Theme
Teaching the movement as organized, many-voiced, unfinished work rather than a short chapter with a tidy ending.
Journal entries
Research ideas
emerging
A structured review of the first names, images, questions, and verbs in my Civil Rights Movement unit — testing whether the curriculum presents people as organizers with agency or as icons and suffering bodies.
Reading & influences
Article · Melinda D. Anderson
The article that made me audit my own history education. Anderson follows teachers who abandoned the textbook version — a few famous heroes and a tidy ending — for the fuller story: grassroots organizers, churches, women, and nuanced portraits of figures like Parks and King. It is where I finally learned that Rosa Parks was a trained organizer, not a tired seamstress, and it sent me to Aldon Morris next. Read it as a teacher of any subject: the question is not whether your textbook is wrong but what its tidiness is protecting.
Article · Aldon Morris
Morris — the sociologist of the civil rights movement as an organized, indigenous, strategic effort — traces the line from Emmett Till and Rosa Parks through to Black Lives Matter. Two things I keep turning over: his account of Bayard Rustin, a brilliant tactician of the March on Washington who could not safely be made the public face of the movement because he was gay; and the dismantling of the collective-behavior picture of protest as spontaneous emotion. Movements succeed through planning and discipline. Whoever gets described as irrational gets managed instead of heard — which is exactly the mechanism my racialized rigor work studies at classroom scale.
Podcast · Learning for Justice, Southern Poverty Law Center
I am listening to this little by little, and it is the sustained version of what Anderson's article started for me: scholars taking apart the cleaned-up story a season at a time — the organized, strategic history underneath the heroes-and-holidays version. What I appreciate most as a teacher is that every episode ends with classroom-ready guidance, so the fuller story does not stay a private correction; it becomes something I can actually teach. This is the audio companion to my own unlearning.
Book · Hasan Kwame Jeffries
Jeffries helps me see curriculum as a sequence of choices rather than a neutral container. If I begin with only the most recognizable leaders and the most violent photographs, students can leave knowing that injustice existed without understanding how ordinary people organized against it. This work is pushing me to rebuild the unit around agency, strategy, contested ideas, and the movement's unfinished life.
Article · John D. McCarthy & Mayer N. Zald
Resource mobilization theory gives me a direct challenge to accounts of protest as irrational crowd behavior. Movements acquire resources, build organizations, cultivate relationships, make strategic choices, and sustain action under pressure. Teaching that infrastructure restores thought and agency to people whom a cleaned-up curriculum too often presents only as victims or symbols.