The long game

As we delve more deeply into the Civil Rights Movement and I listen to Hasan Kwame Jeffries discuss understanding and teaching it, I keep thinking about how I have taught the movement in the past. My positionality has shaped the content I considered essential, the images I selected, and the skills I helped students develop. I am reflecting on that now as both a learner and a teacher.

Aldon Morris's critique of collective behavior theory has made me reconsider the wide-angle lens through which white critics — and sometimes white teachers — have interpreted the movement. Even when my intentions are justice-oriented, omission and ellipsis can still add to its whitewashing. A high school curriculum can call people minor characters when they were central to the movement's organization, imagination, and survival. I am asking what must change within me and on paper if I want to bring the movement to life, honor the people who led it, and give voice to those still leading it.

I think about the pictures I have chosen: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, children struck by water from fire hoses, police dogs attacking teenagers. My intent was to show the leaders, the different methods, the goals, the cruelty of anti-Black racism, and the resolve required to stay the course. But intent is not impact. I may have shown struggle at a distance without showing enough of the organizers' humanity, individuality, ordinary lives, and extraordinary discipline. Without meaning to, I may have reproduced the very collective-behavior lens I now want students to question.

Morris's Indigenous Perspective gives me another place to begin. In his scholarship, indigenous refers to the agency, institutions, culture, creativity, leadership, and resources generated within Black communities; it does not refer here to Native or Indigenous identity. This lens makes the movement visible as organized from within rather than caused by an irrational crowd reacting from without. I could begin the unit there: not with disorder, but with people building the capacity to sustain change despite repression.

Teachers often begin with the end in mind. I am thinking instead about first moments, first words, and first images. I will revise my plans so Fannie Lou Hamer and Brad Lomax are not brief mentions. I want students to encounter Bayard Rustin and other people who led from intersections of oppression before the curriculum settles into its most familiar names. I may begin with one question: When did the Civil Rights Movement end? The fuller answer is that it did not. It changes form, language, leadership, and strategy across generations, but the long game continues.

That realization moved from my brain to my heart while reading. Morris writes about the decade between Emmett Till's murder and the overthrow of the Jim Crow order in the South. My first response was that a decade was a long time to wait for change. Then I understood: that is the long game. It is larger than hope for tomorrow. It is work undertaken for people whose freedom the organizers themselves might never live to see.

Resource mobilization theory sharpens the contradiction. A group cannot be both a rudderless mob driven by primitive impulses and a movement capable of raising money, coordinating institutions, planning in minute detail, adapting under pressure, and sustaining action for years. I want students to understand the organization, planning, prayer, pivots, gratitude, and resolve required to keep working for justice under repression. Those are not background details. They are the movement.

This reflection leaves me with a concrete obligation. I need to compare what I meant to teach with what my materials actually center. Which people appear only as suffering bodies? Who is shown thinking, planning, disagreeing, resting, caring, funding, and leading? Whose name is attached to the strategy? My curriculum is not neutral simply because I inherited it. The long game asks me to revise it honestly.