Dr. King. It is also barely remembered that the March on Washington was for freedom and jobs.

In fact, The Americans, a high school history text by publishing giant Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, tells students that the march was called simply "to persuade Congress to pass the [1963 civil rights] bill." In reality, the demand for jobs was not a throwaway line designed to get trade union support. Instead it reflected the growing economic crisis affecting black workers.

Indeed, while Dr. King was a major player, the March on Washington did not begin as a classic civil rights march and was not initiated by him. There is one constituency that can legitimately claim the legacy of the march-one that has been eclipsed in both history as well as in much of the lead-up to the August 2013 commemorations: black labor.

Initiated by A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the march became a joint project with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Randolph and other black labor leaders, particularly those grouped around the Negro American Labor Council, were responding to the fact that the black worker was largely being ignored in the discussions about civil rights. In addition, the economic situation was becoming complicated terrain for black workers.

As historian Nancy MacLean has pointed out, the elements of what came to be known as deindustrialization-which was really part of a reorganization of global capitalism-were beginning to have an effect in the United States, even in 1963. As with most other disasters, it started with a particular and stark impact on black America.

It is also barely remembered that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee played a key role in the event. The civil rights leadership insisted that the militant rhetoric of the original speech by SNCC's then-chairman John Lewis-now Congressman John Lewis-be toned down. Reading U.S. history textbooks, students are seldom even introduced to the words of Lewis or other speakers. Here is Pearson's U.S. history textbook coverage:

"Many people, including Christian and Jewish religious leaders, gave speeches that day, but none moved the crowd as did King. His voice rang as he proclaimed, 'l have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skins but the content of their character.'"

Teaching about the March on Washington presents a series of challenges precisely because it involves counteracting sanitized textbooks and demythologizing not only the march, but also the Black Freedom Struggle-the Civil Rights Movement, as it became known. As such, there are a few points that cannot be overlooked if we want to honor the march's true story:
1. The context.
The idea for the march in 1963 did not appear out of nowhere, and the fact that A. Philip Randolph originated it was no accident. The notion of the March on Washington in 1963 was, in certain respects, the revival of an idea from 1941 when Randolph convened a group to plan a march on Washington, D.C. to protest the segregation of the growing war industry. That march, which was planned as a black march on Washington, never happened because the mere threat of 100,000 African Americans marching forced President Franklin Roosevelt to give in to the demand for an executive order bringing about formal desegregation of the war industry.
2. The actual march was the result of work that began in the 1950s.
Although conceptualized by Randolph, the march was actually the result of the increasing tempo of a social movement. It could not have been organized in a little more than six months-as it was-if it had not been connected to local organizing that had gone on for decades in NAACP youth councils, churches, unions, women's groups, and more. It was not individuals who chartered buses from all over the country-it was organizations.
3. The march's principal organizer was Bayard Rustin.
This year President Obama will posthumously award Bayard Rustin the Medal of Freedom, however teaching about Rustin complicates the simplistic Civil Rights narrative offered to students by corporate history textbooks. Rustin was a gay pacifist with a long history of organizing, but despite his record of achievements, homophobia led to him being denied the title of national director of the march-technically, he served under Randolph.

Rustin closed the march with a list of demands and had everyone pledge "that I will not relax until victory is won." He was a complicated character who remained in organized labor and became a mentor to many, especially to younger activists in the burgeoning gay rights movement. At the same time, he refused to later condemn the Vietnam War and was critical of the Black Power Movement.
4. The march was controversial on many levels within the Black Freedom Movement.
Individuals, such as Malcolm X, were critical of it, albeit in a contradictory manner, claiming that it would not amount to anything. And there were those within the march who, like then-SNCC chairman John Lewis, wanted a more militant posture.
5. The economic situation for African Americans was not addressed in any fundamental manner in the aftermath of the march.
There were periodic improvements, but the crisis that Randolph and the NALC saw brewing in the early 1960s took on the features of a catastrophe by the mid to late 1970s, a fact that we have been living with ever since. Divorcing "civil rights" from economic justice is a feature common to mainstream approaches to history, including those found in school curricula.
6. The entirety of Dr. King's August 28, 1963 address should be read.
What comes across is something very different from the morally righteous and tame "I Have a Dream!" clips and textbook soundbites usually offered around the time of Dr. King's birthday. In fact, the speech is a militant and audacious indictment of Jim Crow segregation and the situation facing African Americans.

To truly honor the legacy of this anniversary, teachers should have students compare the King of the actual speech with the King from the clips. It would also be useful to have students read and discuss some of the day's other speeches. For example, in Randolph's opening speech he proclaimed that those gathered before him represented "the advance guard of a massive moral revolution" aimed at creating a society where "the sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of the human personality." This is a sentiment that we never hear about that day.

This 50th anniversary of the March on Washington also offers an opportunity to connect the issues and experiences of 1963 with current realities. In 2013, black workers have been largely abandoned in most discussions about race and civil rights. As National Black Worker Center Project founder Steven Pitts has repeatedly pointed out, with the economic restructuring that has destroyed key centers of the black working class, such as Detroit and St. Louis, much of the economic development that has emerged has either avoided the black worker altogether or limited the role of black workers to the most menial positions. Thus, unemployment for blacks remains more than double that of whites and hovers around Depression levels in many communities.

We can all do justice to this anniversary by asking the right questions and providing the actual historical context in which the 1963 March unfolded. More so, we can also offer, as Rustin asked the marchers in 1963, our "personal commitment to the struggle for jobs and freedom for Americans. . .and the achievement of social peace through social justice. How do you pledge?"

This article is part of the Zinn Education Project's If We Knew Our History series.

Posted on: GOOD | Huffington Post | Common Dreams.

© 2013 The Zinn Education Project, a project of Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

Photo credits:

Official program for the March on Washington: National Archives.

Bayard Rustin and Cleveland Robinson: Library of Congress, photo by Orlando Fernandez for New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper.

All other photos from The Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs/the Labor History Archives at Wayne State University, www.reuther.wayne.edu.

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Claiming and Teaching the 1963 March on Washington - Zinn Education Project

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By Bill Fletcher Jr. August 28 will mark the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Publicly associated with Dr. King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech, this march brought more than 250,000 people to the nation's capital.

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Review the three and choose the one that you feel is the most important of the three to end our time with and explain why.

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Reflections of a “Deseg Baby” By: Linda Mizell (p. 137-139)

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Reflections of a “Deseg Baby” By: Linda Mizell (p. 137-139)

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photo: U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

I grew up in the segregated South, and came of age as a "deseg baby." My friends and I began our school lives in modern buildings constructed in our segregated neighborhoods in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some of them during periods of budget reductions.

In 1955, with the decision known as Brown II, the Supreme Court decreed that public schools be desegregated "with all deliberate speed," though it would be another 16 years before any real effort was made to carry out that decree on a large scale. Predictably, the responses of the 21 states directly affected by the Brown decision ranged from "ready compliance" to hostile, aggressive legal challenge and evasion. A number of southern states chose the path that Florida did: While attempting to legally challenge the ruling, the state also tried to forestall counter challenges from the black community by making our separate schools "equal" through a rash of new construction and renovation and unprecedented purchases of new instructional supplies.

It was too little, too late, but it added fuel to a debate that had been carried on for over a century-whether "separate schools with equal facilities are more advantageous than mixed schools with prejudice"-a question posed by ardent desegregationist Charles H. Thompson, the first dean of Howard University's school of education and founding editor of the influential Journal of Negro Education.

There is considerable evidence that until early in the 20th century significant numbers of African Americans, if not the majority, supported the existence of separate schools. Many viewed them as "symbols of racial achievement [that] provided about the only avenue of opportunity for black professionals," wrote historian Daniel Crofts.

Prior to the 1930s, African-American schools were not necessarily considered academically inferior; nor were "mixed" (integrated) schools equated with "equal" (or superior) education. It was not uncommon in the 1930s to be opposed to the evils of segregation and still support separate schools, though it seems paradoxical. This debate was one of the hottest topics in the African-American press.

Yet, with few exceptions, supporters of African-American schools were denounced as "accommodationists" and/or "self-serving fools" intent on little more than preserving patronage positions. A. Philip Randolph even called them "Jim Crow niggers." Today, if we remember these folks at all, this is pretty much how we remember them.

An African-American man uses the segregated, "colored " entrance to a Belzoni, Mississippi, theater in 1939.photo: U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/ WOLCOTT

Judge Robert L. Carter (who served as NAACP General Counsel and was a lead attorney in the Brown cases) noted in retrospect that the legal team had not sought the advice of professional educators in shaping its collective ideology, saying "[W]e felt no need for such guidance because of our conviction that equal education meant integrated education." As sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot noted, "although the Brown decision focused on schooling, it disregarded the development of children and the perspectives of families and communities."

Between 1935, when the NAACP began implementing its school strategy, and 1954, when the Supreme Court handed down the Brown decision, the goal of equal educational opportunity and the strategy of desegregation were conflated in such a way as to make it difficult to publicly oppose-or even to question-the ideology of integration. The debate among African Americans didn't end, though; it simply became a private rather than a public conversation.

I grew up hearing those "in-house" conversations. Many times over the past 30 years, I've wished that I had the opportunity to talk with the folks we dismissed as "Toms," to explore with them the perspectives they gained by simultaneously supporting black institutions and challenging Jim Crow education. Can "separate but equal" schools really work? We don't know: We've never really had them. Does integration work? Haven't had much experience with that, either.

While much has been written on the challenges, limitations, and miscalculations of desegregation policy as an effective vehicle for guaranteeing equality of access to educational opportunity, the prevailing viewpoint-especially as we approach the 50th anniversary of Brown-attributes contemporary wisdom to historical hindsight. It would have been difficult to accurately predict the complicated mix of social, political, legal, and economic factors that have led to school resegregation in the United States. Yet academic tracking, discriminatory disciplinary practices, the radical decline in the number of black teachers and administrators, rising drop-out rates, and other challenges that define 21st century educational apartheid were real and imminent threats to parents and educators in the 1930s-just as real as the inferior facilities and other manifestations of institutional neglect that galvanized their opposition to segregation.

By the time I graduated from high school, the county system had been fully desegregated, but it seemed that we had slipped even further away from the goal of access to quality education. Thirty years later, hometown debate over the continued failure of our public schools to educate African-American children has been deflected by a new proliferation of "neighborhood" schools and a revived emphasis on "choice" as an alternative to court-ordered busing.

Vanessa Siddle Walker, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and others have documented how segregation forced black communities to develop strategies and structures that allowed effective schools under the worst of circumstances. Yet they are clear that there is nothing to be gained from romanticizing the non-existent "good old days" of segregation.

It seems to me we're still missing the point that W. E. B. DuBois made in 1935: "The Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education. What he must remember is that there is no magic, either in mixed schools or in segregated schools."

It's the same point that parents and educators have been making for the last 150 years. Would we now be better prepared to respond to the challenges of desegregation if we'd been able to have a more honest public debate on its potential risks and benefits all along?

Linda Mizell ( lindamiz@aol.com) is a lecturer in education at Tufts University. She is a member of the steering committee for the National Coalition of Education Activists (NCEA) and a senior associate with Enidlee Consultants USA.

Recommended Reading

Plural but Equal , by Harold Cruse (William Morrow, 1988). $12.95.

Shades of Brown , edited by Derrick A. Bell (Teachers College Press, 1980). 150 pp. $29.99.

Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South , by Vanessa Siddle Walker (University of North Carolina, 1996). 276 pp. $18.95.

Too Much Schooling , edited by Mwalimu J. Shujaa (Africa World Press, 1994). 412 pp. $21.95.

What Brown Should Have Said , edited by Jack Balkin (New York University Press, 2001). 257 pp. $20.

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I grew up in the segregated South, and came of age as a "deseg baby." My friends and I began our school lives in modern buildings constructed in our segregated neighborhoods in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some of them during periods of budget reductions.

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Review the three and choose the one that you feel is the most important of the three to end our time with and explain why.

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What we don’t learn about the Black Panther Party-but Should By: Adam Sanchez & Jesse Hagopian (p. 141-149)

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What we don’t learn about the Black Panther Party-but Should By: Adam Sanchez & Jesse Hagopian (p. 141-149)

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By Adam Sanchez, Jesse Hagopian

Illustrator: Bettmann | Getty Images

On Monday April 1, 1967, "George Dowell and several neighbors from North Richmond, California . . . heard 10 gunshots. Sometime after 5:00 a.m., George came upon his older brother Denzil Dowell lying in the street, shot in the back and head. Police from the county sheriff's department were there, but no ambulance had been called. . . . [The] sheriff's office reported that deputy sheriffs Mel Brunkhorst and Kenneth Gibson had arrived at the scene at 4:50 a.m. on a tip from an unidentified caller about a burglary in progress. They claimed that when they arrived, Denzil Dowell and another man ran from the back of a liquor store and refused to stop when ordered to halt. Brunkhorst fired one blast from a shotgun, striking Dowell and killing him. . . . For the Dowells, the official explanation did not add up, and community members helped the family investigate. . . . There was no sign of entry, forced or otherwise, at Bill's Liquors, the store that Dowell had allegedly been robbing. Further, the police had reported that Dowell had not only run but also jumped two fences to get away before being shot down. But Dowell had a bad hip, a limp, and the family claimed that he could not run, let alone jump fences. . . . A doctor who worked on the case told the family that judging from the way the bullets had entered Dowell's body, Dowell had been shot with his hands raised. . . . Mrs. Dowell publicly announced, 'I believe the police murdered my son.' . . . A white jury took little time deciding that the killing of unarmed Dowell was 'justifiable homicide' because the police officers on the scene had suspected that he was in the act of committing a felony. Outraged, the Black community demanded justice."
-Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr. Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party
Helping North Richmond's Black community demand justice for the killing of Denzil Dowell was one of the first major organizing campaigns of the Black Panther Party, and the first issue of The Black Panther newspaper, which at its height around 1970 had a circulation of 140,000 copies per week, asked, "WHY WAS DENZIL DOWELL KILLED?" Anyone reading the story of Dowell today can't help but draw parallels to the unarmed Black men and women regularly murdered by police. The disparity between the police's story and the victim's family's, the police harassment Dowell endured before his murder, the jury letting Dowell's killer off without punishment, even the reports that Dowell had his hands raised while he was gunned down, eerily echo the police killings today that have led to the explosion of the movement for Black lives.

Yet when we learn about the early years of the Panthers, the organizing they did in Richmond - conducting their own investigation into Dowell's death, confronting police who harassed Dowell's family, helping mothers in the community organize against abuse at the local school, organizing armed street rallies in which hundreds filled out applications to join the Party - is almost always absent. Born just over 50 years ago, the history of the Black Panther Party holds vital lessons for today's movement to confront racism and police violence - yet textbooks either misrepresent or minimize the significance of the Panthers. Armed with a revolutionary socialist ideology, they fought in Black communities across the nation for giving the poor access to decent housing, health care, education, and much more. And as the Panthers grew, so did the issues they organized around.

This local organizing that the Panthers engaged in has been largely erased, yet it is precisely what won them such widespread support. By 1970, a Market Dynamics/ABC poll found that Black people judged the Panthers to be the organization "most likely" to increase the effectiveness of the Black liberation struggle, and two-thirds showed admiration for the party. Coming in the midst of an all-out assault on the Panthers from the white press and law enforcement - including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's claim that the Panthers were "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" - this support was remarkable.

The Textbook Version of the BPP

A few of the major textbooks don't even mention the Black Panthers, while most spend only a sentence or two on the organization. Even the small number that do devote a few paragraphs to the Party give little context for their actions and greatly distort their ideology.

Textbooks often associate the Panthers with violence and racial separatism. For example, according to Teachers' Curriculum Institute's History Alive! The United States Through Modern Times, "Black Power groups formed that embraced militant strategies and the use of violence. Organizations such as the Black Panthers rejected all things white and talked of building a separate black nation." While ignoring that the Panthers believed in using violence only in self-defense, this passage also attempts to divide the Panthers from "nonviolent" civil rights groups. The Panthers didn't develop out of thin air but evolved from their relationships with other civil rights organizations, especially the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The name and symbol of the Panthers were adopted from the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), an independent political organization SNCC helped organize in Alabama, which was also called the "Black Panther Party." Furthermore, SNCC allied with the Panthers in 1968 and although the alliance lasted only five months, it was a crucial time for the growth of the Panthers.

The passage from History Alive! also incorrectly paints the Panthers as anti-white, erasing their important work building multiracial coalitions. Most famously, Chicago Panther leader Fred Hampton organized the Rainbow Coalition that included the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the Young Patriots - a group of poor, Southern, white migrants. The Black Panthers helped the Patriots set up their own community service programs. In California, the Panthers made an important alliance with the mostly white Peace and Freedom Party, which in 1968 ran Eldridge Cleaver for President in an attempt to provide an antiwar, anti-racist alternative to the Democratic Party. An editorial in The Black Panther explained: "The increasing isolation of the black radical movement from the white radical movement was a dangerous thing, playing into the power structure's game of divide and conquer."

Other textbooks also erase the socialist character of the Black Panther Party. Holt McDougal's The Americans reads, "Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded a political party known as the Black Panthers to fight police brutality in the ghetto." While the textbook later acknowledges other things the Panthers advocated, by reducing the reason for their founding to fighting police brutality, The Americans profoundly diminishes the important ideological basis of the party. More clearly than any other national civil rights organization, the Panthers linked the fight against racism with the fight against capitalism. As Panther Huey Newton explained, "We realize that this country became very rich upon slavery and that slavery is capitalism in the extreme. We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both." The Panthers understood that Black people could not achieve socialism on their own and their work building multiracial anti-capitalist coalitions flowed from that analysis. In fact, the Panthers developed an education requirement for joining the party that consisted of reading 10 books relating to Black liberation and socialism.

Several textbooks also blame the Panthers for the end of the Civil Rights Movement, while simultaneously ignoring or downplaying the role the FBI played in destroying the party. In a later section in The Americans, the authors write, "Public support for the Civil Rights Movement declined because some whites were frightened by the urban riots and the Black Panthers." What textbooks like this fail to mention is the decline in public support was a result of the counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) of the FBI. According to scholar Ward Churchill:

The Black Panther Party was savaged by a campaign of political repression, which in terms of its sheer viciousness has few parallels in American history. Coordinated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation . . . and enlisting dozens of local police departments around the country, the assault left at least 30 Panthers dead, scores of others imprisoned after dubious convictions, and hundreds more suffering permanent physical or psychological damage. Simultaneously, the party was infiltrated at every level by agents provocateurs, all of them harnessed to the task of disrupting its internal functioning. Completing the package was a torrent of "disinformation" planted in the media to discredit the Panthers before the public, both personally and organizationally, thus isolating them from potential support.

With minimal and problematic coverage in the history textbooks, there is little curriculum for teachers hoping to provide students with the crucial history of the Black Panther Party. This is why we were excited last year to hear that PBS began distributing Stanley Nelson's new documentary Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. The documentary is an essential tool for the classroom and gives high school teachers an incomparable visual companion to teaching the Panthers. Like any documentary, the film has some oversights that teachers should be aware of. Although it discusses the Panthers' 10-Point Platform, it doesn't do a great job of explaining the Panthers' Marxist ideology. It also doesn't provide enough historical context for the Panthers' activities, making it difficult for students to fully understand both the rise and fall of the Party. And in its attempt to tell the national story of the Panthers, it sometimes skips over important local organizing efforts. But chunked into sections and coupled with readings that help flesh out the documentary's omissions, it is a crucial addition to any social justice teacher's tool chest.

Teaching the Panthers Through Role Play

To introduce the film and to try to give students a fuller picture of the party's history, we developed a mixer activity in which each student takes on a role of someone who was in, or connected to, the Black Panthers. Students are given a role with a thumbnail sketch of that person's biography along with details that help illuminate aspects of the party. In all of the roles, we tried to emphasize why people joined the Black Panther Party. For example, the role of Kathleen Cleaver begins:

As a young Black woman growing up in Alabama in the 1950s, you wanted to challenge injustice. You were inspired by powerful women leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). . . . These women were creating a social revolution in the Deep South and all worked with SNCC. . . . In 1966, you went to organize in SNCC's New York office and then to Atlanta, Georgia. You had joined SNCC at the time it took up the slogan "Black Power," and you saw the Black Panther Party as taking the positions SNCC was headed toward. . . . You decided to move to San Francisco and join the Panthers.

Among the other roles is Ruby Dowell, Denzil Dowell's sister who joined the party after the organizing the Panthers did in Richmond.

We also tried to highlight the repression the Panthers faced along with some of the lesser known but important stories of Panther community organizing. The role for Lumumba Shakur, founder of the New York Black Panther Party chapter, explains how the entire New York Panther leadership was arrested on flimsy evidence. Part of the role's description:

You spent two years in prison while the trial proceeded. You organized prisoners to fight for better living conditions and at one point took control of the jail from the prison guards. You demanded and received bail hearings for every prisoner. Hundreds of prisoners were released as a result of the new hearings.

Students also encounter Panther allies like William "Preacherman" Fesperman of the Young Patriots, Madonna Thunder Hawk of the American Indian Movement, Gloria Arellanes of the Brown Berets, and Jose "Cha-Cha" Jimenez of the Young Lords. They also meet Panther "enemies" like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Los Angeles Police Officer Pat McKinley.

One of the most overlooked aspects of the Panthers we tried to highlight was their role in the struggle for anti-racist education. Historian Donna Murch details how the Panthers had their origins in "agitation for Black Studies courses and debates about the 'relevance' of education," and describes the membership of Panthers as "composed largely of Southern migrants under 25, including many students recruited from local high schools and community colleges..." The Panthers were originally formed out of a study group at Oakland's Merritt community college. The Panthers' belief in the need for an education beyond what was being taught in the school system led them to develop a network of liberation schools for youth.

In the mixer, the role of Ericka Huggins highlights the Panthers' flagship liberation school in Oakland. Other roles highlight the Panthers' fight for ethnic studies and their free breakfast program that fed hundreds of hungry children before school and was eventually adopted by the U.S. education system - one of the party's most meaningful and lasting reforms.

Lastly, we tried to include criticisms of the Panthers in the roles - not just from the police and conservative politicians, but from Black Panthers themselves. Often students can glorify the Black Panther Party, especially students of color who are regularly harassed by police and are justifiably impressed with the Panthers' bold defiance against what they called "the pig power structure." But the Black Panther Party existed as a national organization for only a short period, and while a large responsibility for their destruction should be put on the FBI and police efforts to destroy the party, it's also important for students to ask whether the Panthers could have done anything differently. Whether it is the sexism some female Panthers experienced, or the ideological debate that caused an eventual split in the party, we wanted to provide students with tools to critically assess this complex history.

To start the activity, we distribute roles to students and ask them to read them several times, underline important information, and list out three or four crucial facts on the back of the role. Students are often blown away by the stories presented. "My character's a badass!" one student exclaimed after reading about Bobby Seale's acts of defiance in the courtroom when he was put on trial after participating in the 1968 antiwar demonstration at the Democratic National Convention.

When students finish reading, we give out eight questions that guide them as they circulate around the room, meeting others and finding a different person to answer each of the questions. For example, "Find someone who has an opinion on the role of women in the Black Panther Party. Who is this person and what is their opinion?" We encourage students to take their time - the point of the mixer is not to race through and get all the answers to the questions, but to learn from the various stories in the room to get a fuller picture of the Black Panther Party. As teachers, we participate in the mixer as well. It's helpful to take a role with a more complex critique that might be hard for students to explain, like Stokely Carmichael or Luke Tripp of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement. Students are often eager to learn the stories in the room and a buzz fills the air as they grab one another and share their roles.

At the end of class - with at least 20 minutes left, we ask students to head back to their seats and silently write on four questions:

1. What were some of the things you learned about the Black Panthers that you didn't know before the mixer?

2. Whose story did you find most interesting or surprising?

3. What did you think of the critiques of the Black Panthers you encountered?

4. What would you like to know more about?

We've always been impressed by the rich discussion these four questions produce. Students are often surprised to learn the story of Richard Aoki. "I thought they'd only allow Black people into their group, but Aoki was Japanese American," Maya wrote. For many students this is the first time they learn about Latinx or Asian American radicals. Aliyah exclaimed, "It was cool to learn about Gloria [Arellanes] and Cha-Cha Jimenez. I didn't know that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans were fighting in the same ways as the Panthers." "Yeah, my mom told me about the Brown Berets," Ayanna stated, "but I didn't know that they were connected to the Panthers."

Students are often shocked at the level of violence the Panthers faced at the hands of the FBI. "It was sad to hear the story of Lil' Bobby Hutton," Brandon wrote. "He was trying to help his people and was shot more than 12 times with his hands up. He was only 16!" David added, "I found it interesting the way the FBI set up the BPP. It's clear the government did not want them to succeed." More specifically, James noticed, "The FBI sent fake letters to the Oakland and New York Panthers to create tensions between them. I didn't realize the FBI was so involved in breaking them up."

We've found that students can often be impressively articulate when evaluating the critiques they come in contact with during the mixer. Keisha wrote, "I thought Luke Tripp's ideas made sense when thinking about how to fight capitalism. He founded the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement in Detroit and was focused on helping working-class Blacks. He thought the confrontations with police would just get Panthers thrown in jail and that they should focus on organizing strikes." Melanie disagreed, "I actually think the confrontations with police were important because it showed people the Panthers weren't scared." Madison grappled with the differing views of sexism in the party that she encountered: "It was interesting that Roberta Alexander called out sexism in the BPP and thought they didn't give women equal rights. Other Panther women I met disagreed. People still have sexist attitudes toward women and women don't have equal rights so that was interesting to think about." Other students defended the Panthers against critiques from the right and left. "[California State Assemblyman] Donald Mulford said that he wanted to protect society from Black people with guns. But I feel like society needs to be protected from white people with guns," declared JT. "I really like Stokely Carmichael," Gregory began, "but I disagree with his critique of the Panthers for making alliances with white people. I get where he's coming from, but you can't fight racism with racism." Without realizing it, Gregory's words echoed Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton's.

We hope the mixer we wrote, Stanley Nelson's new documentary, Wayne Au's lesson on the Panthers' 10-Point Program, and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca's lesson on COINTELPRO, can be starting points for educators who hope to arm a new generation with the story of the Panthers. As the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party passes by, these lessons should be just a few of many to come that help teachers and students explore this rich - and too often ignored Ñ history.

Resources: Click here for the Black Panther Party mixer.

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What We Don't Learn About the Black Panther Party - but Should

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By Adam Sanchez, Jesse Hagopian Illustrator: Bettmann | Getty Images On Monday April 1, 1967, "George Dowell and several neighbors from North Richmond, California . . . heard 10 gunshots. Sometime after 5:00 a.m., George came upon his older brother Denzil Dowell lying in the street, shot in the back and head.

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Review the three and choose the one that you feel is the most important of the three to end our time with and explain why.

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COINTELPRO Teaching the FBI’s war on the Black Freedom movement By: Ursula Wolfe-Rocca (p.151-159)

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COINTELPRO Teaching the FBI’s war on the Black Freedom movement By: Ursula Wolfe-Rocca (p.151-159)

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By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

Illustrator: Emory Douglas

Graphic illustration of the impact of COINTELPRO by Black Panther Minister of Culture Emory Douglas, 1976.

Student-selected and student-run current events discussions are a daily ingredient of my high school social studies classes. The first 20 minutes of every 90-minute class period, we read an excerpt from a recent newspaper article and discuss its significance. In the last few years, the discussions have been dominated by names that have piled up with sickening frequency: Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland. My students, mostly Asian American and white, live in Lake Oswego, one of the wealthiest cities in Oregon and a community that benefits from mostly positive relationships with police. They struggle to understand a society that continues to allow Black lives to die at the hands of law enforcement.

This year, student attention has turned to how activists are responding to the racism in the criminal justice system, particularly the Black Lives Matter movement. In November 2015, a student brought in an Oregonian article, "Black Lives Matter: Oregon Justice Department Searched Social Media Hashtags." The article detailed the department's digital surveillance of people solely on the basis of their use of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. My students thoughtfully discussed and debated whether tying #BlackLivesMatter to potential threats to police (the premise of the surveillance program) was justifiable, with most students agreeing with the Urban League and the American Civil Liberties Union that the U.S. Department of Justice acted improperly and potentially unlawfully.

But what was not noted in the Oregonian article was the historical resonance of this story, which recalls the ugly, often illegal, treatment of Black activists by the U.S. justice system during an earlier era of our history.

My students had little way of knowing about this story behind the story because mainstream textbooks almost entirely ignore COINTELPRO, the FBI's counterintelligence program of the 1960s and '70s that targeted a wide range of activists, including the Black freedom movement.

COINTELPRO offers me, as a teacher of classes on government, a treasure trove of opportunities to illustrate key concepts, including the rule of law, civil liberties, social protest, and due process, yet it is completely absent from my school's government book, Magruder's American Government (Pearson).

One of the options for U.S. history teachers in my school district is American Odyssey (McGraw Hill). In a section titled "The Movement Appraised," the book sums up the end of the Civil Rights Movement:

Without strong leadership in the years following King's death, the civil rights movement floundered. Middle-class Americans, both African American and white, tired of the violence and the struggle. The war in Vietnam and crime in the streets at home became the new issue at the forefront of the nation's consciousness.

Here we find a slew of problematic assertions about the Civil Rights Movement, plus a notable absence. Nowhere does American Odyssey note that, in addition to King's death and Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement also had to contend with a declaration of war made against it by agencies of its own government.

American Odyssey is not alone in its omission. American Journey (Pearson), another U.S. history textbook used in my school, also ignores COINTELPRO.

The only textbook in my district that does mention COINTELPRO is America: A Concise History (St. Martin's), a college-level text used to teach AP history classes. Its summary and analysis takes exactly one sentence: "In the late 1960s SDS and other antiwar groups fell victim to police harassment, and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and CIA agents infiltrated and disrupted radical organizations." Without context, without emphasis, without a real-life illustration of what "harassment," "infiltrated," and "disrupted" actually meant in the lives of those targeted, this sentence is suffocated into meaninglessness.

Why do textbook writers and publishers leave out this crucial episode in U.S. history? Perhaps they take their cues from the FBI itself. According to the FBI website:

The FBI began COINTELPRO-short for Counterintelligence Program-in 1956 to disrupt the activities of the Communist Party of the United States. In the 1960s, it was expanded to include a number of other domestic groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party. All COINTELPRO operations were ended in 1971. Although limited in scope (about two-tenths of one percent of the FBI's workload over a 15-year period), COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging first amendment rights and for other reasons.

Apparently, mainstream textbooks have accepted-hook, line, and sinker-the FBI's whitewash of COINTELPRO as "limited in scope" and applying to only a few organizations. But COINTELPRO was neither "limited in scope" nor applied only to the organizations listed in the FBI's description. Under then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO included legal harassment, intimidation, wiretapping, infiltration, smear campaigns, and blackmail, and resulted in countless prison sentences and, in the case of Black Panther Fred Hampton and others, murder. This scope of operations can hardly be described as "limited." Moreover, these tactics were employed against every national civil rights organization, the antiwar movement (particularly on college campuses), Students for a Democratic Society, the American Indian Movement, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and others.

A better way to understand the wide net cast by COINTELPRO is the final report of the Church Committee. In the early 1970s, following a number of allegations in the press about overreaching government intelligence operations, a Senate committee, chaired by Democrat Frank Church of Idaho, began an investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies. Their 1976 report states: "The unexpressed major premise of much of COINTELPRO is that the Bureau [FBI] has a role in maintaining the existing social order, and that its efforts should be aimed toward combating those who threaten that order." In other words, anyone who challenged the status quo of racism, militarism, and capitalism in American society was fair game for surveillance and harassment. Rather than "limited," the FBI's scope potentially included all social and political activists, an alarming and outrageous revelation in a country purportedly governed by the protections of free speech and assembly in the First Amendment.

Bringing COINTELPRO into the Classroom

I post a recent headline on the overhead screen: "Top Officer in Iraq: 'We must neutralize this enemy.'" I ask my 11th-grade U.S. history students, "So what does the word neutralize mean in this headline?" Well-schooled in the popular culture of war and violence, they have no trouble with this task.

"Kill."

"Destroy."

"Eliminate."

"Get rid of."

I write their definitions on the board and explain we will come back to them in a bit. I say that in this lesson we are going to look at a bunch of old documents from the FBI. I try to build excitement by telling students that these documents were classified top secret and not meant to be seen by everyday folks like us. I continue: "In fact, we only found out about them because a group of peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stuffed suitcases full of documents-selecting the night of a much-anticipated Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight so the security guard would be distracted."

I post the first document on the overhead for the class to analyze together. It's a memo sent by Hoover in 1967 to FBI field offices throughout the country: "Black Nationalist-Hate Groups" (see Resources). In it, Hoover instructs his agency "to assign responsibility for following and coordinating this new counterintelligence program to an experienced and imaginative Special Agent well-versed in investigations relating to black nationalist, hate-type organizations."

At this point in the unit, students have compared the activism of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality, Malcolm X, and the Black Panther Party, analyzing the tactics and social critiques brought to bear by different strands of the movement. Students draw on this background when I ask them to predict which organizations will be targeted under Hoover's counterintelligence program. "So guys, who are the 'hate-type organizations' referred to in this document?"

A number of hands shoot up-students think they've got this one. Invariably, their first guess is that the FBI must have targeted the Black Panthers. They explain that the Panthers advocated Black Power and self-defense, and encouraged members to own firearms. Students plausibly predict that if the FBI were to treat any Black activist groups as a potential threat, those with the most revolutionary rhetoric and those bearing arms would have been first in line.

"Well, you're right," I say. "So, were the Black Panthers a threat to American security? Did the FBI have a justifiable reason to be tracking them?"

There are always some students who bristle at the militancy of groups like the Black Panthers. Whether it is the Panthers' use of the term "pig" to describe law enforcement, or Malcolm X's reference to "white devils," or the philosophy of self-defense, my students struggle with a discomfort they do not feel when we are talking about SNCC's sit-ins. I try to help students separate their discomfort about the group's rhetoric from the question of whether the threat they posed to the U.S. government was a security threat or a political one.

I remind students of prior lessons-the Panthers' 10 Point Program, their careful adherence to state gun laws to protect them from being charged on weapons infractions, their street patrols to monitor police violence, their breakfast for children programs, their freedom schools.

After some discussion, a consensus usually emerges among my students: White America may not have liked their message or their tactics, but the Black Panthers represented a political challenge. They weren't doing anything to merit the FBI response.

I continue: "But the Black Panthers were not the only ones targeted. Let's take a look at the other groups on the FBI's list."

I reveal the next page of the document, which states the groups to which "intensified attention under this program will be afforded," and I ask students to call out other organizations they see listed that we have studied in this unit.

"SNCC!"

"SCLC!"

"CORE!"

I add some humor by acting confused: "Wait a second, can you guys help me out here? Remind me again, who was the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference?"

Before I am even done with my act of feigned ignorance, students are shouting, "King! King was the leader of SCLC!"

"Oh yes, that's right! Now help me again because I can't seem to remember: Was he a member of a 'hate-type' organization?"

Students roll their eyes at my poor acting and adamantly confirm: "No! He was all about nonviolence!"

Now I get serious and pause for some analysis and questioning: "OK, folks, what is going on here? Why would the FBI target activist organizations, including those that were explicitly nonviolent, like SCLC and CORE?"

Students offer a few suggestions:

"Maybe Hoover was really racist and didn't want the Civil Rights Movement to succeed."

"Maybe the FBI worried that the nonviolent organizations were going to become more militant."

But this discussion usually ends soon after it begins. Students are flummoxed. They have grown up in a world that glorifies and mythologizes King; they cannot make sense of the notion that U.S. security agencies viewed him as a threat.

In spite of its brevity, this discussion is important. It frames the inquiry to come by cultivating students' curiosity and confusion.

Now I present to students the final part of the document. This is where Hoover reveals the goal of COINTELPRO:

The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.

I ask a student to read this quote aloud since hearing the words disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize underscores their sinister meaning.

I remind the class of the earlier definitions of neutralize on the board. I ask, "So what is the FBI saying it wants to do to SCLC, SNCC, CORE, and the Black Panthers?"

Students look at the board, but they can't quite believe what is written there, so they add question marks.

"Kill?"

"Destroy?"

"Eliminate?"

"Get rid of?"

Most years, there will be a student who interjects at this point to suggest that maybe neutralize means something different in this context; surely it can't be as bad as I make it sound. This disbelief is the perfect tone to set for the next step of the lesson, when students delve into the documents and see for themselves what the FBI meant by neutralize.

The Documents

I arrange the desks into groups of four. I provide students packets of declassified memos (see Resources) from the COINTELPRO era. These documents are a representative sample of the scope and tactics of the program, and reveal the FBI's use of infiltration, psychological warfare, legal harassment, and media manipulation against activists and organizations.

I give students a worksheet with some guiding questions to complete as they read and discuss. It mixes retrieval and analysis questions, so students are directed toward the highlights of the documents and the significance of what they read.

For example, for the memo dated 9/27/68, about the Black Panther Party, the worksheet asks, "How does the FBI characterize the Black Panther Party?" Students skim the memo and locate this sentence: "It is the most violence-prone organization of all the extremist groups now operating in the United States." This is a simple retrieval question. But then I ask, "What activities by the Panthers are not mentioned anywhere in these documents?" Here I urge students to go back to earlier lessons on the social dimensions of the Panthers and recall the breadth of community programs offered by the Panthers, from health clinics to nutrition classes to free breakfasts for children.

I encourage students to tackle the documents together, reading aloud, talking, deciphering, and questioning as they go. These documents can be tough and the copy quality, with lots of redacting, is not always great. Since students are generally very engaged during this lesson, it can get loud.

COINTELPRO and Martin Luther King Jr.

Midway through the packet, students read about the FBI's program of harassment against Martin Luther King Jr. When they arrive at these documents, I always know, because I start to hear a lot of this:

"Wait, what is this?"

"I am totally confused-this letter was sent to King?"

"Ms. Wolfe, we don't understand document 6 at all."

This is my cue to stop the group work and read the King documents together as a class, documents that reveal that through illegal wiretapping, the FBI collected evidence of King's extramarital affairs and used this evidence to try (unsuccessfully) to blackmail him. The documents show that the FBI not only attempted to discredit King, but also to get him to commit suicide.

It is hard to overstate how dumbfounded the students are by these revelations. How could the U.S. government participate in this level of harassment of a man they have been taught to embrace as a near-deity?

This is a perfect teaching opportunity to help establish the truth about King: He was not the watered-down, Hallmark-holiday caricature that has come to dominate our culture; in the eyes of people like Hoover, he was a dangerous radical who needed to be targeted.

The FBI and Hoover saw King as the radical who, in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," called out racial moderates for their gradualist approach to injustices that required immediate action; the radical whose opposition to the Vietnam War, famously expressed at Riverside Church, led him to describe the U.S. government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today"; and the radical who warned Americans, "When machines and computers, profit motives, and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

I do not always address all of these dimensions of King with my students, but even just one of these examples helps delineate the breadth of his critique of U.S. society and establish for students why the FBI might see him as a threat and a target of COINTELPRO.

King Was Human

At this moment in the lesson, students want to talk about King's infidelity.

"Ms. Wolfe, please tell me it is not true that King cheated on his wife!"

"Wait, the FBI made that up, right? To make him look bad?"

I try to limit the length of this conversation, since it is obviously not directly related to the goals of my lesson, but I think it would be a mistake to shut down these heartfelt student questions.

"Yes," I say. "It's true, King did cheat on his wife."

Most students seem saddened by this news and sometimes question whether King's infidelity discredits and undermines his heroic status. I challenge kids to move beyond this all-or-nothing moral position: "Look, humans are multidimensional. We can be fantastic in one situation, but miserable in another. Imagine if your entire life's accomplishments were ignored and you were judged only on the basis of the worst thing you ever did. Would that be fair?"

Students begrudgingly take my point but are still sad, as though they have just learned a dark secret about a close family member.

I wonder if there may be a hidden lesson in critical thinking when we reveal King's moral imperfection to students. If we insist that our activist heroes demonstrate moral perfection-or if we hide their blemishes-do we not in some way transmit the message to young people that heroic action is something for a small elect, the untarnished few, not for imperfect people like you and me?

The Murder of Fred Hampton

We've clarified the goals of COINTELPRO and learned about the actual strategies, methods, and targets of the program. But, so far, COINTELPRO has been revealed only on paper. Now it is time to show students how the program damaged and destroyed people's lives.

I show students an excerpt of the documentary Eyes on the Prize - part of the episode "A Nation of Law?" that details the story of Fred Hampton. Hampton was a former NAACP youth organizer who became the chair of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968. Hampton embodied what was powerful and promising about the Panthers. At just 20 years of age, he helped the Panthers establish a breakfast for children program and a free medical clinic on the South Side of Chicago. He taught political education classes and was working to create a multiracial "rainbow coalition" of Chicago youth groups that included the Blackstone Rangers (a street gang), the Young Lords, and the Young Patriots, an organization of working-class white youth, often migrants from Appalachia. Howard Saffold, a member of the Chicago Police Department at the time, eloquently sums up law enforcement's concerns about Hampton's coalition-building:

The Panthers were pursuing an ideology that said we need to take these young minds, this young energy, and turn it into part of our movement in terms of Black liberation and the rest of it. And I saw a very purposeful, intentional effort on the part of the police department to keep that head from hooking up to that body. It was like, you know, do not let this thing become a part of what could ultimately be a political movement, because that's exactly what it was.

Like most of the leaders of the Black freedom movement, Hampton drew the interest of the FBI and COINTELPRO. In 1969, following months of harassment, Hampton was shot and killed as he slept in his bed, his pregnant partner beside him, during a police raid on his home. He was 21 years old.

As they watch the documentary, students take notes on the facts of the Hampton case, and we stop the film often to discuss what we see and hear. I help them tease out the COINTELPRO dimension of the story: an FBI informant infiltrated the Chicago chapter of the Panthers and earned Hampton's trust. He proceeded to provide a floor plan of Hampton's apartment, noting which room he slept in. This information was used by the raiding officers who killed him.

Following the film, students complete a viewer response journal to talk back to the film, a way to process the horror, shock, and grief many of them feel after watching the deadly consequences of COINTELPRO. Aiden grapples with Hampton's innocence: "The police had no reason to come to Hampton's house like that and open fire. He wasn't hurting anyone and he hadn't done anything wrong." Carrie echoes an elderly woman quoted in the film: "The tragic death of Fred Hampton was 'nothing but a Northern lynching.'" Avery writes: "A mob of people came into Fred's home, for no reason, and murdered him. The fact that these were police officers only made it more unbelievably awful."

The Hampton murder also serves as a moment to bring students back to our earlier discussion of the word neutralize. Did the FBI target Hampton for murder? Although FBI agents did not pull the trigger on the weapons that killed Hampton, they provided critical information to those who did. It is clear to students that murder was an acceptable outcome in the larger project of destruction undertaken by COINTELPRO.

Indicting COINTELPRO

I usually end this lesson with students writing a piece related to the Church Committee report. The report concludes, in part:

The findings which have emerged from our investigation convince us that the government's domestic intelligence policies and practices require fundamental reform. . . . The Committee's fundamental conclusion is that intelligence activities have undermined the constitutional rights of citizens.

After reading this statement, I lead a quick discussion of which constitutional rights the report might be referring to; students have recently studied government, so it doesn't take long for them to recall the Fourth Amendment's privacy protections, the First Amendment's speech and expression protections, and the Fifth Amendment's due process protections. We also use this discussion to recall examples from our investigation of the COINTELPRO documents that demonstrate the government infringing on these rights. Finally, I ask students to use the committee's statement as the thesis for some in-class writing.

The prompt reads:

Based on the documents you read and the film you watched, write at least two supporting paragraphs for the excerpt from the Church Committee's conclusions. In order to do this you will need to:

1. Identify protections in the Bill of Rights that were denied or abused by COINTELPRO.

2. Identify examples from the COINTELPRO documents or the film that prove that the rights of activists were abused.

3. Explain and analyze how the evidence in the documents proves that a constitutional injustice occurred.

Admittedly, this is a rather dry academic exercise, but it requires students to formalize their thinking about COINTELPRO as they craft what amounts to an indictment. The task requires students to show, unequivocally and unambiguously, that COINTELPRO was not just unethical and unjust, but illegal too.

Final Thoughts

When I first started teaching about COINTELPRO back in the early 2000s, I ended the unit with a discussion of then-President George W. Bush's NSA surveillance program, which had recently been exposed and was being hotly debated; more recently, I have drawn connections to the Edward Snowden revelations. This year I will address government tracking of Black Lives Matter activists and the use of social media platforms to gather intelligence on protest movements and protest leaders. It seems that the questions of surveillance and government overreach are never out of date.

COINTELPRO is not just a surveillance story. It is a story about a duplicitous and destructive government-sponsored war against Black and other activists. And though the COINTELPRO documents have long been made public, it is a story history textbooks continue to ignore.

Textbook publishers' disregard for the history of COINTELPRO is one more example of the crucial importance of the Black Lives Matter movement, which lays bare the systemic dangers faced by Black people in the United States while simultaneously affirming and celebrating Black life. When activists use social media to show the nation the brutal strangulation of Eric Garner or the mowing down of Tamir Rice or the deadly harassment of Sandra Bland, we cannot fail to recognize the injustice and racism of the criminal justice system. When that same social media shows us Garner's wife pleading, "He should be here celebrating Christmas and Thanksgiving and everything else with his children and grandchildren"; or a photo gone viral of Rice as a shy, smiling boy; or a Facebook post of Bland looking joyful about a new job-we feel the human potential lost as a consequence of these injustices.

What I attempt in my classroom is a Black Lives Matter treatment of COINTELPRO, where we reveal the injustice of the program while simultaneously affirming and celebrating the promise of the activists it sought to silence. Just as Black Lives Matter activists use video footage to convince a disbelieving wider public of what African Americans have long known about police brutality, we teachers can use our classrooms to shine a light on history that has been available, but systematically ignored, by our textbooks and in our curricula, a history that emphatically communicates: Black history matters.

Resources

Goldfield, David, et al. 2005. The American Journey: A History of the United States. 3rd ed. Vol. 2. Pearson.

Henretta, James A., David Brody, and Lynn Dumenil. 2006. America: A Concise History. St. Martin's.

McClenaghan, William. 2005. Magruder's American Government. Pearson.

Nash, Gary. 2004. American Odyssey: The 20th Century and Beyond. McGraw Hill.

PBS. 1990. "A Nation of Law?" Eyes on the Prize. Produced by Henry Hampton. Blackside.

COINTELPRO Documents

Unless otherwise indicated, the following documents can be found in Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall. 2001. The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret War Against Dissent in the United States. 2nd ed. South End Press:

Dec. 1, 1964. FBI memo about "taking steps to remove King from the national picture." The memo suggests sending Martin Luther King Jr. an anonymous letter encouraging him to commit suicide. p. 98. A clean, unredacted version of the letter to King and be found at nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to-mlk-reveals.html?_r=1.

Aug. 25, 1967. Memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover initiating COINTELPRO against civil rights organizations. vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/cointel-pro-black-extremists/cointelpro-black-extremists-part-01-of/view.

March 8, 1968. FBI memo suggesting misinformation leaflets be distributed in Baltimore to combat the influence of new SCLC offices opening there. vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/cointel-pro-black-extremists/cointelpro-black-extremists-part-01-of/view, p. 78-79.

July 10, 1968. FBI memo proposing false information be used to "convey the impression that [Stokely] Carmichael is a CIA informant." p. 128.

Sept. 27, 1968. FBI memo describing the Black Panther Party as the "most violence prone organization . . . now operating in the United States," with FBI plans to create factionalism within the party. p. 124.

Oct. 10, 1968. FBI memo in which a "media source" is sought "to help neutralize extremist Black Panthers and foster a split between them and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee." p.127.

December 1969. Floor plan of Fred Hampton's apartment, as drawn by an FBI informant. p. 139

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COINTELPRO: Teaching the FBI's War on the Black Freedom Movement

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By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca Illustrator: Emory Douglas Student-selected and student-run current events discussions are a daily ingredient of my high school social studies classes. The first 20 minutes of every 90-minute class period, we read an excerpt from a recent newspaper article and discuss its significance.

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The Color Line By: Bill Bigelow   p.82-87                                           What vocabulary in the lesson is problematic? How would you address that? What would you change about the lesson? What would you use? 

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The Color Line By: Bill Bigelow   p.82-87                                           What vocabulary in the lesson is problematic? How would you address that? What would you change about the lesson? What would you use? 

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Presidents and Slaves By: Bob Peters p.88-95                                 “We do a disservice when we sanitize history and sweep uncomfortable truths under the rug.”                                     Agree/Disagree and why           

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Presidents and Slaves By: Bob Peters p.88-95                                 “We do a disservice when we sanitize history and sweep uncomfortable truths under the rug.”                                     Agree/Disagree and why           

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When Black Lives Mattered By: Adam Sanchez (p.96-98)     “Though often overlooked in classrooms across the country, Reconstruction was a period where the impossible suddenly became possible.”                                        What are some of the moments in Black history that are overlooked in the school curriculum and what do they teach us about the possible?  How do we debunk the myths that perpetuate white supremacy by leaving crucial parts of history out of the textbook?                                       

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When Black Lives Mattered By: Adam Sanchez (p.96-98)     “Though often overlooked in classrooms across the country, Reconstruction was a period where the impossible suddenly became possible.”                                        What are some of the moments in Black history that are overlooked in the school curriculum and what do they teach us about the possible?  How do we debunk the myths that perpetuate white supremacy by leaving crucial parts of history out of the textbook?                                       

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Presidents and Slaves By: Bob Peterson (p.88-95)                   “While discovering which presidents were enslavers, it pokes an important hole in the godlike mystique that surrounds the ‘Founding Fathers’”                                     Agree/Disagree and why             Why was it important for some people to paint this narrative about the ‘Founding Fathers’?      

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Presidents and Slaves By: Bob Peterson (p.88-95)                   “While discovering which presidents were enslavers, it pokes an important hole in the godlike mystique that surrounds the ‘Founding Fathers’”                                     Agree/Disagree and why             Why was it important for some people to paint this narrative about the ‘Founding Fathers’?      

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Reconstructing The South By: Bill Bigelow (p.99-107)                     Group Work                                    What vocabulary in the lesson is problematic? How would you address that?What would you change about the lesson? What would you use?

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Reconstructing The South By: Bill Bigelow (p.99-107)                     Group Work                                    What vocabulary in the lesson is problematic? How would you address that?What would you change about the lesson? What would you use?

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Space for Young Black Women By: Jody Sokolower p.51-57 Why is it important to make spaces specifically for Black girls to talk about their experiences in school and society? In what ways do Black girls often get overlooked in discussions about race? How can we change it right now?

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Space for Young Black Women By: Jody Sokolower p.51-57 Why is it important to make spaces specifically for Black girls to talk about their experiences in school and society? In what ways do Black girls often get overlooked in discussions about race? How can we change it right now?

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Trayvon Martin and My Students By: Linda Christensen p.58-67   “Things are getting better. Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race” - Obama                                                            Group Work Quote Analysis-                                         1) Context for the quote                                                 2) Identification of the Speaker: Who is it? What is their authority on this topic?                                        3) Introduction to quote.                                                4) Do you agree or disagree with the quote?                                                            Why? What is missing? What else do readers need to know?                              

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Trayvon Martin and My Students By: Linda Christensen p.58-67   “Things are getting better. Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race” - Obama                                                            Group Work Quote Analysis-                                         1) Context for the quote                                                 2) Identification of the Speaker: Who is it? What is their authority on this topic?                                        3) Introduction to quote.                                                4) Do you agree or disagree with the quote?                                                            Why? What is missing? What else do readers need to know?                              

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Taking the Fight Against White Supremacy By: Adam Sanchez  Adam writes about how to engage students in discussions about the removal of statues and monuments to enslavers, Confederates, and white supremacists (pp.70-73). How should we decide as a society who we should publicly honor? How can we engage students in answering this question?

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Taking the Fight Against White Supremacy By: Adam Sanchez  Adam writes about how to engage students in discussions about the removal of statues and monuments to enslavers, Confederates, and white supremacists (pp.70-73). How should we decide as a society who we should publicly honor? How can we engage students in answering this question?

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In the essay “Student Athletes Kneel to Level the Playing Field (pp. 33-38),” Jesse Hagopian discusses the role middle and high school athletes have had in the struggle for Black lives. What could we do in our schools that would engage students and student athletes? How could we provide space for our student athletes to use their platforms today?

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In the essay “Student Athletes Kneel to Level the Playing Field (pp. 33-38),” Jesse Hagopian discusses the role middle and high school athletes have had in the struggle for Black lives. What could we do in our schools that would engage students and student athletes? How could we provide space for our student athletes to use their platforms today?

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In the editorial “Black Students’ Lives Matter (pp.17-21),” the Rethinking Schools editors suggest three immediate steps for bringing the BLM movement into our teaching.  What are those recommendations?  What do you think would work here? What are other ways for educators to support?

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In the editorial “Black Students’ Lives Matter (pp.17-21),” the Rethinking Schools editors suggest three immediate steps for bringing the BLM movement into our teaching.  What are those recommendations?  What do you think would work here? What are other ways for educators to support?

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In Wayne Au and Jesse Hagopian’s “How One Elementary School Sparked a Citywide Movement to Make Black Students’ Lives Matter (pp. 22-31),”they discuss what it means to show up for students inside and outside of the classroom through organizing. How can you use the lessons learned from this piece to mobilize and organize for Black lives?

# data[].attributes.subject
In Wayne Au and Jesse Hagopian’s “How One Elementary School Sparked a Citywide Movement to Make Black Students’ Lives Matter (pp. 22-31),”they discuss what it means to show up for students inside and outside of the classroom through organizing. How can you use the lessons learned from this piece to mobilize and organize for Black lives?