Text Analysis: Segregation and Self Defense
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.