Civics Lessons as Activism in Alabama’s Long Civil Rights Movement

• In Event: Constructing Possibilities for Advancing the Historical and Contemporary Relevance of Southern Black Educators’ Activism

Abstract

The purpose of this presentation is to convey how the historiography of Black educators’ activism during Alabama’s civil right movement can inform contemporary culture wars contesting how Black life and history should be taught in U. S. classrooms. The presenter will highlight how Black educators contributed unassumingly to the Alabama movement through civics lessons taught in classrooms, youth civic organizations, churches, and the community. The presenter will expound on this study with personal insights from the presenter’s current involvement in emerging coalitions mobilized to combat educational gag orders in Alabama through civics curricula and pedagogy.

Perspectives from public and social history guide this presentation’s emphasis on how Black educators in the U. S. South, both past and present, employ or employed civics lessons to teach their students and the broader community about their rights and responsibilities as first-class citizens of the United States. The methods include analyses of archival, oral history, and documentary sources coupled with auto-ethnographic approaches to understanding the work of emergent grassroots history coalitions and teacher- and community-led professional development initiatives in Alabama. Primary data sources include meeting proceedings, letters, newspaper articles, oral histories, lesson plans, digitized, publicly-disseminated teacher professional development seminars, nonconfidential email list serve correspondence, and digitized public announcements. Secondary sources include Black educators’ memoirs and published historical accounts of the civil rights movement in keystone municipalities in Alabama.

The presenter concludes that contrary to their invisibility and minimalization in the historical canon of the mid-twentieth century civil rights movement, Black educators in the U. S. South played a pivotal role in the movement through their intellectual and pedagogical activism, and that this activism is particularly important to demystify and foreground today as educators face reprisals in their efforts to teach about Black life and history accurately, truthfully, and with fidelity.

Author

• Tondra L. Loder-Jackson, University of Alabama - Birmingham