American Civil Rights...The Events

Emmett Till

In 1954, Emmett Till, a fourteen year old African-American from Chicago was visiting his relatives in Mississippi. Not use to the Jim Crow South, to black subservience to whites, and wanting to impress his relatives white his "northern smoothness", Till spoke "out of place" to a white woman in a grocery store. Till's relatives claim he merely said hello or some other mundane nicety to a white woman, while others say he was much more "fresh" with her than that. Regardless, the next day, his body was found floating in the river, his face and head so badly beaten, he was hardly recognizable. He was taken back north to Chicago for his burial, which his mother demanded be open casket, so everyone could see what they had done to her son. Jet magazine published his photograph on the front cover.
Down in Mississippi, the husband and brother in law of the woman Till "accosted" were arrested and put on trial for murder. In a segregated courtroom, with Till's mother present, an all white jury found both men not guilty of murder in less than one hour. Even though, Mose Wright, Till's uncle, risking his own life, stood before the courtroom and identified both as Till's killers.
What is your response to the murder of Emmett Till? What would you advise
African-Americans who are angry with the verdict to do? Why?

Montgomery Bus Boycott

In 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, as in most southern cities, while in violation of federal statutes, segregation existed on city buses. White patrons were allowed to sit in the front, "privileged" seats, while African-Americans were permitted to sit in the "Colored Only" section at the back of the bus. In the event that the white section became full, African-Americans were made to stand and clear the "Colored" section if necessary.
In 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress and secretary at the office of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons), was on her way home from work, sitting in the row just behind the white section. When the white section became full, the bus driver asked the African-Americans in Parks' row to stand so the white patrons could sit down. At first, all refused to move. When the driver asked again, more insistently, the others slowly rose, but Parks still remained seated. After the third request, the bus driver threatened Parks with arrest by calling the police. Ms. Parks responded by telling the driver to go right ahead. He did, and she was arrested, the fifth person to be arrested that year. The Mississippi NAACP and Ms. Parks both planned for her to be arrested. It was in fact, what the African-American community was waiting for. Two days after her arrest, a boycott of the Montgomery buses was organized. As the major source of transportation for the African-American community, many felt that the bus boycott would never hold, so many woke up early to see what would happen. Near empty buses circulated the city all day. The boycott had held that first day and for more than a year after that. It succeeded because the African-American community organized car pools and other solutions to the transportation crisis.
Besides Rosa Parks, at least one other stalwart and source of inspiration arose from the bus boycott. A 26 year old new comer to Montgomery, a recent Ph.D. graduate and new minister, Dr.
Martin Luther King arose as the passionate inspiration and spokesperson for the movement. He above all others continued to lead and inspire the resistance in Montgomery. For one year, while Rosa Parks was in jail, and Dr. King inspired the resistance, the buses remained empty. After one year, the Montgomery bus system was finally desegregated.
Was the bus boycott the most effective way to end bus segregation? Should Rosa Parks have submitted to arrest and been forced to remain in jail for the duration of the boycott?

The Little Rock Nine

In 1954 in the case of Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the previous case of Plessy vs. Ferguson was struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States. Previously, (Plessy vs. Ferguson) the court had said that "separate but equal" facilities for blacks and whites was constitutional. In Brown vs. the Board of Ed.,"separate but equal" was declared"inherently unequal", therefore ordering the integration of all public facilities, especially schools. The problem was that while the federal court system had ordered integration to occur, it was up to the states as to how to implement the order.
In Little Rock, Arkansas, Central High School, the city's only high school was to be integrated. Nine top African-American students from a local independent school was chosen as excellent candidates who could withstand the pressure and succeed. The first day of school arrived and the white community of Little Rock surrounded the school in violent virulent protest, shouting racial epitaphs and blocking entrance to the school. Eight students with their parents went together to the school, and upon seeing the ghastly scene, retreated to a safe distance. One female African-American student arrived on the scene alone. She was immediately surrounded, shouted at, and spat upon. With no where else to go, seething with rage but having no other recourse, she sat on a bench and waited for the bus to arrive as the melee ensued. Eventually a woman would guide her to safety. This was the scene over the course of the next week. Eventually sheriff's deputies were called in, but they merely stood guard over school property, doing nothing to aid the African-American students in safely getting to school.
Eventually, President Harry S Truman called in soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division to escort students to school. Each of the nine students was assigned one individual soldier as a body guard, going with them to and from class.
How do you feel about the way the integration of Central High School was integrated? Do you feel there was a better way?What was the better way? Should Central High School have been integrated at all?

Voting Rights

After the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution were passed. The 13th amendment freed the slaves and outlawed slavery throughout the land, while the 14th amendment gave the ex-slaves the right of citizenship and the 15th amendment gave freed males the right to vote. During the southern reconstruction period, the freed African-Americans were able to fully exercise their rights, under careful guard of the union soldiers. After President Rutherford B. Hayes pulled the union soldiers out of the south, however, the rights of the African- Americans began to disappear and a type of defacto-slavery began to appear.
While constitutionally, the ex-slaves were guaranteed the right to vote, it was up the the states themselves to insure that these rights were protected. Unfortunately, the state and local governments did not want to protect them. Instead literacy tests, poll taxes, as well as simple refusal to allow black citizens the right to register to vote. Literacy tests were given to insure that the citizens were educated "enough" to vote, but different reading tests were administered to black
and white voter registrants. Poll taxes were enforced, causing all voter registrants to pay a fee in order to take part in their constitutionally protected rights. As with the literacy tests, prices varied depending upon your race. In some counties, a registered voter, usually white people, had to vouch for your character in order to register to vote, so, many blacks again were refused 0 registration. From 1960-1964 Bob Moses and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) lead voter registration drives and nonviolent direct action protests in an attempt to register new African-American voters. Some new voters were gained, but many many black people were beaten and arrested over the years.
What is the most effective way to gain voting rights for African Americans?

The Children's Crusade

In Birmingham, Alabama, Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) began nonviolent direct action campaigns to educate the American population at large to the racial injustices that black people were forced to face everyday. Through protest marches and other civil demonstrations, SCLC and Dr. King hoped that they would be able to raise the consciousness of Birmingham. The marches and demonstrations were well covered by both the television news and print news. Live on TV, the police commissioner, Bull Connor ordered his men to release attack dogs, high powered fire hoses, as well as the cruel violence of his own men upon the nonviolent protesters.
By the end of the second day of mass protests, almost all of the adult resistors were arrested and in jail or in the hospital. That is when a call was made for the children to march. Initially, Dr. King opposed this idea severely, but eventually came to defend it. He argued that civil rights was their struggle too. The idea was that after the violence that had ensued the previous day, to send the city's children out into that would truly show the desperation of the struggle for civil rights in Alabama. It was also thought that Bull Connor would not dare to touch a mass march of peaceful children.
Should Civil Rights Leaders risk the lives of the children?

Freedom Summer, 1964 and the use of Whites

In 1964, Bob Moses and SNCC organized Freedom Summer. The intent was to get volunteers from all over the country, train them in nonviolent resistance in Oxford, Ohio, bus them down to the south with great fanfare, (calling them Freedom Riders), then spend the entire summer educating those who wished to be educated, and demonstrating for voting rights. The summer had two missions:
1. educate local African-Americans so they can pass the literacy test,
educate them in nonviolent resistance tactics, so they can earn their own rights and
2. demonstrate, demonstrate for voting rights. SNCC and the Freedom Summer movement gained attention far and wide. Many people who applied for volunteer positions were white middle class college students or college educated young people. This brought SNCC a new dilemma. Many felt that blacks would only truly have freedom if they struggled and fought for it themselves. Others argued that only when middle class white children are injured and hurt, live on television, would the country's attention focus on the problems of African-Americans in the south.
Should the Civil Rights Movement allow white college students to aid in Freedom Summer and the Civil Rights Movement in general? Should the African-Americans count on themselves top free themselves?

Schwerner, Chaney, Goodman, the murders

SNCC volunteers, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were looking for a site to place a Freedom School when they disappeared. It is strict SNCC protocol to call in every three hours to let other staff members know of your location. Outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi, the three were arrested for speeding, taken to the local jail, but not permitted to call anyone. They were released just after night fall. As they were making their way out of town, they were chased by at least one patrol car, carrying a deputy sheriff, named Cecil Price, as well as two other vehicles carrying Ku Klux Klan members. The three were shot, their bodies were buried, and their car sunk in the middle of the swamp. Their disappearance launched one of the largest missing persons investigations in FBI history. Eventually their bodies and cars were found and the suspects arrested. They were found not guilty of murder by an all male, all white jury. Later, they were re-arrested on charges of violating the civil rights of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman. They received sentences ranging from three to ten years. They are all free today.
What should the proper response be from the African-American community? What should we do?

The Vietnam War

Beginning in 1965, the United States was fighting a very unpopular war against communist revolutionaries in the country of Vietnam. Because college students could get a draft deferment, the majority of ground infantry soldiers sent to Vietnam were 18 year old, uneducated people of color. A large percentage of these soldiers were African-American.
The causes of this war were suspect from the beginning, as well as America's involvement in it. Many civil rights leaders looked at the Vietnam War as an extension of the destruction of American Civil Rights, as the poor and disenfranchised soldiers of color killed the poor and disenfranchised Vietnamese.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began to speak out against the war in Vietnam. He felt that being against the Vietnam War was a natural extension of the struggle for Civil Rights. Many others felt that to speak out against the war only agitates more people and takes attention away from the real cause of the movement of civil rights.
Should the Civil Rights Movement risk mixing its message and alienating some Americans by speaking out against the Vietnam War as well?

The Watts Riots

In 1965, a black motorist was shot and killed by a police officer in Watts, California. It was widely documented that it was an unjust shooting, and that the driver offered no resistance. However, the shoot was deemed just by LAPD, and the officer went free. In response to the shooting the neighborhood of Watts went up in flames. For five days, the neighborhood of Watts was looted and burned. The neighborhood warned LAPD and others to stay out, insisting that they would be shot if they did not stay outside the neighborhood. From that day to this, Watts has never been the same. The neighborhood, stricken with poverty then, remains so to this day.
Was this the proper way to resist? What is your view of the Watts Riots? What advice would you offer to keep this from happening again?

The American Civil Rights Movement...The Organizations

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons
The Congress of Racial Equality
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense

The American Civil Rights Movement...The Personalities

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

You are Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. You are the son of an Atlanta minister who went on to become a minister yourself, earning a Ph.D., becoming the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the nonviolent movement for Civil Rights in America, and one of the most eloquent speakers of all time. You believe in Mahatma Gandhi's teachings of nonviolent direct action and agitated for equal rights your entire life. You felt very strongly that people should ban together to fight for equal rights amongst all Americans. While some people see your nonviolent philosophy as "passive" and weak, you believe that when you are knocked down, you should stand right back up and stand where you are, daring someone to strike your other cheek. While your nonviolent resistance strategies were tested time and again by the violence of whites, you refused to give up. You submitted to arrest many times and spent much time in jail, gladly giving up your freedom to continue the struggle and to educate others on the need for equal rights. You believe very strongly that nonviolent change is needed, because people's minds must be changed, not just their actions. For real change to occur you feel that people need to change the way they see themselves, the African-Americans, and the world. You become world famous for your march on Washington D.C. where you deliver your "I have a dream..." speech, as well as your "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" where you defend your nonviolent beliefs. In 1968, while leading a resistance movement in Memphis, Tennessee, you are shot down by an assassin's bullet.

Minister Malcolm X

You are Minister Malcolm X, minister in charge of Muslim Temple #7 in Harlem, New York. You were born Malcolm Little, the son of a Protestant minister who supported Marcus Garvey in the 1920s. Your father supported wholeheartedly the notion of black Africans returning to their native land. At a young age, your father was lynched before your eyes, sending your mother to an asylum and you and the other children to various family members. As a young man, you became troubled, getting into all sorts of illegal trouble. When you relocated to New York
City, you earned the nickname of "The Red Devil", because of your outrageous risk taking behavior and your red tinged hair. You became the leader of a gang, but were eventually caught, convicted of several robberies, and sent to the New York Penitentiary. While in prison, you became a Black Muslim, following the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, whom you and all of his followers considered to be a living prophet. During these days, you spoke of him as the "All wise, all knowing, Elijah Muhammad." You were his number disciple and voice. Your passion, power, sarcasm, and absolute belief brought in more young Muslim recruits than anybody else.
You fully believed in and vehemently spoke about the white devils. Elijah Muhammad through you argued that it was the white may who devoured and destroyed everything they touched and thereby out to be dealt with as they dealt with you, through violence. You quipped
more than once, that "I've turned the cheek so many times, both of your cheeks hurt." While you didn't directly advocate violence, you did recommend that when forced to, black men should not shrink from violence to defend themselves. You believed that black people, especially men, should be organized and militant, ready at a moments notice to respond as you often said, "By any means necessary."
As time went on however, you fell out of grace with Elijah Muhammad. He fathered children with three of his personal secretaries, cheating on his wife, but then refusing to adequately support the children. Against the wishes of the Black Muslims, you broke this story to the news and were banished from the Black Muslims. It is at this time, that you begin to travel abroad, and go on a religious pilgrimage to Mecca. On your Hadj, you worship with white Muslims and Muslims of all color and race. It is at this time, that you change your racial doctrine, beginning to preach racial unity although still not shrinking away from the use of violence. More than any other man in history, you understood what life was like in the inner city and how that could be changed and life of inner city blacks, made better. In 1968, just a few months before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., you are assassinated while giving a speech by followers of Elijah Muhammad.

Bob Moses

You are Bob Moses, but now go by Bob Parrish. You are a Howard University trained Math teacher who was born and raised in Harlem, New York. You were working on a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Harvard University, when your mother became ill and you dropped out to support her and your brothers and sisters by teaching math. In the late 1950s, while watching a report on voters rights activists in Mississippi, it struck you that you were doing nothing for the rights of your fellow African Americans. The next week, you joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. This organization attracted mostly young college students, or college aged working class blacks from all over the country, but mostly in the south. Its mission was to use nonviolent techniques to raise the consciousness of Americans to the problems of southern African-Americans in an attempt to get the government to intercede. SNCC had two plans, one, to agitate for an end to segregation and racism and two, to educated black Southerners in order to pass the literacy tests (so they could register to vote), get them to register to vote, and finally to give African-Americans the tools they need to free themselves from the bindings of segregation.
Bob Moses was a leader in McComb, Mississippi of SNCC's voter registration drives. As the leader he was arrested many times for nonviolent protest activities. He even attempted to place one deputy sheriff under citizen's arrest for violating the voting rights of African-Americans. In 1964, you developed the idea of Freedom Summer. A summer dedicated to education in Freedom Schools and agitation for voters' rights. It was to be kicked off by the Freedom Riders, mostly white college students riding interracially on buses to their deep south school sites. You were always deeply troubled over whether to use whites or not. On the one hand, you felt that whites being beaten and jailed over black rights, might attract more media attention than just blacks getting beaten. However, you worried that the use of whites would disenfranchise the blue collar local black activists who had been fighting for their rights for years, and would continue to long after the whites left at summer's end.
In 1964, you were training Freedom Riders in Oxford, Ohio, when you got the news. Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, three SNCC activists had disappeared outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. You and other SNCC volunteers held an all night vigil, hoping desperately that the three would reappear, unfortunately, they did not. They were murdered by a duty sheriff and at least five other members of the local Ku Klux Klan. That night, you changed your name to Bob Parrish, and said that you would never speak to white people again. You boarded a plane to Africa to return several years later. You now live in New York City and run the Algebra Project there.

Rosa Parks

You are Rosa Parks. A are a quiet, yet deceptively strong African American activist in Montgomery, Alabama. For years you had worked for the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), even being their state secretary. The summer before last, you went to the Highlander Folk School and along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., were trained in Gandhian, nonviolent resistance tactics.
You are soft spoken, hard working and quiet, but you are described by Dr. King, as one of the strongest people he's ever met. In 1955, on a day you pre-planned with the NAACP, you get arrested for violation of the segregated busing policy. Sitting in the row directly behind the white section, you and three others are asked to get up when the white section becomes full. At first, all four of you refuse the bus driver's request. After a second and third order to stand up, you are the last person refusing to rise. The bus driver informs you that he will get a police officer, if you refuse to stand up. You tell him to go ahead, and he does, he gets a local police officer who places you under arrest. You are the perfect poster child for nonviolent resistance, and the NAACP knows it. They cease the opportunity and organize a boycott of all the city's buses. The boycott lasts for one year and you and Dr. King emerge as its leader. Over one year, you protest and sing with other African-Americans demanding their rights, organizing carpools and other ways to get blacks to their jobs and back home again Montgomerey's blacks used the buses almost exclusively to get to work). After one year, the mayor ordered the buses to be integrated.

Fannie Lou Hamer

You are Fannie Lou Hamer, the youngest of twenty children. Your parents were poor sharecroppers who barely made ends meet. Every year, starvation was always close by. At an early age, you took your place in the fields along side your parents and your older brothers and sisters. Never in your life did you taste freedom. Illiterate, never having the chance to attend school, you never learned that you were granted certain inalienable rights. It wasn't until SNCC and Bob Moses came to town that you learned what your rights were and ever more powerfully, how to get them. You attended a Freedom School during Freedom Summer in 1964, and your life was changed forever. It was here that you first heard about the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments, as well as Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. You were outraged to find out that you had been denied these rights all your life and that no one had stood to fight for you. During that summer you resolve to struggle for your rights for your entire life if need be. You become active in every march, and sing loudest in every freedom song. You are subject to arrests and beatings often. You also push for and become a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, demonstrating for your rights all the way to the Democratic National Meeting in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

James Meredith

You are James Meredith. When you graduated from high school, you already knew where you wanted to go to college, the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss as it was better known. The only problem was that the University of Mississippi was all white, and you are an African-American. Early in high school, you became active in the NAACP, struggling against segregation and racism and attempting to raise consciousness. You were offered scholarships to attend several black colleges for free, but you were determined to pave the way for other African-Americans by becoming the first African-American to attend Ole Miss. You began by hiring the NAACP to sue the University of and state of Mississippi, while simultaneously leading protest marches. During one of the protests, you are shot in the leg while police officers and FBI agents watched. Eventually however, you were the first African-American to attend the university.

Septima Clark

You are Septima Clark, a powerful Civil Rights worker who founded the Citizenship Schools that both the SCLC and SNCC used to educate southern African-Americans. You believed wholeheartedly that education was the key to solving all the problems of the Southern Negro. You both loved and berated Dr. King as a "glamour queen" who chased newspaper reporters, photographers, causes, and anything else that would make them famous. You felt that Dr. King and the majority of the men of the SCLC avoided the difficult, often frustrating work of attempting to educate unschooled, impoverished, and ignorant people. You felt that education was the real calling of the movement. You felt that if you could educate the people, they could pass the literacy tests, as well as learn how to gain their own rights and their own freedoms. Through education, you felt adults could gain power. Through speaking their voices and their points of view, by making them do this, you gave them power. You didn't care how ignorant your students were, or thought they were, how badly spoken they were or thought they were, you made everyone speak, and speak with pride.

Melba Beales

You are Melba Beales, originally Melba Patillo. You were one of the "Little Rock Nine". You were one of nine African-American high schoolers chosen to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. You and eight others were specially chosen because of your intelligence and your resilience. You and the others were chosen because it was believed that you would represent yourselves and your community well. On the first day of classes, eight of the nine made plans to meet with your parents and go to school together. One student, however decided to go alone to school. When they arrived, a small riot was in progress. The white community had turned out in force to keep the African-American students out. The eight who were with their parents stayed for a few minutes and then left for their own safety. Your friend who was alone, became surrounded, with no support and nowhere to go, she waits for the bus at a bus stop, while the crowd hurls insults at her. Eventually, the 101st Airborne division is sent in to protect you. So everyday, you attend classes guarded by the United States army.

Stokeley Carmichael (Kwame Ture)

You are Kwame Ture, formerly Stokeley Carmichael, a college educated African-American activist. In the early 1960s, you became member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). You struggled with other Southern African-Americans through protests, freedom schools, mass arrests, and beatings. You are a devoted to the cause, willing to do anything that is necessary. By 1965, you are disheartened and disillusioned, you begin to feel that something is missing from the movement. In 1965, you are elected chairman of SNCC, defeating John L. Lewis, its passionate, but less confrontational leader. You decide that you are going to take SNCC to the next level. You become an increasingly militant and confrontational voice in the Civil Rights movement. You don't care who you offend, and you begin to clash openly and publicly with Dr. Martin Luther King, among others. You begin to use the phrase "Black Power", and "Black is Beautiful" to describe your new militancy. You still believe in the concepts of nonviolence, but you believe in a much more confrontational brand of nonviolence. You feel that Dr. King and other Civil Rights leaders walk too softly, too afraid that they will offend people rather than bring into the cause. Your view is, that some people need to be offended. You also believe that black people need to responsible for themselves, fighting for their own rights, rather than constantly relying on government officials and other white people to come to your aid and rescue you. You feel that "white rescue" alone can be more damaging than white oppression.

Huey Newton

You are Huey Newton, the founder and first leader of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Right after high school, you were drafted into the military and served as a soldier in the Vietnam War. It was there that your political activism began. In the rice paddies of Vietnam, you realized that you, a poor person of color was sent, along with many other poor people of color, to murder another group of poor people of color. You began to realize that the government of the United States oppresses and needs to oppress African-Americans. After the war, angry and disillusioned you returned to your home in Oakland, California. There, lounging around the house one day, you hear screeching car brakes, a scream in combination with an ambulance siren. You brush outside to find, a dead girl, killed by a speeding motorist. You are told by passers by and onlookers, that she is the fifth child that year to be killed by a car at that corner that year. You are told further that many attempts have been made to contact the city to have a street light put in, but to no avail. It was in that moment that the Black Panthers were created. That day, you gathered your friends and stood at that street corner and directed traffic all day. This lead to your first of many confrontations with police. With a few months, you had launched the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. This was a political party that recruited young black men to patrol their own streets, dedicated to the safety, prevention of crimes, and education of their own neighborhoods. Further, they actively encouraged all people of color to demand and fully exercise their constitutionally granted Civil Rights. In California, this included the right to openly carry weapons. Eventually you are tried and jailed for the killing of a police officers, a crime for which you claim to be innocent.

Eldridge Cleaver

You are Eldridge Cleaver, a member of the Black Panther Party for Self-defense, eventually becoming its Minister of Information, putting together the Black Panther Party Newspaper. You were born in Wabbaseka, Arkansas, moving with your family to Phoenix, Arizona, and then onto Los Angeles. In 1957, you were convicted of "assault with intent to murder " and served time in San Quentin and Folsom prisons. It was during this time that you wrote a collection of essays later published as your first book, entitled Soul on Ice ì. This book became the philosophical backbone for what would become the Black Panther Party for Self-defense In his essay collection, he recounted his interest in raping white women because he felt it would send shock waves through the white race.
In 1966, you were released from prison, moved to Oakland, California and helped to establish the Black Panthers. You grew in power and prominence, becoming the official party spokesman and Minister of Information. In 1968, you ran for president for the Peace and Freedom Party. A few months later, you were wounded in a police shoot-out, during which your friend, Bobby Hutton was killed. Faced with returning to prison, you jumped bail and escaped to Algeria, then Cuba, and then France. In each location you created and then continued the International Branch of the Black Panther Party.

Similar dreams divergent paths

A Civil Right Resitance Rally
Essential Question: What is the best way to gain Civil Rights? What is the best path to take?

Background

Although there is earlier evidence of slaves in St. Augustine, Florida, Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 is the first record of Africans being brought to America as slaves. It was here at this time that the resistance was begun. Feigned ignorance, placing rocks in the bottom of a cotton basket to offset its weight, running away, and even open rebellion were not uncommon events even from the beginning. Nevertheless, slavery became a Southern institution and remained so until 1865.
Although antislavery societies were formed, eloquent speeches were made arguing for its end, and William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of the Liberator, burned a copy of the Constitution in protest, slavery grew stronger until a cataclysmic Civil War was fought and three Constitutional Amendments (13th, 14th, and 15th) were passed.
During the Reconstruction Period, it seemed as if the recently freed African-Americans might actually be able to fully participate in American life as free citizens. With the Freedman's Bureau offering educational programs and the union troops enforcing the Constitutional Amendments, there seemed to be hope in the air. Unfortunately, during President Rutherford B. Hayes' Administration, the troops were pulled out of the South, and the new freedoms were replaced with Jim Crow Laws and defacto slavery. For decades after this, African-Americans, in the South, were subjected to literacy tests, poll taxes, poorly funded segregated public schools and facilities...an overall brutal and difficult existence.
Although resistance remained during this period, largely through the work of W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, and Marcus Garvey, a sustained organized resistance did not rise until three powerful events in the mid-1950s. First, in 1954, Thurgood Marshal argued that Linda Brown had the right to attend the school closer to her home rather than being bused several hours to the all "colored" school. In the Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision, schools and all public facilities and institutions were ordered to be desegregated. The problem was that while ordered to desegregate "with all due speed", the federal government left the process of desegregation up to the states. Second, in the same year, a teenager named Emmet Till while visiting family in Mississippi from his home in Chicago, "makes a pass" at an older, married white woman, hoping to impress his cousins. Later that night, the white woman's husband and brother in law appeared at the home of Till's uncle, Mose Wright, demanding that Emmet show himself. When they are refused, Till was taken from the house. The next morning his badly beaten body was found floating in the river. After a trial in which Mose Wright identified the two men as the kidnapers, they were found not guilty by an all white, all male jury, after only one hour of deliberations. Third, the secretary for the Mississippi NAACP, a seamstress named Rosa Parks, armed with a quiet strength and determination, refused to give up her seat to white passengers when the bus driver demanded. So began the Montgomerey Bus Boycott, a year long boycott of the city's buses, which also saw the emergence of Dr. Martin Luther King as a twenty-six year old resistance leader.
After 1954, the lives of Southern African-Americans would never be the same. The march for Civil Rights had begun. Although there would be pain, death, angst, struggle, and agony, over the coming decades, in the words of Arch-Bishop Desmond Tutu, "Once a people decide to be free, nothing can stop them." The destination had been chosen, Civil Rights, freedoms, the equality that the Constitution said was there's, now all that remained was the choice of which path to take.

Objective and Student Responsibilities

The purpose of this simulation is for students to fully explore the history of the Civil Rights movement in an effort to determine which resistance activist had the best approach to finally gaining their rights. To do this, students will become experts on the life and beliefs of an individual civil rights resistance activist, while gaining familiarity with several. At the same time, students will also examine several major events in the African-American Civil Rights movement. Each student will deliver a testimony outlining their character's resistance philosophy, then engage in a Socratic Seminar style discussion, during which they discuss how best to respond to specific Civil Rights Events described in the events hand out. The purpose of this discussion is to convince one another, and the "unconvinced", students and others who wish to participate in the Civil Rights movement, but are unsure how best to participate. At the end of the discussion, the `"unconvinced" must decide who they will follow and reveal this to the class. At the end of the simulation, students will be able to answer the essential questions of "What is the best way to gain Civil Rights? and What is the best path to take?"
Student Responsibilities:
All students will research and "become" either a resistance activist or a member of the unconvinced Students will complete a research paper describing the life, times, and particular beliefs of their individual resistance leader. Students will complete a two page testimony describing what their character is most known for in the Civil Rights movement, what their specific perspective on how best to achieve Civil Rights is, as well as how they feel African-Americans should respond to specific Civil Rights events. Students will deliver testimonies at a Civil Rights Rally held on the Spellman College campus. Students will then discuss their ideas, as well as the specific Civil Rights events in a Socratic Seminar style discussion, attempting to convince their colleagues, as well as the "unconvinced"of the rightness of their perspective.


Brian C. Gibbs
Theodore Roosevelt High School

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