Text Analysis: Segregation and Self Defense

Text Analysis: Segregation and Self Defense: Text

In the examination of Blair Kelly's Right to Ride, we were encouraged to compare Kelly's history of the early 20th century to other focused narratives like Grace Elizabeth Hale's examination of consumerism and race and to other, more traditional narratives. In this student discussion, I compared Kelly's history with the histories that are typically taught in American high schools. Additionally, this discussion required an examination of the primary sources that Kelly used to build her historical narrative.

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In Civil Rights in the 20th Century I read and examined The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis' and Up Against the Wall: The Role of Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party by Curtis Austin. The paper presented here synthesized these texts to answer the question, "Was non-violence or aggressive self-defense more effective at achieving the civil rights movement's goals in the mid-twentieth century?" After reviewing the texts and their sources, I came to the conclusion that Malcolm X's "ballot or the bullet" question to be a false choice... both were integral to each other for to achieve success.

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Inspired by my research of Theoharis and Austin's texts, this set of lesson plans to has students examine the diverse and nuanced approaches to the civil rights movement of the mid twentieth century. In this set of lessons students begin by examining excerpts from several primary sources from the period. After, students research the philosopheis and tactics from a diverse list of civil rights leaders in order to participate in a socratic seminar in character. This seminar focuses, not only the philosophies of these individuals but in the tactics they used to broaden who "we the people" applied to.

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Text Analysis: Segregation and Self Defense: Work

Reflection

Thematic examination of historical “eras” was daily fare for Civil Rights in the 20th Century. Examining the several monographs on specific periods of civil rights activism in the post-bellum United States, was truly fascinating. Consumption and segregation, massive resistance, the 13th amendment, the political activism of the Black Panthers, and the “New Jim Crow” of mass incarceration in the United States provided insights into historic themes in the movement that I had not been aware of. But two texts that stood out the most to me were Jeane Theoharis’ The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and Blair Kelly’s Right to Ride. In the analysis of these texts, I was able to get a much broader yet more sophisticated understanding of streetcar segregation in the south, segregation that would be challenged on busses by the iconic Rosa Parks more than a half a century later. What I found from these secondary texts is that they, and other readings for the course, humanized the study of history and fleshed out the organizers, communities and riders that challenged the looming threat of becoming a “Jim Crow” nation. Even the iconic Rosa Parks is portrayed, in Theoharis’ text, as a more sophisticated and complicated figure than we learned about from those very early ages in our schools. These texts, and others, set the stage and direction, then for a series of lessons that I created to teach about the individuals of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Text Analysis: Segregation and Self Defense: Text