Personal Reflections, and Implications for Replication

TOWARDS RAISING NOT JUST BETTER MUSICIANS, BUT BETTER PEOPLE

Elena Claudine Bennett B. A., Cornell University--College of Arts and Sciences, 1978 M.Div., Yale Divinity School, 1983

PROJECT

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

EDUCATION (Curriculum and Instruction)

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, SACRAMENTO

SPRING 2010

TOWARDS RAISING NOT JUST BETTER MUSICIANS, BUT BETTER PEOPLE

A Project

Elena Claudine Bennett

Approved by:

, Committee Chair Crystal Olson, Ed.D.

, Second Reader Porfirio Loeza, Ph.D.

Date

Student: Elena Claudine Bennett

I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the

University format manual, and that this project is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for the Project.

, Associate Chair Rita M. Johnson, Ed.D. Date

Department of Teacher Education

iii

Abstract

TOWARDS RAISING NOT JUST BETTER MUSICIANS, BUT BETTER PEOPLE

Elena Claudine Bennett

Throughout history, music has powerfully influenced social justice movements and attitudes in every corner of the world. But the human race continues to struggle today with prejudice and unfairness manifested in many forms, around the globe, and music still has a role to play in facing this great challenge. This project therefore asked: how can music education in an American school help to develop not only better singers and instrumentalists but more tolerant, compassionate, historically informed, socially enlightened students? Over the course of eight weeks, this project taught the history and music of America’s Underground Railroad and of the Civil Rights movement to children in first through fourth grade, to see how those studies might positively affect children’s attitudes towards social justice and their behavior towards other people. I observed responses to the historical material, to the music studies in class, and to the mixed-media assembly shared with our school community. Though striking attitude and behavioral changes were not widely obvious in the short-term,

iv students and adults alike responded thoughtfully and enthusiastically to the project.

Long-term benefits are expected.

, Committee Chair Crystal Olson, Ed.D.

Date

v DEDICATION

I dedicate this project to Jim and Jean Strathdee, whose music and ministry for social justice around the world has inspired me for many years.

vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I give heartfelt thanks for the academic advice, encouragement, and inexhaustible support of Crystal Olson and Porfirio Loeza, my mentors and friends throughout this project.

I am grateful to Christy Vail and my colleagues at Sacramento Country Day

School for allowing flexibility in my teaching schedule these past two years, without which I could not have undertaken this project.

For their video and PowerPoint editing, I commend Sarah Song, Porfirio

Loeza, and Tom Wroten.

Finally, I thank my husband Gary and sister Carmela for patiently letting me bounce ideas off them, sometimes for hours.

vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

Dedication ...... vi

Acknowledgments ...... vii

Chapter

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Challenge ...... 1

Why, and to Whom, Does This Question Matter? ...... 1

The Author’s Background and the Context of This Inquiry ...... 2

Procedure ...... 3

Literature Review ...... 5

Research Methods and Documentation ...... 5

Significance for Other Teachers ...... 6

Limitations ...... 7

2. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ...... 8

Introduction ...... 8

The Practice and Theory of Arts in Education ...... 8

History and Role of Music in Social Justice Movements ...... 19

Group Singing as an Expression of Emotion and Solidarity ...... 21

Topical Song-Writing as Social Protest ...... 28

Music as a Source of Cultural Strength and Pride ...... 37 viii Why Teach Music of Peace and Justice in School? ...... 42

Character Education ...... 42

Parental Guidance Suggested? ...... 46

Singing Their Way into History ...... 47

Releasing the Imagination: From Empathy to Hope to Action ...... 48

3. DEVELOPMENT AND DOCUMENTATION OF THE PROJECT ...... 52

“He Said It’s Not Just How People Look…That Matters” ...... 53

In the Days of Slavery ...... 66

Teaching the Music ...... 69

Applying the Moral Lesson ...... 80

Rehearsing the Assembly ...... 82

Presenting “Lift Every Voice and Sing” ...... 88

4. EVALUATION OF THE PROJECT, PERSONAL REFLECTIONS, AND IMPLICATIONS FOR REPLICATION ...... 91

Evaluation of the Project ...... 91

Personal Reflections ...... 99

Next Time ...... 103

Implications for Replication ...... 107

Final Thoughts ...... 109

Appendix A. Script for “Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Musical Celebration of Black History, Civil Rights, and Hope” ...... 111

Appendix B. PowerPoint Presentation Used in the Assembly: Song Lyrics and Film Footage ...... 122 ix Appendix C. Video of the Lower School Assembly, February 23, 2010 ...... 123

Appendix D. Recommended Resources ...... 124

Appendix E. Student Artwork and Photographs ...... 130

References ...... 141

x 1

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

The Challenge

I teach music to children – not as a job, or a craft, but as an art. I teach them using songs, dance, puppet and human dramas, instrumental music, musical games, history lessons, movies, visual art, and literature of all kinds. Frequently, even the youngest students then turn around and share their music with others, in the process inspiring and educating their peers, their families, their concert audiences, their teachers, and even the wider community beyond our school. The perennial question for me is: what ultimately is the goal of teaching music in this way? How can I design and implement a more human curriculum that will effectively create—that is, raise up—not just better musicians (or poets, dancers, actors, and artists), but better people?

How can I use music and other arts to develop more tolerant, compassionate, historically informed, socially enlightened people, who care about their fellow humans and celebrate the differences between them?

Why, and to Whom, Does This Question Matter?

This question should be important, in the first place, to government policy- makers, as they weigh curriculum and school funding choices which will influence the strength of our citizenry now and in the future. The question certainly also matters to school administrators—public and private, urban and rural, affluent and struggling alike—as they examine and reexamine the purpose of schooling in American society and education’s direct role in children’s everyday lives. The issue is important to

2 parents, as they seek excellent, balanced education for their children. It profoundly concerns me and all teachers in my position, as we identify and struggle towards our highest goals as individual educators. Above all, the question matters for our children, who seek and deserve spiritual inspiration just as much as they need cognitive development in their schools.

The Author’s Background and the Context of This Inquiry

I am a classical violinist, with a bachelor’s degree in English and American

Literature, a minor in music, and a master’s degree in theological studies. For 30 years

I have taught school and directed music with all levels of children and adults in schools and churches, in settings ranging from the Arizona desert to inner cities to prosperous suburbs. I currently teach music full-time in an independent private school, to all the children in the first six grades. My students range from four and five-year- old preschoolers, to 9 and 10-year-old fourth graders. Every student comes to my classroom for 30 to 45-minute music classes, three to four times per week. I usually see them in groups of 15 to 20 students, though each grade also comes once a week in a large group which ranges from 30 to 40 students.

I am strongly supported by an experienced, creative, and musical lower school principal, an appreciative headmaster, and a uniformly open-minded and talented community of colleagues. Parents are generally affluent and frequently demanding, with high academic expectations of our school, but also typically enthusiastic about the arts and the development of their children’s character. I have most of the children in music class for years—usually for five or six years consecutively. I am personally

3 responsible for developing our lower school music curriculum. That is, I am expected and trusted to decide what, how, when, and why I teach everything I do. I feel that in this context I have both the opportunity and the responsibility to develop my students not only as musicians, but as broad-minded thinkers, as global citizens, and as people of conscience and heart.

Procedure

The overall context for this project was a school-year curriculum which sought to deepen moral values and teach appreciation for the whole human family. For example, the year started with folk dancing, using it to foster, as Sanna Longden says,

“civility, community, cooperation, and character” (2002, p. 2). In October we celebrated nature’s bounty with cultures around the world, considering the needs of our environment and of the people who labor to bring food to our tables. November found us honoring ancestors with respect and love and expressing gratitude for our lives through various art forms. As we approached December’s Winter Concert, we considered ever-changing peace issues which related to our school community and the planet. We prepared music about world peace and unity, paying close attention to the meanings of our songs and how they apply to our own lives. This theme of peace and unity was the common thread linking our arts activities throughout the school year.

In chapter 3 of this paper I describe and document the teaching of one major unit of this curriculum. The unit was a study of the American Civil Rights Movement through its music, in the course of which we developed a musical assembly and shared it with the rest of our school. The research for this project was done from January 4th

4 to February 24th, 2010, as I taught the history and music of the movement to 150 students of the lower school. Our study of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Civil Rights

Movement, and the segregation era — including a brief look at the Harlem

Renaissance – began in the weeks leading to his birthday. We then went back to the roots of African American history, through discussions of slavery and abolition. I introduced children not only to the music but to the social as well as artistic and intellectual goals of these movements. Preschoolers did not study civil rights per se, but learned about African dancing and also considered diversity and tolerance through stories like Ferdinand the Bull and Giraffes Can’t Dance. First graders took a general look at slavery, segregation, King’s speeches, Ruby Bridges, and the music of freedom marches. Second graders reviewed the same things but also concentrated on Harriet

Tubman, the Underground Railroad, Rosa Parks, and the Montgomery bus boycott of

1955. Third graders reached farther back into history as they studied the beginnings of slavery in Jamestown and the southern colonies, which coincided with their classroom study of colonial America. Besides reviewing all of the above, fourth graders traced the evolution of jazz from its roots in African American history to the present and began playing jazz on the recorder. Our studies culminated in the community celebrations on February 23rd and 24th entitled “Lift Every Voice and Sing: A

Musical Celebration of Black History, Civil Rights, and Hope,” which included narration, group singing, solos, video, and a bit of drama. I guided students to treat all of this as not simply a music performance but as a “teach-in”—as service—to the entire school community.

Literature Review

I began with a review of literature on the general theory and practice of arts in education, with an emphasis on the writing of John Dewey (1934), Elliot Eisner

(1998), and Donald Arnstine (1967). Profoundly relevant to my project were their discussions of why school is essential in the first place, what matters most in curriculum, the conditions under which students learn best, and the critical importance of esthetic experience in schools. Second, I considered some of the various roles music has long played in movements—that is, in human lives—struggling to survive adversity and oppression. From the Underground Railroad to freedom marches, from concentration camps to labor and farmworker movements, music has united, educated, and energized people working towards freedom and justice. Music has done this around the world, throughout human history, and continues to do so today. Third, I considered the question of why social justice music should be taught to American schoolchildren and how it serves the highest, most critical goal of all teaching—what

Paolo Freire (1970) and Maxine Greene (1995, 1998) call the “conscientizaton” of students.

Research Methods and Documentation

I welcomed musicians Jim and Jean Strathdee into my classroom to share socially conscious music with my third and fourth-grade students. I interviewed faculty members, administrators, and parents at our school, for their impressions of ways our music class activities influenced students’ values, character, and social

6 behavior. I documented these interviews with tape-recordings and written notes. I chronicled children’s responses to songs before and after we discussed their social and historical backgrounds. I used narrative writing to describe children’s dialogues, conversations and activities in class. I encouraged children to express themselves outside of class in original art and poetry about human rights; I observed these to document children’s feelings, interests, and attitudes, wondering how they might change over the course of our two-month project. I recorded children singing and acting out mini-dramas, such as Rosa Parks’s civil disobedience on an Alabama bus in

1955. Through this research I wanted to observe the effects, if any, that learning socially conscious and culturally sensitive music has on children’s developing values and character. Can children’s souls be strengthened, along with their social consciousness, through arts education?

Significance for Other Teachers

I feel sure that many music teachers already believe in what I am trying to research in this project—they just don’t make (or aren’t given) the time to put their beliefs into practice in their curriculae, classrooms, and concert halls. Perhaps articulating these higher goals and discussing ways to pursue them actively with children will inspire other teachers--not to replace or detract from traditional musical skill-building, but to enrich it. I will look for ways to share the reflections and narratives of this project with others by submitting articles to The Orff Echo or MENC publications.

Limitations

This project had several limitations. In the first place, I worked with a limited number of children, of mostly similar socioeconomic backgrounds, in a relatively small school. This project could not be a sweeping study of, say, a whole generation of children, or a large population of students from a wide array of backgrounds. I would describe our school’s cultural diversity as moderate — more diverse than many suburban schools around the country, but certainly limited in diversity compared to most urban public schools in California.

Second, my experience and time with these students was limited. I do not know most of them intimately outside of school, and even on the campus I have limited time to spend with them outside of our music classes and performances. I needed observations from other adults on campus to add to my own during the months of this research. The changes in attitude that I was looking for may be subtle and not easy to see in a matter of weeks. I expect that these attitudes will develop over a period of years, beyond the timeframe of this project.

Finally, the project looked at possibilities, not quantifiable facts. That is, it attempted to influence human values and change attitudes. But attitudes cannot be dictated. No researcher, teacher, or even parent can ever prove or control what goes on in children’s hearts. Character and values can be observed, discussed, described, stimulated, and demonstrated at times, but not scientifically proven. This research was limited to what children chose to say aloud and what they demonstrated by their actions.

Chapter 2

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

Introduction

This review of the literature explores how character and social justice consciousness can be nurtured in elementary education, specifically through music. I will look at the literature in three broad areas, beginning with the general practice and theory of arts in education. I will then briefly review the history and varying roles of music in social justice movements, and conclude with reflections by writers and musicians on why music of conscience can benefit children in school. These three areas will inform and support both my long-term goal—a year-long elementary music curriculum oriented around social justice themes—and the project which is the subject of this paper: teaching the Civil Rights movement through music to students from first through fourth grade, observing children’s responses to the material, and culminating in a school-wide celebration of civil rights music led by second graders.

The Practice and Theory of Arts in Education

For more than a century, education theorists—from Lester Frank Ward to John

Dewey, Donald Arnstine, and Elliot Eisner—have sought to define and articulate the main purposes for educating people in schools. Why is schooling essential? The following pages will review where these authors’ answers to that question converged.

But moving beyond their theories on why schools matter, how exactly did they propose we practice good educating? Under what conditions do students learn best?

What is most important in curricula, and what do we really mean by literacy? What

9 characteristics do we expect in good teachers and look for in students? Teachers engaged in Orff-Schulwerk, or in Reggio Emilia-inspired schools, also put into practice valuable answers to these questions. In addition, though Dewey’s Art As

Experience (1934), John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), and Jun’ichiro Tanazaki’s In

Praise of Shadows (1977) were not about education in schools specifically, their respective reflections on esthetic experience and on seeing beyond the superficial were as relevant to educators as they were to artists.

Elliot Eisner (1998) believed that one of the most basic aims of education was to “expand and deepen the kinds of meaning people can have in their lives” (p. 16). By this he meant finding meaning in things both concrete and abstract, in the real world around us and in the world of ideas and feelings. Humans need and want to make sense of the natural world, of the societies past and present in which they live, of their own bodies and emotions. That search for meaning was also at the heart of John

Berger’s (1972) discussion of how to approach art. Berger regarded the classic fine art of the past, which cultural elitists have mystified and removed from everyday life, as properly belonging to anyone who sought to derive real meaning from it. Regardless of their background or station in life, people needed to learn and to choose to view art actively, thoughtfully, and to seek meaning from it for themselves; such viewers would judge as well as enjoy art, find connections between it and their own experience, and try to apply those judgments and insights to their own lives and societies. Engaging art of the past in this more mature and powerful way would add new meanings to ordinary people’s lives.

The need and search for deeper meanings in life also appeared in Dewey’s

(1934) reflections on esthetic experience. He wrote with dismay that “only occasionally in the lives of the many are the senses fraught with the sentiment that comes from deep realization of instrinsic meanings…we use the senses to arouse passion but not to fulfill the interest of insight” (p. 21). Eisner (1998), Berger (1972), and Dewey all knew that to live vital and rich lives, people need to lead lives full of experience, “clothed in meaning” (Dewey, p. 57). People need actively to seek meaning wherever possible, whether in artistic or in educational endeavors. These writers understood that effectual education in good schools can help students begin and persevere in that quest.

For humans to find as much meaning as possible in life, as in art, they must develop their minds. Thus another fundamental reason to send people to school was to develop their cognitive abilities, in as many ways as possible. Eisner (1998), for example, noted that the human mind was “a form of cultural achievement” (p. 16). He meant that while we are born with cognitive potential, what we do with our minds— what opportunities we have to develop them—will determine what kinds of thinkers we become. This idea reflected Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences

(Smith, 2008), which proposed that humans possess not one but various kinds of intelligences, largely operating interdependently. All of the theorists reviewed thus far understood that schooling was critical to raising people who could think, in the broadest and deepest sense. Further on, this paper will consider how exactly they understood cognitive ability and how they proposed those abilities be developed.

Besides finding more meaning in life, why else was it imperative to develop young minds in school? It was important because our paths through this life are fraught with obstacles of all kinds. Widely and highly developed thinking skills are critical to help people meet and productively overcome challenge. Donald Arnstine

(1967) believed that another of the most important reasons to send people to school was to equip them to deal intelligently and confidently with life’s unpredictable challenges, whenever they might arise. Free, democratic societies needed schools to turn out resilient thinkers, good at solving problems, not only for their own personal benefit but also for the good of others around them. School is a good place, then, to challenge students in many ways, artistically, intellectually, scientifically, even spiritually, to help them grow.

In Dewey’s (1934) discussion of having an esthetic experience, he, too, saw challenge and our responses to it as crucial.

An environment that was always and everywhere congenial to the straightaway

execution of our impulsions would set a term to growth as surely as one always

hostile would irritate and destroy…we all recognize that a balance between

furthering and retarding conditions is the desirable state of affairs—provided

that the adverse conditions bear intrinsic relation to what they obstruct instead

of being arbitrary and extraneous. Yet what is evoked is not just quantitative,

or just more energy, but is qualitative, a transformation of energy into

thoughtful action…. (Dewey, pp. 62- 63)

For Arnstine (1967) and Dewey, students in school, artists interacting with their own environment, scientists probing the natural world, or any combination of the above, needed to meet, embrace, and work through a variety of challenges in order to grow as individuals and as community members. Both writers would agree that one of the most fundamental purposes of school was to help students become confident, active problem-solvers, in the classroom and beyond it.

One more especially compelling reason to educate people in school was articulated in the 1880s by Lester Frank Ward. Ward was convinced that a system of education “properly constructed and properly distributed” (Kliebard, 1982, p. 23) could be a powerful instrument of social progress. By producing more open-minded, humanitarian citizens, schools could help to ameliorate governmental dishonesty, social vice, racism, sexism, and economic inequality. In the 20th century, John Dewey

(1934) and many other educators came to share Ward’s conviction that good education would convince and equip people to work for social justice. Certainly Dewey believed deeply in community, in people working and learning together for the good of all, in social, political, economic, and educational as well as artistic endeavors. He regretted the compartmentalizing of modern life, which created workers laboring without purpose and without esthetic connection to their tools; consumers separated from the producers of material goods; artists and their creations separated from the everyday life of their communities; races and social groups indifferent or hostile to each other.

“Of much of our experience as it is actually lived under present economic and legal institutional conditions, it is only too true that these separations [between practical life

13 and esthetic understanding] hold” (Dewey, p. 21). Such conditions did not promote social progress, in Dewey’s view.

Authors such as Berger (1972) and Brazilian theater director Augusto Boal

(1979) addressed the subject of social inequity in different but also thought-provoking ways. Berger accused art establishment experts of being “clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline” (Berger, p. 23), who fostered shallow, elitist attitudes towards fine art and propped up “the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture”

(Berger, p. 23). By learning to view art differently, though, ordinary people could address the problem of social justice, even as they found more meaning for their own individual lives. Boal, too, worked to open people’s minds and raise social consciousness through experiences in the arts. Strongly influenced by Paolo Freire’s

(1970) pedagogical theories, Boal believed that people could learn to care and do more about historical social oppression by participating actively in provocative kinds of street theater. From Ward to Boal, these educators and artists affirmed that the right kinds of experiences and education could keep people’s lives—including their social, political, religious, and business lives—from becoming morally and ethically bankrupt. Right-minded education and schooling could and should help society become more just.

Arnstine (1967) valuably reminded us, however, not to obsess over the best theoretical purposes of education, since there are many worthy ones. For him, the bottom line was: students go to school in order to learn how to learn for the rest of their lives. At some point they need to think about their own reasons for getting an

14 education. “In a society that values freedom of choice and self-determination, there are good reasons for enabling students themselves to makes their own selections about how much effort they will expend” in pursuing various kinds of education (Arnstine, p. 345). But how personally students invest in the process of education depends not on theory but on practices in school. How, then, should we put the theories into practice in real classrooms?

To start with, the conditions under which students work in classrooms are critical. Arnstine (1967) stressed that the atmosphere, attitudes and activities of classroom life should lead students to acquire dispositions to learn. That is, to become able, wide-ranging learners, students needed to live, work, and play under conditions which made them want to learn. Such conditions would include activities which allowed students to experiment and which stimulated their curiosity. Even young students would help to choose activities and would practice academic skills in entertaining rather than tedious ways. Teachers would be concerned about the social relevance of the subjects presented in their classrooms. They would not place

“arbitrary restraints…on…freedom of thought, of decision, or of social interaction

(Arnstine, p. 355). Students would not be grouped rigidly, or channeled into or away from certain studies, as developmentalist G. Stanley Hall advocated at the turn of the twentieth century. They would be encouraged to investigate many subjects, at their own pace, as their own interests and skills developed.

To put all of this in Dewey’s (1934) terms, in order for students to become strong, self-motivated learners, they would need the kind of environment which led to

15 his idea of a complete esthetic experience. Initiative, originality, improvisation, would be highly valued. Classroom life would not shut out the natural world but would be in touch with it as closely as possible. Classroom activities would relate clearly and purposefully to real life. Teaching activities would be active, dynamic processes, continuously changing over time, provoking new questions even as they yielded new understandings, all moving students on to new, emotionally satisfying products or outcomes (not just tests). The conditions which Arnstine (1967) recommended—like the environment Dewey advocated—would enable students of any age to have profound learning experiences, even as they enabled artists to have esthetic ones.

Under such conditions, do children’s cognitive skills really develop?

Absolutely, declared Eisner (1998). But students would gain fluency and confidence in many forms of literacy, not just in language and numbers. Eisner aptly commented on this: “The three Rs tap too little of what the mind can do” (Eisner, p. 45). For, as

Dewey (1934) put it, “to think effectively in terms of relations of qualities is as severe a demand upon thought as to think in terms of symbols, verbal and mathematical” (p.

47). Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences also had many implications for this kind of educational practice. Classroom studies and activities should enable each student to recognize and to strengthen his own personal blend of intelligences (Smith,

2008). So student learning would not be limited to reading, writing, mathematics, and sciences. Students would be allowed to explore as deeply as possible their individual strengths in areas such as music, visual art, theater, dance, physical education, social studies, environmental studies—perhaps even community service. Arts education

16 would be especially valued. Whether developing dance skills, learning to play instruments, acting in dramas, designing pottery, or discovering the world of gardening, students would learn to create and to use what Eisner termed “forms of representation.” Dewey called that artistic expression. Reggio Emilia teachers would include it in play, the work of childhood. Followers of Carl Orff call it Schulwerk.

Experimenting with such forms enables students to communicate publically and sometimes permanently their inner thoughts, feelings, and flights of imagination. No matter how one labels such activities, what happens is cognitive development.

Students definitely learn to think, in many ways.

John Dewey’s (1934) “The School of Today” brilliantly summed up the best in educational practice. In it he vividly described an elementary school teeming with vitality and life. In this hive of educational activity, students of all ages built things, cooked, grew plants, studied and cared for animals, examined objects from nature, made music. They read widely, wrote poetry and letters, studied arithmetic and biology, pondered history. They learned to listen, to debate, to plan and organize, to reflect on their work, to help govern their school, to communicate and to work cooperatively with both peers and elders. Teachers counseled, supported, instructed, enabled students to take various kinds of risks, without dominating or manipulating.

Undoubtedly they also encouraged students to consider ideas and see things from different points of view, as Western readers are asked to do in Tanazaki’s In Praise of

Shadows (1977). Dewey’s school sounded more colorful and bustling than the traditional Japanese rooms Tanazaki described, yet its own clear sense of order and

17 harmony prevailed there, too. Dewey singled out student confidence as one of the most striking characteristics of the school; the children were joyful, self-assured, and supremely confident in the value of their individual efforts and products. But most impressive was the way in which students and teachers together created a little world of their own and filled it with things and activities that mattered to them. Activities had definite purpose and meaning within the immediate environment of the school, which is why children cared about them. Students and teachers together felt a kind of ownership of the place, they belonged there, what they did and learned there mattered.

Yet the school was not isolated, cut off from the outside world they lived in. That larger world mattered too, and the things they did in school related meaningfully. All the elements of Dewey’s concept of esthetic experience interconnected and unfolded there. Clearly, this kind of learning is embraced in Reggio Emilia schools, just as it is celebrated in Orff-Schulwerk. I have experienced it in some of my own classrooms. It is powerful and unforgettable.

Finally, it is interesting to consider a bit further the crucial role of teachers in education. In the view of early reformer Joseph Mayer Rice (Kliebard, 1982), incompetent teachers devastated school systems and needed to be held accountable for unsuccessful students. Rice’s heart for students was in the right place, but he ended up focusing relentlessly on efficiency, time management, and tightly controlled goals for both students and teachers in schools, rather than on quality experiences. In contrast, one can compare the qualities Arnstine (1967) considered requisite in an exemplary teacher to those of an artist seeking Dewey’s (1934) kind of esthetic experience.

Arnstine felt that such a person needed to be curious, independent and critical in thinking, flexible and imaginative in their choice of materials (p. 365). He described good teachers as people who naturally craved the freedom to make intellectual and creative choices for themselves, rather than follow arbitrary mandates from administrators. At the same time, such teachers were also good at working with others, cooperatively making decisions. They loved to learn, especially in the areas they taught. Exceptional teachers would see learning as a dynamic, evolving experience, rather than a cut-and-dried textbook exercise. They would enjoy growing along with students as they learned, asking new questions, probing further. Good teachers, as described by Arnstine, were keenly aware of their own abilities and dispositions and used them to advantage when working with students.

According to Dewey (1934), artists seeking esthetic experience would need all of the above qualities. Dewey went further and pointed out that even scientific kinds of thinkers, which would include many classroom teachers, shared with artists a disposition to “emotionalized thinking” (p. 76). That is, people leading students to experiences in the sciences still follow intuitions and feelings to some degree. Like artists, “they, too, press forward toward some end dimly and imprecisely prefigured, groping their way as they are lured on by the identity of an aura in which their observations and reflections swim” (Dewey, p. 76). He meant that explorations in the sciences, or even in mathematics, sometimes end up in unforeseen places. Those experiences may evolve over time and lead to new, unpredictable conclusions; these

19 will likely lead to even more questions, as do esthetic experiences, if the teacher who is guiding allows his students to inquire freely, with open minds.

Arnstine’s (1967) thinking certainly reflected Dewey’s (1934) in these and many other ways. So did the work of many other 20th-century theorists, from Elliot

Eisner (1998) to Howard Gardner (Smith, 2008). Some of the educators reviewed above applied the ideas they held in common with Dewey specifically to the art of teaching school, while artists such as Berger (1972), Freire (1970), Boal (1979), Orff,

Tanazaki (1977), spoke of artistic experiences in a broader sense. At the center of it all stood Dewey, who simultaneously “personified and transcended what…[became]

American education in the twentieth century” (Kliebard, 1982, p. 9). As America moves through the 21st century, schools continue to face enormous challenges, and consensus among theorists and educators is still hard to reach. The reflections and convictions of these theorists, and especially of Dewey (1934), remain relevant, provocative, and inspiring.

History and Role of Music in Social Justice Movements

“Right was the tyrant king who once said, ‘Beware of a movement that sings’…whenever and wherever the oppressed challenge the old order, songs are on their lips.” (I.W.W. leadership, as cited in Fowke & Glazer, 1973, p. 9)

I will turn now from theories about esthetic experience generally, in schools, to the practice of a very specific type of esthetic experience, in the real world. By that I mean the practice of making socially conscious music-- what Peter Baird called

“transformative song-making” (Baird, 2001, p. 20). Experiencing music in fractured, plugged-in America today seems less and less a social affair, and many leave singing,

20 in particular, to concert and recording artists-- or to American Idol soloists. In Western societies, at least, people increasingly seem to consume music more than they make it themselves. But though the impulse to sing together publically may have died down, it has not died out. There are still people here and across the globe who make a joyful noise unto their God, sing along at the ballgame, or hurl revolutionary choruses at the powers-that-be. With hearts overflowing people still do attend concerts, whether it’s

60 people in the corner of a Barnes and Noble bookstore or 60,000 jammed into a

South American soccer stadium. New musical genres, new equipment, new leaders, new instruments emerge, and extraordinary things still happen when even ordinary people make music together. Throughout the ages, from mothers crooning their children to sleep, to slaves singing in rhythm as they hoe a field, to a tsunami of marchers united in “Eyes On the Prize,” music—and singing in particular— has had astonishing power when shared between human beings.

That power is especially remarkable among people engaged in social action.

Through the centuries, music has reflected the collective souls of mass social movements even as it has fed the individual souls of those participating. In this section, I will consider three roles that music has played globally and throughout history in advancing social justice, and I will review literature that has chronicled and critiqued these ways. Most fundamentally, singing expressed emotion and bolstered morale within and outside of freedom movements, which unified group members and attracted new sympathizers. Second, “topical” songs directly attacked social problems, paid tribute to important individuals, and rhetorically recorded historical events; their

21 creators aspired not simply to reflect the social, economic, and political realities of their day but to help change them. Third, various writers have argued that by helping to strengthen cultural identity, dignity, and pride in oppressed communities, socially conscious music does much more than provide atmosphere or backdrop for political movements. It weaves the spirit of social activism and political protest deeply into the social fabric of a community, where it can influence or revive a community’s self- identity – in ways that may endure over time and help new movements emerge.

Group Singing as an Expression of Emotion and Solidarity

To begin with, singing has always been a natural way for people to voice their most intense personal feelings, from despair to jubilation, from devastating loss to triumph. Singing spirituals helped many African Americans not only to endure but emotionally to triumph over slavery. Words like these bound sufferers together.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home,

A long way from home. (traditional, as cited in Reagon & Scanlon, 1994, p.

21)

And these:

There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole,

There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.

Sometimes I feel discouraged and think my work’s in vain,

But then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again. (traditional, as cited in

Reagon & Scanlon, p. 17)

Exploited classes of people everywhere and in all times also expressed themselves through more secular songs. Julia Ward Howe spoke out in “Suffrage

Song,” set to the familiar tune of “America”: “My country, ‘tis for thee to make your women free, this is our plea” (as cited in Howe, n.d.). Similarly, “The Housekeeper’s

Lament” made clear how ordinary women felt about their domestic status in the1800s.

Oh, life is a toil and love is a trouble,

Beauty will fade and riches will flee.

Oh pleasures they dwindle and prices they double,

And nothing is as I would wish it to be…

Alas, [‘tis] no dream—ahead I behold it;

I see I am helpless my fate to avert.

She laid down her broom and her apron she folded,

She lay down and died and was buried in dirt. (Sarah Price, as cited in Reiser &

Seeger, 1985, p. 17)

In the next century, Canadian folksinger Hilda Thomas flipped and rewrote those verses to end like this: “O life is a toil and love is a trouble, beauty will fade and riches will flee. But I’m damned if I’ll live with oppressions that double, and I’m damned if

I’ll wait any more to be free!” (as cited in Reiser & Seeger, p. 17).

Another repertoire of songs which unfailingly roused high emotion helped carry the greatest singing movement in American history, the Civil Rights Movement.

Southern freedom songs and singers had deep roots in the passionate gospel tradition of the Black church. Consider, for example, “We Shall Overcome,” which was originally written for striking tobacco workers and based on the old Baptist hymn “I’ll

Be All Right.” Although militant leaders like Malcolm X eventually lost patience with the implicit passivity of the phrase “we shall overcome someday,” for a time the anthem powerfully unified and uplifted the whole movement. Wyatt Tee Walker,

Martin Luther King’s assistant in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, remarked in 1963:

One cannot describe the vitality and emotion this one song evokes across the

Southland. I have heard it sung in great mass meetings with a thousand voices

singing as one; I’ve heard a half-dozen sing it softly behind the bars of the

Hinds County prison in Mississippi; I’ve heard old women singing it on the

way to work in Albany, Georgia; I’ve heard the student singing it as they were

being dragged away to jail. It generates a power that is indescribable. (as cited

in Carawan & Carawan, 1963, p. 11)

Freedom songs swept people along on tides of passion. When northern college students began to lead sit-in’s, freedom rides, and demonstrations in the early 1960s, they helped bring back many old gospel tunes which had fallen out of fashion with the older black generation. As Guy Carawan travelled the South teaching, compiling, and leading songs for the movement, he heard students sing new life into the old songs, retaining the old spiritual tunes and style but rewriting them with verses about real life.

We took a trip on a Greyhound bus—

Freedom comin’ and it won’t be long,

To fight segregation, this we must!

Freedom comin’ and it won’t be long.

On to Mississippi with speed we go—

Freedom comin’ and it won’t be long.

Blue-shirted policemen meet us at the door—

Freedom comin’ and it won’t be long. (modernized by members of

CORE, as cited in Glazer, 1970, p. 119)

Depending on the situation, songs were a solace or a protective shield. As one student told Guy Carawan (Carawan & Carawan, 1963), whenever he was arrested the singing “helped to ease the knot in the pit of my stomach” (p. 62). In another sense they were an emotional weapon, and the act of singing a potent means of exerting non- violent force against even the most vicious foes. Jeff Sapp recounted how Rev. Fred

Shuttlesworth exhorted the children of Birmingham to respond to angry police.

“It’s to be a silent demonstration. No songs, no slogans, no replies to

obscenities.” Everyone nodded in agreement. “However,” Shuttlesworth

added, “when you’re arrested, sing your hearts out.” That’s exactly how it

played out. So when a policeman shouted, “You’re all under arrest!” hundreds

of voices united in song: “Ain’t a-scared of your jail, ‘cause I want my

freedom, I want my freedom, I want my freedom. Ain’t a-scared of your jail,

‘cause I want my freedom, I want my freedom now! Ain’t a-scared of your

dogs, ‘cause I want my freedom…” (as cited in Sapp, 2004, p. 15)

The crusade to desegregate Albany, Georgia’s bus depots in 1961 was especially known for its singing. There, just as spirituals had strengthened slaves in their battles to survive, “it was the singing in the mass meetings and marches that sustained the spirit of the community during the long months of arrests” and struggles with police (Dunson, 1965, p. 63). Countless other songs such as “Oh, Freedom,”

“Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round,” and “We’ll Never Turn Back” expressed that unstoppable determination and encouraged all within earshot to persevere together in the struggle for equality. Through their singing, students inspired elders, elders encouraged students, leaders communicated with the masses behind them, and everyone supported each other. When Talladega College students marched in Alabama to protest police brutality, Bob Zellner described the scene this way:

The march was stopped about a block and a half from the campus by 40 city,

county, and state policemen with tear gas grenades, billy sticks and a fire truck.

When ordered to return to the campus or be beaten back, the students. . .chose

not to move and quietly began singing “We Shall Not Be Moved.” (as cited in

Carawan & Carawan, 1963, p. 21)

And no one faced hostility with music more resolutely than St. Augustine’s anti- segregation marchers in the summer of 1964. For 45 straight nights marchers were attacked with acid, bricks, bottles, chains, and anything else the Klan could use to brutalize them. Dorothy Cotton wrote:

After we were attacked we’d come back to the church, and somehow always

we’d come back bleeding, singing “I love everybody…” It was hard…to sing

“I love Hoss Manucy” when he’d just beat us up…[but] he’s still a person with

some degree of dignity in the sight of God, and we don’t have to like him, but

we have to love him. He’s been damaged too. So we sing it, and the more we

sing it, the more we grow in ability to love people who mistreat us so bad. (as

cited in Carawan & Carawan, 1968, p. 27)

Emotive freedom songs were certainly not limited to the United States or to the

1960s. German peasants in 1381, French revolutionaries, South African anti-apartheid marchers, Palestinian and Jewish peace activists in Israel, Spanish civil war resisters,

Irish Republican Army supporters, Latin American land reformers, Chinese human rights demonstrators, all poured their feelings into fervent song. Sudanese women today protest Islamic law by singing in the streets. Incredibly, German concentration camp prisoners even sang “The Peat Bog Soldiers” to keep up morale and express defiance as they were marched out to toil in the frozen marshes.

Up and down the guards are pacing, no one, no one can go through;

Flight would mean a sure death facing, guns and barbed wire greet our view.

But for us there is no complaining, winter will in time be past;

One day we shall cry rejoicing: “Homeland dear, you’re mine at last!”

Then will the peat-bog soldiers march no more with their spades…

to the bog. (anonymous, as cited in Fowke & Glazer, 1973, p. 193)

Above all, across all races, genders, ages, religions, and nationalities, songs sprang with great feeling from, and about, low-wage laborers. The singers and subjects of these songs included working class men and women of every description: small farmers, cowhands, dockhands, lumberjacks, laundry women, migrant farmworkers, chain gangs, miners, factory and mill workers (including children), union organizers, the unemployed, and immigrants. The very titles of their songs reflected the depth of emotion running through labor movements—titles such as: “Babies in the Mill,” “No

Irish Need Apply,” “Too Old to Work,” “Raggedy, Raggedy Are We,” “Deportee,” and “Forget-Me-Not (A Layoff Lament).” Singing was especially crucial in the painful early years of union organizing. In 1905 the International Workers of the

World published their famous “little red songbook” to “fan the flames of discontent” among ill-treated workers (Stavis, 1960, p. 3). It was designed to fit in a worker’s back pocket, ready to be pulled out whenever a rousing song was needed at a meeting, rally, or strike. The Wobbly motto was “Sing and fight!” and many shaped their grievances into passionate songs.

A miner’s life is like a sailor’s ‘board a ship across the wave.

Ev’ry day his life’s in danger; still he ventures, being brave.

Union miners, stand together! Heed no operator’s tale!

Keep your hand upon the dollar and your eye upon the scale!

(traditional, as cited in Reiser & Seeger, 1985, p. 90)

Topical Song-Writing as Social Protest

A second way that singing long served the cause of social justice was by directly attacking social problems with provocative lyrics and song-stories ranging from witty to melodramatic to militant. Barrie Stavis (1960) pointed out that the earliest topical songs were typically written by victims of social injustice themselves: “the song[s] grew out of the direct participation of the writer[s]” (p. 4). But later topical songs were more often written for and about situations from an outsider’s point of view, often in direct response to an event or a movement’s immediate need. These songs did not speak in the religious terms of spirituals, or emote in repetitive choruses, but poetically expressed a strong ideological viewpoint and vehemently lobbied for a course of action. Professional songwriters and activist entertainers, from the prolific Joe Hill to Woody Guthrie, Bob

Dylan, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Tom Paxton, and Phil Ochs, to name a few, were not necessarily present at the events or members of the classes they wrote about (though they often paid a high personal price for standing by the people and ideals they believed in). They provided general songs to edify the public, to “strip away false and romantic notions about the way the world operated and set in their place a more real understanding” (Stavis, p. 5). From sweatshops to the Great Depression, labor problems were decried in the biting lyrics of songs such as “Casey Jones the Union Scab,” “It’s a

Long Way Down to the Soupline,” and “Workers of the World, Unite!”

Topical songs played an equally important role in our Civil Rights Movement.

Haunting examples included Len Chandler’s “Murder on the Road in Alabama,”

Richard Farina’s “Birmingham Sunday,” and Lewis Allen’s “Strange Fruit.”

Southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood

on the root.

Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scenes of the gallant South, the bulging eyes and the

twisted mouth,

Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh, and the sudden smell of

burning flesh. (Allen, as cited in Glazer, 1970, p. 294)

As the movement spread out of the South to Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, shifting attitudes were reflected in more combative songs like “Burn, Baby, Burn.”

I really wanted a decent job, I really needed some scratch,

(I heard people talking about a dream, now, a dream that I couldn’t catch).

I really wanted to be somebody and all I had was a match.

Couldn’t get oil from Rockefeller’s wells, couldn’t get diamonds from the

mine,

If I can’t enjoy the American dream, won’t be water but fire next time.

So I said, “Burn, baby, burn—burn, baby, burn—

Nowhere to be, nowhere to turn-- burn, baby, burn.”

(Collier, as cited in Carawan & Carawan, 1968, p. 191)

Jimmy Collier later explained the message he was trying to send.

I made up this song while the riot in Watts was going on. I was searching for

ways to try and express what I thought these fellows in Watts were trying to

say by burning the town down…[A]fter they’ve sung the song and got out

some of their hate and some of their vengeance, we try to put in our own pitch

about using non-violence to change things. We say you’ve got to learn, baby,

learn, and what you really want to do is build something rather than tear down.

(as cited in Carawan & Carawan, 1968, p. 188)

Ballads, too, immortalized the sacrifice and heroism of individual freedom fighters, as in “The Ballad of Medgar Evers.” Or they recounted galvanizing incidents, such as

New York City’s horrific Triangle Fire in 1915.

Then on that fateful day—dear God, most terrible of days!

When that fire broke out, it grew into a mighty blaze.

In that firetrap way up there with but a single door,

So many innocent working girls burned, to live no more! (Rabin, as

cited in Reiser & Seeger, 1985, p. 87)

Topical singing also fueled anti-war and anti-nuclear efforts from America’s Civil

War to its conflicts with Japan, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Iraq. In the 1950s and

1960s, “ban-the-bomb” and “stop-the-war” songs proliferated, especially through the folk song revival movement.

First we got the bomb, and that was good, ‘cause we love peace and

motherhood;

Then Russia got the bomb, but that’s okay, ‘cause the balance of power’s

maintained that way. WHO’S NEXT?

Then France got the bomb, but don’t you grieve ‘cause they’re on our

side (I believe).

China got the bomb but have no fears, ‘cause they can’t wipe us out for

at least five years. WHO’S NEXT?

…So Israel’s getting tense, wants one in self defense;

“The Lord’s our Shepherd,” says the psalm, but just in case we better

get a bomb.

Luxembourg is next to go, and (who knows?) maybe Monaco;

We’ll try to stay serene and calm when Alabama gets the bomb.

Who’s next? Who’s next? Who’s next? WHO’S NEXT?

(Lehrer, as cited in Glazer, 1970 pp. 343-345)

Other popular songs of the cold war era included “Draft Dodger Rag,” “Lyndon

Johnson Told the Nation,” “Eve of Destruction,” “Bring Them Home,” “So Long,

Mom (A Song for World War III),” “What Have They Done to the Rain?” “Suppose

They Give a War and No One Comes?” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” “With

God On Our Side,” and John Lennon’s famous “Give Peace a Chance.”

But what happened when Americans stopped gathering in parks for sing- alongs with harmonicas and guitars? Did topical song-writers continue to play an active role in promoting social justice after the 1960s, or did they just settle down and concentrate on paying their mortgages? Clearly, protest music ebbed and flowed over the next 30 years, but the themes were mostly the same, and the tone grew angrier than ever. As each new style of music emerged, a vociferous minority of musicians

32 continued to sing out for human rights and a more just world. Rather than gathering in parks and street demonstrations, they expressed themselves from their recording studios and concert venues. In the 1970s, soul music became the most vehement voice of protest, contributing songs like “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler)” “The

Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” and the environmental classic, “Mercy, Mercy Me

(The Ecology).” Marvin Gaye’s voice was one of the strongest. In his music

he eloquently phrased his disgust at social conformity and indicted a

government that didn’t have its citizenry’s best interests at heart…his moral

mission on ‘What’s Going On’ [was ] to stir our civic conscience and to make

us aware of our political surroundings. (Dyson, 2004, p.69)

Hard rock bands, inherently anti-establishment and pro-freedom of speech, “in permanent opposition to The Man, the sell-out, the whole nine-to-five suburban nightmare” (Everett-Green, cited in Fischlin, 2003, p. 39), followed. 10,000 Maniacs

(“Please Forgive Us”), Don Henley (“All She Wants to Do Is Dance”), and others condemned America’s role in the Iran-Contra Affair. Rappers and hip-hoppers targeted racial violence and police discrimination with harsher, more profane lyrics.

Punk groups like Dead Kennedys (1985) demanded:

Tell me who’s the real patriots—

The Archie Bunker slobs waving flags?

Or the people with the guts to work for some real change?

Rednecks and bombs don’t make us strong,

We loot the world, yet we can’t even feed ourselves.

With every new war came a surge of new protests, from old-timers like Bruce

Springsteen, U2, and Neil Young to contemporary artists Los Illegals, Pink, Ani

DiFranco, Lenny Kravitz, and Lucy Kaplansky.

Another bomb lights up the night of someone’s vision of paradise,

But it’s just a wasted sacrifice that fuels the hate on the other side…

All in the name of a holy land, all to claim a line in the sand…

[But] there’s so much blood on all our hands, it cuts an even deeper line

in the sand. (Kaplansky, 2004)

Women’s issues were also kept alive by bands such as Sonic Youth, who screamed against sexual harassment and media exploitation of women in a complicated song titled “Swimsuit Issue.” Reviewer Sarah Kerton once commented, “Sonic Youth reminds us that protest songs don’t have to include acoustic guitars and twee harmonica melodies stuck in 1965. They don’t even have to be about war. Not with guns, anyway” (Kerton, 2007)

These kinds of bands wielded music as “dissident practice, as commentary, as critique…as rebellion, resistance, and revolution” (Fischlin, 2003, p. 10). Another persistent, unconventional voice was Rage Against the Machine. Since 1991 the group has “raged” on behalf of causes ranging from political dissidents Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, to Tibetan freedom and California sweatshop laborers. Band members paid particular attention to the land reform struggle of peasants in Chiapas,

Mexico. In 2000 lead singer Zack de la Rocha explained:

I’m interested in spreading those ideas through art, because music has the

power to cross borders, to break military sieges and to establish real dialogue.

Our purpose in sympathizing with the Zapatistas is to help spark that

dialogue…We act as facilitators so that [the Zapatista communities] can

participate. We put them in contact with the organizations and Zapatista

support committees here in the U.S. And the interest and involvement of the

young people of the United States in the struggle of the Chiapan indigenous

people is greater each day. For this reason our music has become a bridge.

(interview with Reforma newspaper, as cited in Woolridge, 2000)

Rage Against the Machine set an example for the rock industry not only by their scathing attacks on institutions, people, and practices they considered unjust, but by their consistent, strenuous efforts to educate their audiences about the causes referenced in their songs. Not content simply to describe and criticize social problems, their CD’s, DVD’s, and website all include contact phone numbers, addresses, internet links, etc. to organizations in sync with the band’s political agenda. Their Rage

Against the Machine DVD, for instance, includes contacts for groups which support prisoners’ rights, children and women living with HIV/AIDS, women’s health groups, homeless and street youth, and the National Commission for Democracy in Mexico, among others (Fischlin, 2003, p. 32).

With the growth of topical, politically conscious rock-and-roll, however, came another interesting phenomenon of the 1980s: gigantic international fundraisers such as Live Aid, Farm Aid, the Sun City (South Africa) concert, Amnesty International’s

Conspiracy of Hope and Human Rights Now concerts, Nelson Mandela’s 70th

Birthday Tribute, and the Greenpeace concerts. Dubbed “charity rock,” these kinds of concerts did not rise up from already developed social movements, like the labor and civil rights movements of the past. Rather, mega-concert organizers attempted to build new movements—to energize masses of unpoliticized young people-- raising social consciousness and money at the same time. Some musicians considered the consciousness-raising even more important than the fundraising. Of the star-studded

Nelson Mandela tribute in 1988, Jim Kerr insisted: “This is a political concert; it’s not a little namby-pamby moneyraiser” (as cited in Garafolo, 1992, p. 64).

But what has political pop music really accomplished, besides lining the pockets of rock stars, polishing their public images, opening huge new markets for recording companies and corporations such as Pepsi and AT&T, and occasionally raising money for relief agencies? Have the lucrative recordings, mega-festivals, and over-the-top celebrity events gotten anything radically changed in the real world, outside the stadium walls? That question continues to provoke intense debate. Nelson

Mandela himself expressed one point of view when he thanked musicians of the 1988 anti-apartheid event.

Over the years in prison I have tried to follow the developments of progressive

music…[Y]our contribution has given us tremendous inspiration…[Y]our

message can reach quarters not necessarily interested in politics, so that the

message can go further than we politicians can push it.[W]e admire you. We

respect you…[W]e love you. (as cited in Garofolo, 1992, p.65)

Yet many politicians, musicians, and writers are deeply troubled by what they call the self-aggrandizing “Bono-ization” of musical protest. Canadian journalist Naomi Klein, an ardent voice in the anti-globalization movement, is frustrated by millionaire rock stars who sing about world hunger and poverty and violence, usually on safe terrain, to audiences hardly affected by the issues, virtuously waving their solidarity bracelets and cell phone cameras in the air. From Klein’s point of view, protest music communicated in this fun, profitable, and non- confrontational way is ineffective because it is “less dangerous and less powerful than grass-roots demonstrations”

(Klein, as cited in Delaney, 2007). In another CNN interview, an environmental activist in London bluntly insisted:

Charity concerts are…just pathetic and a way to reincorporate the issue. It

changes nothing. It’s enjoyable but (from a political point of view) it’s a waste

of time. It diverts attention away from taking action and protest. Nobody ever

changes anything from attending a concert. (anonymous, as cited in Delaney,

2007)

This criticism of social justice music is not entirely new (even in the 1960s many decried the commercial co-opting of anti-war songs like “Blowin’ In the

Wind”). To go deeply into that complex debate was beyond the scope of this literature review. But middle-class, politically naïve, self-absorbed western youth are not the only people who flock to concerts and listen to popular music. One must keep in view the audiences and singers who live immersed in the problems being sung about and

37 ask: what else does protest music, including that performed by the rock stars at mega- events, do for them?

Music as a Source of Cultural Strength and Pride

Various historians, sociologists, and musicians themselves have observed that for oppressed communities, a third role of socially conscious music-making has long been to foster cultural identity, dignity, and pride. Consider, for example, la Nueva

Cancion. In the 1950s and ‘60s its musicians embraced indigenous musical styles and instruments and blended them with European, American, and other traditions. As totalitarian military governments repressed people more and more violently in the

1960s and 1970s, pro-socialist nueva cancioneros such as Victor Jara and Violeta

Parra sang out against them and encouraged people throughout Latin America to stand up for land reform, human rights, religious freedom, freedom of expression, and economic parity in general. These musicians sought to convince their fellow citizens that they deserved better lives than their governments allowed them, that they should see themselves as revolutionaries at heart, that they had a moral and political right to be heard and respected.

Protest music in Latin America was not limited to the folk style and intellectual orientation of Nueva Cancion. In the early 1980s, Rock Nacional emerged as another musical phenomenon, created by young Argentinians who yearned for cultural “space” and a pro-democratic voice of their own. In that space “a ‘we’ was constructed, an identity within which the musicians became leaders who, through the lyrics of their songs, gave form to an alternative, countercultural proposal which challenged the

38 ideology of the dictatorship” (Vila, as cited in Garafolo, 1992, p. 209). This was more than just rhetoric and melody—the very act of making this kind of music represented

“possibility, potential, power…[It was] the contradiction of silence…of silencing, of being silenced” (Fischlin, 2003, p. 10). And it makes sense that music would especially influence young people in their search for cultural and social identity. By nature impatient, idealistic, energetic, and willing to take risks, youth in many cultures waged their own “singing revolutions.” In the Baltic states, massive singing festivals helped bring independence from Soviet rule; in 1988, 300,000 people gathered at one in Estonia (Fischlin, 2003, p. 26). Anti-Milosevic punk rock played on underground radio helped weaken that Yugoslavian dictatorship. Similarly, independent radio stations used volcanto songs to culturally unify Sandinista supporters in Nicaragua (as well as to instruct them in the actual mechanics of guerilla warfare). Contraband rock- and-roll in Palestinian territories, the yaogun yinyue of China, the nueva trova of

Cuba, the rai music of Algeria, the chimurenga of Zimbabwe, the marching songs of

California farmworkers, and the aboriginal rock-and-roll of Australia, to name a few, helped their communities sort out and develop cultural identity and self-respect in the face of relentless discrimination and repression.

Two further examples are especially worthy of note. One is the long, painful history of music in South Africa. Protest singing, of course, strengthened Black cultural identity during the tortuous days of apartheid, as it did for Black Americans in the days of slavery and Jim Crow. But in a different way, diverse kinds of music are also helping to bind people together culturally in post-apartheid South Africa, as the

Black community struggles to rethink and rebuild its own culture. Black musicians have led this effort, opening up people’s minds to new “freer-thinking” styles of music, from politically outspoken hip-hop to progressive jazz; at the same time, revival of old-time music from the townships, from the Black church, and even from toi-toi tribal chant has renewed the voice and pride of older Black generations.

Moreover, in his essay “Music Beyond Apartheid?” Denis Constant-Martin expressed hope that music may play an even more crucial role as a force for reconciliation between Black and White South Africans, as they try to figure out how to live together and move forward in peace.

It is because oppression was visited upon Blacks that they have the possibility

of, and have assumed the responsibility for, rendering liberty to all, including

the oppressors. Music is one of the areas where the manifestation of this not-

so-new dream is crucial, in that contemporary South African music, in its

origins and its lively reality, is in a very real sense from all, to all, for all. In

many ways the musical situation parallels the political situation.

Because…musics of mixture and cross-fertilization were innovated by Blacks

and refused by a large part of the White population, Black artists occupy a

position of cultural leadership, just as Black political leaders are determining

the course of structural change…[I]t is Black artists who are the carriers, the

regenerators of the culture of all…With them, White artists in growing

numbers are participating in the work of building a common South Africa.

(Constant-Martin, as cited in Garafolo, 1992, p.207)

One can only hope.

One further example is the musical campaign which has helped native

Hawaiians fight to reclaim their cultural dignity in the last several decades. The problems began early in the twentieth century, as the tourist industry began to eat steadily away at traditional Hawaiian culture. Tourist hotels, restaurants, and clubs gradually took over Hawaiian cities and beachfronts, and many Hawaiian musicians pandered to their call for demeaning “island” songs, with titles like “Oh, How She

Could Yacki Hacki Wicki Wacki Woo (That’s Love in Honolulu)” and “Princess Poo- poo-ly Has Plenty Papaya.” Across the mainland, too, it became fashionable to perform phony Hawaiian songs and dances, with a highly artificial, commercial kind of “island” sound and look After Hawaii became a state in 1959, television shows, books like James Michener’s Hawaii, Elvis Presley movies, Don Ho’s nightclub routines, even hula hoops— promoted even more the look and sound of this stereotypical “Hawaiian culture”. But native citizens increasingly resented the degradation of more than just their music. Bitterness festered over the federal government’s military presence on the islands, the tourist industry’s greed and disrespect for Hawaii’s natural environment, and the poverty to which so many native

Hawaiians were reduced.

By the 1970s, an organized resistance movement began to speak out against aggressive land development, military bombing sites, economic inequities,

41 environmental devastation, educational problems, and the repression of the Hawaiian language. Musicians helped lead that movement, bringing back traditional acoustic music first, then broadening into electrified pop and rock songs full of protest lyrics.

The result, chronicled by George Lewis in “Don’ Go Down Waikiki: Social Protest and Popular Music in Hawaii,” has been

the cultural and political rebirth of native Hawaiians….Island musicians [since

the 1970s] have forged a musical movement in search of their own traditional

roots and culture…merging [traditional ethnic material] with their own

pressing social and cultural concerns to create a new type of music—part

contemporary, part traditional, and all layered with social protest critical of

non-natives who Hawaiians see as having nearly destroyed their culture, their

self-identity, and their sacred land. (as cited in Garafolo, 1992, p. 172)

The lyrics of “Hawaiian Awakening” express the stress of this long cultural battle:

Deep in this tortured land all alone

Hear the winds cry, the mountains moan…

We followed their rules much too long

Our protests are heard in our music and song. (Maxwell, as cited in

Garafolo, 1992, p. 172)

Lewis concluded that in Hawaii not only did musical protest help effect real political and economic change, it changed the self-identity of indigenous Islanders. He saw grow a new “spirit of awareness. . .of social solidarity and ethnic and cultural pride, awakened by the movement and nurtured by the music” (as cited in Garafolo, p. 185).

That revived identity is clearly a force that should continue to be taken seriously in

Hawaiian politics and society.

Why Teach Music of Peace and Justice in School?

With the many writers and musicians reviewed above, I believe that the kind of socially conscious music discussed thus far has long been, and will continue to be, a force for positive change across our troubled, complex world. But my own work, as indicated at the outset, is with American schoolchildren. How is socially conscious music-- that bred in adult freedom movements as well as the sort traditionally meant for children-- valuable in their world and in their schools? With others, I would emphatically affirm that much of it can and should play a vital role in music curricula at every level, starting with the primary level I teach.

Character Education

Before reviewing reasons for bringing authentic, adult-oriented social justice music into the classroom, it is important to note that socially conscious music in the broadest sense encompasses the kind of character education songs typically written for children, which can be valuable in their own way. Such songs talk about standing up for friends, sharing, extending kindness and compassion, being honest and fair, accepting and appreciating human differences, caring for the natural world, caring for one’s country, and not giving up, among other topics. A classic example is “Don’t

Laugh at Me,” which became the musical heart of Peter Yarrow’s middle-school anti- bullying curriculum.

I’m a little boy with glasses, the one they call the geek,

A little girl who never smiles ‘cause I’ve got braces on my teeth,

And I know how it feels to cry myself to sleep.

I’m that kid on ev’ry playground who’s always chosen last,

A single teenage mother trying to overcome my past.

You don’t have to be my friend, but is it too much to ask?

Don’t laugh at me, don’t call me names, don’t get your pleasure from

my pain.

In God’s eyes we’re all the same-- some day we’ll all have perfect

wings.

Don’t laugh at me. (Steve Seskin, as cited in Lantieri, Roerden, Weiss, &

Yarrow, p. 103)

Another, simpler example is this tender appreciation of a friend’s individuality, which

John Denver once sang to a muppet named Robin.

I like your eyes, I like your nose,

I like your mouth, your ears, your hands, your toes.

I like your face—it’s really you. I like the things you say and do.

There’s not a single soul who sees the skies the way you see them

through your eyes;

And aren’t you glad—you should be glad—there’s no one, no one,

exactly like you! (Muhoberac, 1982)

Though songs like these may not drive political movements, they helpfully address the evolving social values and emotional needs of young people who will lead their communities tomorrow. Through honest, perceptive lyrics and well-crafted music, good character education songs speak to, as well as for, the children who learn them, as they express the worries, difficulties, and triumphs of children’s homes, classrooms, playgrounds, neighborhoods. In a 2005 article, Mara Sapon-Shevin explained this wider view of social justice music.

Talking about “social justice” conjures up sophisticated topics like apartheid,

anti-discriminatory legislation, income redistribution, and other concerns that

seem beyond the scope of young children. But if we think of social justice in

terms of more basic concepts of commonalities and differences, exclusion and

belonging, bullying, and perspective-taking, then it becomes easier to

understand how we can use music to help students see themselves as part of a

bigger, more peaceful and just world. (Sapon-Shevin, 2005, p. 1)

That potentially more peaceful, just world waits outside the classroom, to be sure, but through the act of group singing—as they stitch the meanings and melodies together, working with both elders and peers towards a common purpose – children can start by building a better world within the walls of their own schools. In singing these songs, they get to know first-hand what acceptance and peaceful cooperation and doing one’s bit feels like. This reflects Dewey’s (1934) idea of esthetic experience, in which kids do not simply mouth democratic and moral principles out of context, but rather live them out as they explore them artistically. It is crucial that children tap into

45 art forms like music, “which live in us,” notes composer Jim Strathdee, “in a deeper place than just cognitive memorization” (e-mail interview, March 30, 2010). And in this kind of singing, everyone takes responsibility for their part, works in relationship with those around them, collaborates and works towards a common and emotionally satisfying goal, builds a kind of singing community as they go. It is important to let children experience this personally and often, for as Dewey and so many educators have reminded us, these are skills which citizens in a democracy need to be good at.

Ruth Crawford Seeger, too, observed this in her singing with children, and noted that the community-building, the connections made between singers, was one of the great benefits of singing folk songs in school.

I came to feel that the children’s gain, and mine, from such experiences was

not just a piece of music—a song. Greater gain was the feeling we had of

making something together, of taking a small piece of experience and using

it—sometimes just letting it grow, sometimes nurturing it. Such experiencing

of a combined individual and group accomplishment can mean a great deal to

the individual taking part in it. He has not only made a contribution: he

receives a contribution from the group in return. And perhaps here was the

most important link of all—the link created from the individual to the group,

and vice versa. (Seeger, 1948, p. 33)

Every participant was needed and wanted, each had something important to add, everyone had a rightful place in the group. Rather than simply being told that they mattered in the classroom community, children were invited to experience that notion.

Thus creating meaningful music and proclaiming lyrics they enjoyed and believed in helped children move beyond understanding a concept like “peaceful world” as a purely intellectual idea to really feeling that they had their own place in one. When people in community like this “sing songs which are central to [their] identity as worthy, caring, and giving human beings…[they] strengthen [themselves] and each other,” Strathdee points out (e-mail interview, March 30, 2010). All children need and deserve such empowerment.

Parental Guidance Suggested?

But why move beyond the character education songs written specifically for children and bring into their classrooms social justice music with more mature themes

– songs which more directly address racial discrimination, adoption, divorce, environmental destruction, ageism, sexism, gay rights, religious prejudice, economic inequity, even death, war, and violence? Parents and teachers often hesitate to broach these subjects with children, afraid that exposing children to moral and social dilemmas, let alone serious pain or wrong-doing, may frighten or depress or confuse them. Ruth Crawford Seeger (1948),mother of Pete Seeger, recalled parents so conflicted about this that even nonsense songs like “The Cat Came Back” caused anxiety. (In that tale, a dapper yellow cat survives unscathed his owner’s many outlandish attempts to do away with him.)

Seeger (1948) suggested, however, that we cannot shield children from all feelings of sadness and hurt, from thinking about hurting others, from wondering even about death, because they naturally feel and contemplate these things already.

Bringing them out into the open by singing about them may help some kids better come to grips with them (p. 17). Seeger pointed out that she and her husband sang to their children “about all sorts of living, and…you cannot separate living and dying…[W]e never laid undue stress on songs of ‘sadness,’ but…when they came along we passed some of them on to our children as part of what it was our privilege to give them” (p. 17). Most thought-provoking was her account of her toddler daughter’s week-long stay in a hospital isolation room, during which the three-year- old sang alone for hours all she could remember of the ballad of Barbara Allen. Seeger mused that even such a young child may have found

some indefinable connection between her own hurt and whatever of the hurt

she may have felt or drawn from the words and spirit of the song…If a child’s

unexpected hurts can become connected with hurts he has heard about in story

or poetry or song—if he can reach back into his experience and tie these

individual hurts of his to what one might call group hurts—will he perhaps feel

in his own less lonely? (p. 19)

Singing Their Way into History

Reaching further, however, why teach music like civil rights anthems, which were rooted in an adult musical genre—spirituals—and in the horrific history of slavery? In the first place, I agree with Sarah Pirtle that it is powerful and appropriate to share “generative” music, meaning music which connects children to past generations. Or as Ruth Seeger (1948) put it,

this is not music which [children] will have to outgrow. It is not a specially

prepared baby food, strained and predigested, and administered with an almost

unavoidable element of condescension by adults and older brothers and sisters.

It need not be discarded along with the kiddy car and the tricycle. Songs like

these are rightly sung by all ages. (p. 24)

And they are sung in all eras. By learning such songs, performing them, and passing them on to future generations, students become part of history. In this way they enter into and become part of a living historical continuum (Jackie Breger, in Baird, 2001, p. 153). As they join the generations of people who have sung and improvised “Oh

Freedom,” for instance, or “Get On Board, Little Children,” children are not simply reciting words about the past, in a rehearsal of impersonal texts from a long-closed book. By pondering and singing the same words that people have sung for centuries, children become modern-day voices for those who have gone before. As they sing the songs of historical justice movements, they keep the messages alive and carry them forward in time, thus continuing the work of the original singers and songwriters.

They become oral historians themselves--living, caring stewards of their culture--as effectively as any adults.

Releasing the Imagination: From Empathy to Hope to Action

Accordingly, as they become messengers for social justice, children can also learn empathy with those they sing about. Singing about, or in the authentic words of, the marginalized and oppressed can help children mentally and emotionally step into those shoes. “I want to know how you think and know how you feel, I really want to

49 walk a mile in your shoes” (Nigro, 1989, p. 21). Musicians and education theorists alike, from composer Ruth Pelham to writer Maxine Greene, have argued that it is critical to give children opportunities to move imaginatively into other people’s realities. Greene (1995) called this “releasing the imagination” through artistic experience.

Participatory involvement with forms of art [including singing] can enable us

to see more in our experience, to hear more on normally unheard frequencies,

to become conscious of what daily routines have obscured, what habit and

convention have suppressed. (p. 123)

From empathy, Greene (1995) would hope that students move on to changed behavior.

[W]hen we see more and hear more, it is not only that we lurch, if only for a

moment, out of the familiar and the taken-for-granted but that new avenues for

choosing and for action may open in our experience; we may gain a sudden

sense of new beginnings, that is, we may take an initiative in the light of

possibility. (p. 123)

That is, when a child understands other people better, he may want to treat them better. Most important, Greene contended, singing such songs can help children avoid or transcend the cynicism, helplessness, and apathy that numbs many of their elders.

As Dewey (1934) maintained, school should teach children that they have the power to be active problem-solvers in all they do, not just passive receptacles or parrots for authority figures. It is significant that many of the songs go beyond describing the hard realities of this world to speak of things the way they ought to be. They can give

50 children, as they give adults in freedom movements, the sense that things not only need to change, but can change. They can inspire kids to believe that social problems are not insurmountable, but can be assaulted and overcome. They can give kids hope.

For children desperately need to feel optimistic about tackling all sorts of challenges and problems as they come across them, whether at school, at home, or in the adult world ahead of them. They need to become convinced that they, with all humans, are able to affect real, positive change where and when it is needed in this world. This is equally true for impoverished and for well-off children—all are needed to transform and to lead their communities in the future. I share Maxine Greene’s

(1998) conviction that the truest goal, the highest calling, for teachers is

to lead their students from an awareness of human suffering and injustices to a

sense of agency or collective action, as part of their democratic education…

teaching to the end of arousing a consciousness of membership, active and

participant membership in a society of unfulfilled promises—teaching for what

Paulo Freire used to call ‘conscientization’ (1970), heightened social

consciousness, a wide-awakeness that might make injustice unendurable. (p.

xxx)

At what stage in people’s education would we seek to arouse this “heightened social consciousness”? As linguistics professor Porfirio Loeza puts it, promoting social justice is the goal of education at all levels; it is the goal of education “writ large” (e- mail interview, March 30, 2010). I believe that teachers can pursue this objective, defined so aptly by Greene, Freire, and Loeza, through the teaching of almost any

51 subject in school, with pupils of any age. Pursuing it through music is a good place to start.

Chapter 3

DEVELOPMENT AND DOCUMENTATION OF THE PROJECT

In working towards Freire’s (1970) idea of “conscientization,” then, I aspired to lead my elementary music students in an annual winter project which encompassed the kind of esthetic experience described by Dewey (1934), the kind of real-life “call to action” broadcast by great freedom movements, and the kind of consciousness- raising sought by our best children’s musicians and artists. After our uplifting

December concert on the theme of world peace and brotherhood, I decided we needed to come back in January to look more specifically, more carefully at what peace and brotherhood mean here at home, in America.

Martin Luther King’s birthday observance offered the perfect way to open the subject. I know of fewer and fewer teachers who make time to teach much about

Martin Luther King, Jr., beyond his name and the usual platitudes about his being a great American. But I had the freedom, the time, and a longing to teach the whole lower school not just a few generalities about King but an overview of the Civil Rights

Movement and detailed information about some of its major figures. Moreover, since our second grade studies the Underground Railroad at this time of year, I would broaden our studies to include slavery and the spirituals in which African American music is rooted. For first through fifth graders, these studies would culminate in a sing-along assembly entitled “Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Musical Celebration of

Black History, Civil Rights, and Hope.” (Preschoolers and kindergarteners would celebrate at least the African element of it by learning West African dance and

53 drumming for their own assembly on World Cultures Day, a week later.) I begin this chapter by explaining how I chose and organized material in the opening two weeks of this project, incorporating class discussions, picture books, videos, audio CD’s, and photographs.

“He Said It’s Not Just How People Look…That Matters”

On the January day when my students returned from winter vacation, I began our eight-week study of the Civil Rights Movement through music. All first through fifth graders aimed to share this music with our lower school community in a February assembly and repeat it for the high school. In this way we set out to celebrate and give thanks for the peace and freedom we enjoy today, to pay tribute to King and other trailblazers, and to urge each other to be ever-vigilant in standing up for social justice—wherever its issues present themselves-- on a daily, personal, basis. Second graders would narrate the program and dramatize Rosa Parks’s story. Lyrics projected on a screen would help everyone in the hall participate in every song, together. In order to find real meaning in the songs, however, I believed each child should first have some idea of the history of the movement—that is, of the social conditions and laws against which King and his movement struggled and about which they sang. So before starting the music, I spent two weeks surveying what my students knew of Dr.

King and helping them piece together a mental and emotional picture of American life under segregation.

When I first began to ask students to talk about Martin Luther King, Jr. and his work, I was struck by how widely their understanding varied from grade to grade and

54 by the diversity of their opinions. Not surprisingly, older students expressed the most mature views. Various fourth graders remarked: “He helped colored people be treated fairly…He stopped segregation…He changed America.” To which T. added: “He changed the world.” C.’s comment was typical in the third grade: “He brought a lot of peace to America. Rosa Parks took a stand, and King represented everybody—Black and White—he wanted us all to be together, not segregated.”

Second graders were eager to answer and demonstrated an understanding of

King’s work that was usually in the ballpark, though they were generally less articulate and occasionally got the facts quite twisted.

CH: He let Black people ride on the same bus as White people.

C: He said that White people are no better than Black people. He got a

whole bunch of people to stop riding on the buses.

M: Mostly every Black person can go where they want [now]. Because of

him, we don’t have slavery. He made it so Black and White people could

be together, so there’s not really any differences between us.

D: He got lots of laws changed so Black people could go to the same school

as White people.

CM: He made White people and Black people be friends instead of separate.

S: He changed a lot of rules because White people were being mean to

Black people, and he changed a lot of things in the world, like slavery.

K: He made a lot of people start walking so the bus company would run out

of money.

G: He made it so girls and boys could be together.

Others: No, that was Ruby Bridges!

G: I mean he stopped a little of the stuff when girls had to be by themselves.

D: When he made his speeches, like 10 White people came and thousands of

Black people came.

A: He had a giant dream, he wanted to have a lot of peace on earth, so

everyone would be happy together.

Is everyone happy together now? And is anything King said still important for us today?

T. (emphatically): I DON’T KNOW.

Whew--then I began to listen to the first grade. Within that class, perceptions of King ranged even more widely. One exchange went like this:

S: [Martin Luther King] believed there could be peace in the world without

violence, and he believed that brown Americans and White Americans

could sit on the same seats next to each other.

Is that important, that they be able to do that?

S: Yes, just because they look different, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be

with each other.

What else did King do that was important?

V: He made the holidays.

Which holidays?

V: All of them, like Hanukah, like Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving.

Because of him we get those [days] off from school.

W (vehemently): No, the baby Jesus made Christmas!

Someone else: And Pilgrims made Thanksgiving!

Opinions in the first grade classes, I found, could swing from the perceptive to the skewed and back again, quickly.

N: He made America fair.

A: [Before], brown people had to go on buses with only brown people.

O: He changed things, ‘cause now Americans can all get on the bus.

N: You mean, colored people [can all get on].

O: No, Americans.

H: Before [King was alive], a lot of things had to do with people’s skin—so

some friends didn’t get to be with other friends. Black children couldn’t

go to school with White children. He changed these things, so people

could be together.”

N: He said it’s not just how they look…[that matters].

Above all, from the first through the fourth grade, many agreed with second grader M. that Dr. King was responsible for ending slavery in America. So my first decision was which history to review first—an introduction to 19th century slavery or an introduction to 20th century segregation. I really wanted children to end up with an accurate view of those two very distinct periods in history and to understand what

African Americans actually faced in both. On one hand, I worried that if I surveyed the history chronologically, concentrating on slavery for the weeks leading up to

King’s birthday, I might unintentionally strengthen the notion that he had led Black

Americans out of physical bondage, like a modern-day Moses. On the other hand, I felt it impossible and illogical to discuss American segregation with no reference to

American slavery at all. So for the first two weeks, I tried to minimize confusion by focusing on the segregation and racism of the century between 1865 and 1968, but I also frequently reminded everyone that after the holiday we would be going back to look more closely at actual slavery, before the Civil War. In that third week we would ask “where did all of this prejudice start?” and return to an even worse time, when

White men literally owned African Americans as property. (Happily, by that point in

January the second grade teachers would begin their annual unit on the Underground

Railroad; so while they taught the history of Harriet Tubman and abolition through literature and art, I would explore it through poetry, spirituals, and more contemporary music about the period.)

After our first introductory week of questions, conversation, picture books, photos, and film clips about what life was like under segregation, I spent the next week narrowing the focus to real activities of the Civil Rights Movement. The question then became “what did people in the movement actually do to try and change things?” Now I faced more curriculum decisions: in the short time I could give to reviewing this complex campaign, who and what was most important to mention? I chose three figures who I thought exemplified crucial aspects of the movement’s

58 philosophy and methods. Naturally, we looked first at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life and work, emphasizing his background in the Baptist church, his philosophy of non- violence, his speeches, his leadership in freedom marches. I stressed, too, that King worked and taught about more than just American racial issues, that he was an activist for global peace and economic fairness across cultures. So along the way I introduced the names and methods of other peacemakers from various cultures—notably, Gandhi.

In every class I read picture books, in particular My Brother Martin, Martin’s Big

Words, and Happy Birthday Martin Luther King, and I played audio recordings of several speeches. Midway through this week I showed news coverage of the 1963 march on Washington and the “Dream” speech. Fourth graders watched grainy footage of the march very carefully, understood much of the speech, and thoughtfully discussed the symbolic power of presenting it at the feet of Lincoln’s statue. Several observed that marchers and performers sang throughout the event.

In the second grade class, three children grew restless after listening for a few minutes and two never seemed to listen much at all; yet most looked like they were trying to understand King’s speech, despite the challenge of his accent, delivery, and vocabulary. When it finished, I asked who could describe the end of the speech. L. said decisively: “He sounded like he really wanted it to happen!” Q. agreed, then wondered aloud if “the same thing could have happened to King [when he finished speaking] as happened to Jesus [when He was arrested and killed]?” Several kids chorused, “no-- Jesus was hung on a cross!” Q. persisted, suggesting that King might have been “put up like against a wall or something, and shot.” Whereupon P.

59 announced: “Actually it was good that Jesus died, because He had to die so He could go ahead and open the gates of heaven for us.” I replied that I did not think King was ever in danger of being publicly executed, though Black Americans certainly faced a lot of violence in those days, and that they should address all questions about the crucifixion of Jesus to their parents and churches! (Though some little boys relish steering our classroom conversation to the subject of homicide, I don’t like discussions to be derailed by that fascination.) In the back of my mind, I sometimes wonder when

I’m going to get a phone call or e-mail from a parent, complaining: “why is the subject of religion coming up in music class, and what does civil rights history have to do with music education anyway?” I well know how even attentive kids sometimes misconstrue or misremember things, going home and utterly distorting things they’ve heard in class. Thankfully, no calls or e-mails – yet.

As we continued to ponder non-violence, third and fourth grades engaged in lively discussions of King’s admonition to the Washington marchers that

in the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful

deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the

cup of bitterness and hatred…We must not allow our creative protest to

degenerate into physical violence. (1963, p. 19)

In class and in conversation, many of these children advocated non-violence quite articulately, voicing intelligent and relevant ways to apply it to their own lives. I sincerely hope these convictions travel as well as they sound in class. Certainly the fourth-graders seem to get it, more and more with every class period. Towards the end

60 of this second week they listened wide-eyed to a former freedom marcher remembering a White protester threatening to put out his cigarette on her face. She recollected that the words to “I Shall Not Be Moved” kept going around and around in her head and enabled her silently to face him down until he backed off. This provoked an enthusiastic and thoughtful discussion of ways to respond to physical aggression without using brute force, and someone recalled King urging the crowd in Washington to “meet physical force with soul force.” Someone else called our attention to a poster on the wall bearing King’s quote, “Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” I was touched by their innocent, earnest conversation.

Later that day I was even more gratified by an exchange between two first graders, S. and E. As both made a beeline for the last of the (highly-prized) top row seats on the risers, they began to argue vehemently about who should get that spot. In a few seconds S. literally whipped out his fist and proposed that they play “ro-sham- bo” for the spot. In another minute S. lost, cheerfully conceded, and it was over. As a class we congratulated them on the quick and peaceful way they settled that problem, and I proclaimed it a demonstration of how we can all continue King’s work today.

When it comes to increasing peace in the world, as fourth-grader J. R. said of giving money to poor people, “everything helps.”

Besides looking at Dr. King himself, I chose in this second week to present the story of Rosa Parks, because it illustrates the concept of civil disobedience so memorably. All classes watched a powerful scene from a 2002 film, The Rosa Parks

Story, which dramatizes the 1955 incident when she refused to give up her bus seat.

Response to this scene varied, depending on the age of the students. Typical of the older students was the third grade’s discussion on January 11th. They were unanimously excited and supportive of Mrs. Parks’s action on the bus, applauding her dignity, self-control, firmness, courage, and judgment. Many strongly sympathized with her frustration and most were able to articulate their feelings lucidly. S. observed solemnly that her saying “no” to the driver and police was particularly justifiable because she was thinking “not just about herself, but about many, many other Black people.” Though his belief is not quite accurate (in her autobiography Rosa wrote that she was not trying to be an NAACP test case or a hero), S. and most others in this class sensed the bigger issues at stake. I made a note to let them read in class her own three-page account of the incident.

That day I also realized for the first time that some first graders, including the brightest and most attentive, had mixed feelings and ambivalence about Rosa’s quiet defiance on that bus. At first they responded as I expected – after viewing the same video clip the third grade saw, they uniformly disapproved of the driver’s treatment of

Mrs. Parks. I noticed that they seemed most affected not by the general situation on the bus, but by the two most blatantly mean things that happened: driver James Blake hatefully flipping the “Colored” sign from Rosa’s row to the row behind her, giving the police the excuse they needed to arrest her and haul her off to jail.

The next time I met these first graders, they did surprise me. Before moving on to discuss the bus boycott itself, I casually asked by way of review and introduction:

“So, do we think Rosa was right to not give her seat to the White guy?” I expected to

62 hear a chorus of “yes!” but instead was met with an uneasy quiet. Slightly puzzled, I put it a different way: “Who thinks she should have gotten up when the driver asked her to?” Several children raised their hands but for the life of them could not explain why they thought so. Conversely, others could not explain why they thought she was right not to get up. In short, the group seemed generally at a loss for words. Not sure whether this was due to lack of understanding, lack of vocabulary, or actual disapproval of Rosa’s action, I showed them another scene in the film, which depicted

Rosa’s earlier run-in with the same bus driver in 1943. On that rainy night she had gotten on the bus and sat down in the colored section, forgetting to get back off and go around to enter through the back door. The film showed Blake confronting her aggressively and forcing her off, slamming the door in her face, and driving away with her umbrella stuck in the door; she walked five miles in the pouring rain, sobbing, to get home. Most children seemed deeply dismayed to see this, but we had no time to discuss it. I simply asked them to think about how that would feel, and whether people should be allowed to treat others that way—or did such a bus system need to change?

A few minutes later, I started the next first grade class a little differently.

Rather than immediately ask them to judge Rosa’s uncooperative behavior, I showed the same film clip about the 1943 incident. They too reacted with indignation. But when I then asked them to evaluate Rosa’s behavior, opinion in this class, too, was divided. Perhaps defying an authority figure is not something these six and seven- year-olds easily condone, no matter what the circumstances. At least a third of them thought she should have given up her seat, and without hesitation B. explained why:

“It is not a good thing to go to jail – she got into trouble doing that [saying ‘no’].” This very literal view of wrongdoing, I began to feel, was causing some of the children to miss the forest for the trees. Rosa’s refusal to be agreeable and cooperative seemed to unsettle them at least as much as did the discriminatory practices on the bus. (Indeed, they were starting to remind me of some of the other Black passengers on Rosa’s bus, who had muttered for her just to get up and move.) On the other side of the debate, Z. agreed with Rosa’s choice because “things needed to change.” A handful of kids seemed relieved to vote “undecided,” as though my questioning was some kind of trap. These responses were unexpected, and I now wonder if not all first graders are developmentally quite ready for this material. Is it over their heads? Or maybe it’s all just too new to them; maybe they need to hear and understand more about life in those days before discussing the rightness or wrongness of Rosa Parks’s actions. I made a note to consider going less graphically into her story with this age group in the future, or at least to introduce it later in our study.

Later in the second week we took a closer look at the topic of boycotts. Every class watched film clips of the Montgomery bus boycott sparked by Mrs. Parks’s arrest; we observed how it started, who kept it going, the kinds of support and hostility it got from the community, how it ended. During the vigorous discussion which followed in the third grade, R. passionately enumerated reasons to boycott Wal-Mart

(“because you know, they make their employees work in very bad heat and freezing cold”). L. speculated that lots of Hallmark stores are going out of business because they are being boycotted. (I said I doubted that.) First graders seemed to understand

64 pretty well how and why the bus boycott worked. But when Rosa Parks’s name came up again in connection with it – just to keep me on my toes?-- most of them had switched their views about her noncompliance with the police. B. explained this time,

“she needed to say no.” Why this change of opinion? No student could really explain it--one and all, they just felt differently. I wondered to myself: had they just needed more time to absorb all these new stories and images, to get past the literal and let the bigger picture come into focus? I fervently hope they are not just trying to second guess what they think I want them to say.

Finally, I shared with second through fourth graders the story of a third key figure, Ruby Bridges, to teach the lesson that everyone, no matter how big or small, no matter when or where they live, can make a positive difference in this world. A well- made Disney film about her experience desegregating a New Orleans elementary school affected most of these students strongly. The angry picketing and the outrageous insults hurled at her on the sidewalk every day startled a lot of them. I hoped that her story would remind them that even very young people can be examples of strength in difficult situations and can help change adult-sized problems in this world.

To drive this message home, on Friday we also began learning Sally Rogers’s infectious song, “What Can One Little Person Do?” It took effort, most of this second week, not to jump straight into the narrative and songs of the assembly itself. Of course I can’t wait for the music to be performed well and powerfully, and I know that learning the songs can help reinforce the history lessons – but only if the children have

65 clear ideas about what the lyrics mean. Simply memorizing and mouthing the words will diminish the songs and make them ring hollow. So rather than leap directly into rehearsal mode, I restrained myself until Friday, determined to let the children absorb the film clips and stories and photos, hear real marchers sing the songs, watch and hear

King speak, ask questions about life back then.

On that last day before the King holiday weekend, I began to teach “Keep

Your Eyes On the Prize,” “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” and “What

Can One little Person Do?” One and all loved these songs and sang them with gusto. It felt as if, after two weeks of discussing such big troubles, the children welcomed this chance to stop talking about the problems and just sing out. Maybe that’s how some freedom marchers felt as they raised their voices above the troubles all around them. It felt really good to throw back our heads and let loose singing.

In summary, our civil rights study began by reviewing for two weeks what life was like during 20th-century segregation, paying special attention to the historic contributions of Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Ruby Bridges, and their supporters. Besides asking questions and leading class discussions of these topics, I frequently used short video clips from some exceptional documentaries and dramatizations. Those scenes, plus the many picture books and photographs lining my classroom walls and shelves, were more compelling than even my most passionate homilies. Most children were riveted by them. By the end of these first weeks, we also began learning some of the civil rights music, and second graders were assigned their individual speaking parts for the program’s narration.

In the Days of Slavery

In the third week of our study, as promised, we stepped farther back in history to explore the Civil Rights Movement’s social and musical roots—that is, to consider slavery and spirituals. I found it easier to reopen the subject of slavery than it had been to initiate discussion of Martin Luther King two weeks earlier. With each passing week students seemed to respond more readily to my questions and observations, in all grades. Rather than tiring of these challenging subjects, they seemed increasingly comfortable talking about them. Though slavery is certainly as alien to these children as racial segregation, conversation about it flowed pretty freely. Maybe its being such a far-off historical oddity, so utterly remote from our personal experience and our era, made slavery almost easier to discuss than the more imaginable, more personal complexities of segregation. I’m not sure. Older children, grades three and four, did not describe slavery in any sophisticated terms, however, but with simplistic, stereotypical imagery surely picked up from storybooks.

How would you explain slavery?

A: It was when a master made Black people work for them, and if slaves

didn’t do what he said, he whipped them.

J: And after—the master-- he lashed them, he rubbed salt into the cuts.

S: But if you worked in the big house, it was better.

About the salt—is that a pretty broad generalization? Do you think every slave owner did that, with every slave?

J (hastily): No, no. Probably only some masters did that.

In the second grade, H. defined slavery as “when someone makes someone work for them and they can’t leave.” Someone said, “They had moats around the houses.” M. described it as “people bossing each other around and being really mean.”

C. said: “It was evil,” and when others giggled at that choice of words, he did not back down. W.—quiet, somber, African American—asked the big question: “Why did they make the Black people be slaves, anyway?” S. wanted to know too: “Who invented slavery?” No one, including me, had easy answers to this. I offered that cruel, greedy, power-hungry, usually well-armed people have been doing this to other people when they could get away with it for thousands of years, and in some places in the world the crime continues today.

The best resource I have found for introducing slavery to young children is

LeVar Burton’s superb Reading Rainbow video, Follow the Drinking Gourd. He walks through an actual slave ship, shows the manacles, stands in the hold and reflects on what happened there. The film powerfully dramatizes what it would be like to be stacked in the hold for a trans-Atlantic crossing, how slaves were bought at auction, how a mother felt when her child was sold, and other scenes of slave life. It is gripping, yet without graphic violence to traumatize second graders. The 10-minute introduction is followed by a retelling of Jeanette Winter’s Follow the Drinking

Gourd. By the time we have listened to Morgan Freeman and Taj Mahal narrate another masterful book, also entitled Follow the Drinking Gourd, the second grade begins to feel what it was like to attempt escape on the Underground Railroad. One very impulsive African American boy who had been having social problems in other

68 classes, was transfixed by this subject and revealed a very different side of himself throughout our discussions and videos. By the third week of our study his behavior in music class changed radically; he began to learn songs, was a model of attentiveness during film clips, contributed enthusiastically and thoughtfully to class discussions, stopped bothering other children physically. Would any of this affect his behavior and attitudes outside of music class? I would have to wait and see. (I once saw this material similarly change the behavior of another boy—also African American, also calling a lot of negative attention upon himself, also in an upper-crust private school; that boy, too, became a very positive, personable student in the course of our studies of civil rights studies and stayed that way for the rest of the year. I don’t know what happened subsequently, as he withdrew from the school. But when they left, his mother told me that our studies in music class had personally meant a lot to him while he was there.)

In the fourth grade, students easily named various purposes which spirituals served. They recalled, for instance, that spirituals were used “to communicate between people, between slaves…they were fun to sing…they kept people’s spirits up…they sent secret messages that the masters didn’t understand…they made people feel better…” They also remembered from their third grade studies that African captives were first brought to Jamestown in 1619, centuries before the kind of “Gone With the

Wind” images usually associated with American slavery. Another day I asked:

What really important part of jazz did we get from slaves and their spirituals?

JC, immediately: Rhythm!

And where did those rhythms come from?

Y: The church?

I remarked that lots of rhythms from slave music naturally found their way into

Black church music and have come down to us in gospel and other jazz forms….

But what part of the world did the rhythms originally come from?

Y: England?

Others: No!

L: Africa.

I was heartened by (most of) these comments and decided to stop being quite so systematic. It seemed time to let all the cats out of the bag—that is, to allow the kids to begin experiencing the program’s music, spoken narrative and drama, and historical background—all together, in whatever directions they might take. I hoped— actually, I expected – that the three components would reinforce and clarify each other. And I wanted students to make connections between them.

Teaching the Music

When I began teaching the music in earnest, the song which students of all ages most often wanted to repeat was Walter Robinson’s upbeat folk ballad, “Harriet

Tubman.” Students especially liked the way Kim and Reggie Harris sang it.

One night I dreamed I was in slavery, ‘bout 1850 was the time.

Sorrow was the only sign, and nothing about to ease my mind.

Out of the night appeared a lady leading a distant pilgrim band.

“First mate!” she called, pointing her hand. “Now make room aboard for

this young woman.

Come on up, mmmmm, I got a lifeline-- come on up to this train of mine.

They said her name was Harriet Tubman, and she drove for…the

Underground Railroad. (Robinson, as cited in Harris & Harris, 1997, p. 5)

Asked why they enjoyed it so much, third graders cited: “the beat,” its tempo and mood, “the chorus about the lifeline,” the fact that “it teaches history while you’re singing”, and that “when we sing it’s like we’re thanking Harriet Tubman for rescuing all those people.” For the sheer pleasure of it, students from first all the way through fourth also loved to sing at the tops of their lungs “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me

‘Round.”

Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round, turn me ‘round, turn me ‘round!

Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round,

I’m gonna keep on a-walkin’, keep on a-talkin’, marching up to freedom land.

(traditional, as cited in Carawan & Carawan, 1963, p. 60)

Five of the songs inspired more serious reflection on Black history and on overcoming adversity in general: “Go Down Moses,” “Oh Freedom,” “Follow the

Drinking Gourd,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and Jim Strathdee’s contemporary anthem, “Song of Hope.” For example, as we learned “Oh Freedom,” I pointed out that the traditional spiritual was reworded for 1960s freedom singing. The original words read: “Oh freedom! Oh freedom! Oh freedom over me. And before I’d be a

71 slave I’d be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free.” Members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee changed the last line to “I’ll fight for my right to be free” (as cited in Carawan & Carawan, 1963, p. 72).

What do those first two lines mean?

F: That person hated being a slave so much, he’d rather be dead [than be

one].

But if escape to the North wasn’t possible, where would a slave hope to find real freedom, forever?

“Heaven!” Apparently some in this class attend church.

B: So did lots of slaves kill themselves?

The conversation flowed on, interest high. In every grade, children really wanted to think and talk about these ideas. The following exchange was between third graders.

Do you think slaves would sing about “fighting for their right to be free?”

G: No, ‘cause if they did they might get punished. Or their master might

hear them in the field, and he might think they were going to escape.

J: No, they weren’t brave enough to sing words like that.

H demonstrated the keenest insight: Some slaves might not even have any hope left, they might not think they would ever get free. So why think about it. They wouldn’t sing about “fighting” to get free.

But why would civil rights marchers sing about “fighting” for their rights?

B: They weren’t slaves. Maybe they could get their rights if they tried hard.

So what do you think people in King’s day meant by “fight” for their rights?

Q, second grade, in a tone of triumph: They fought for their rights with love.

This from a small boy who began this year consistently tuning out in music class, or working assiduously to get negative attention. Thank the Lord for Q!

Another song I determined to teach faithfully was James Weldon Johnson’s

“Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Just as every September I thoroughly review “The Star-

Spangled Banner” and its history, I want each student annually to sing and reconsider the meaning of “the Black national anthem.” In this third week of our project, fourth graders and I spoke and sang the stanzas as we pored over Bryan Collier’s illustrated version of the song. On every page, we made out the lines of faces woven into the clouds and sky – a subtle backdrop of human profiles in “the listening skies” – surrounding modern schoolchildren going about their lives.

S: The people in that picture look like spirits, all around that boy.

Whose spirits, do you think?

SJ: Maybe people in the past.

“Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us. Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us” (Johnson, 2007, pp. 5-6). By the fourth week, when I asked what kinds of things happened in “the dark past,” even first graders were full of specific examples: “segregation…people not allowed to mix…children used separate bathrooms…drinking fountains that weren’t

73 nice…marchers getting sprayed with fireman hoses…slavery…white people bossing black people around…kids wouldn’t sit in class with Ruby or play with her.” As for

“the hope that the present has brought us,” H. in first grade summed it up: “America’s not perfect. But it’s better!”

There’s a line in the program where someone asks “what has this got to do with me? Slavery was abolished over 100 years ago, at the time of the Civil War. Why are we still talking about this old stuff now?” So why do we keep talking and singing about King, and Rosa Parks, and Ruby Bridges, and Harriet Tubman, and laws and ways that are changed now, for us?

R: To honor them. Because of what they did.

Can we learn anything from “the dark past,” even if we don’t face the exact same problems between Black and White people?

Lots of heads were nodding. And Ken Burns sprang to mind, reaffirming that

good history [study] overcomes the arrogance that the past is long ago.

History—our consideration of the past—is a present-day exercise. It tells us

who we are now…[It asks] who are we as a people? What does it mean to be

an American? You can’t possibly know where you’re going if you don’t know

where you’ve been. (introduction to The Shakers, 1995)

So what kinds of things can we learn from those people in the past? (silence) What about solving problems, overcoming obstacles, getting hard things done? Do serious things change just by magic, just by people wishing them to change?

K: No--you have to work for what you want.

J: You have to earn what you get.

Bravo! There followed an animated conversation about learning from the attitudes and examples set by historical figures. We thought about situations in

74 academics, in sports, in family relationships, and amongst friends. It was interesting to hear what they consider hardships in their own lives, and how they face them. True, these bright, talented, generally affluent children enjoy relatively comfortable lives.

But growing up is a challenge in itself, especially in today’s frantic world. And even in our school, some students must cope with tough challenges such as violent custody battles, illness, and emotional or learning problems. Asked to describe things they consider difficult in their own lives, some mentioned pushing themselves to practice and persevere in sports and music, even when they felt bored or tired. Several talked about struggling to control their feelings and behavior when other people upset them.

One child mentioned the stress of sharing different homes with two separated parents.

One boy’s little sister, a preschooler at our school, endures a heartbreaking skin disease which will kill her in a few years. Another boy worried aloud that the country, and his parents, were going to run out of money and said it was “hard not be scared” about that.

Later I mused that the “spirit faces” in the pictures were hovering over everybody, not just over the African American children, and recalled someone once saying that in America, Black history is everybody’s history. We’re all in this together.

Well, when we better understand what happened before us, does that help us go forward? Can it help us be better people now and in the future?

E was apparently still preoccupied by the misguided things people have done in the past and not ready to talk about the future yet.

E: You know, in Little Women there was this character Amy, and at school

she stole some candy and her teacher hit her hard on her hands as a

punishment. It left scars on her hand.

Hands went up around the room, as kids jumped onto the subject of corporal punishment. For several minutes I let them tell stories of parents and grandparents being whacked with rulers and belts.

Obviously lots of people in the past acted like they were not smart, and did really ignorant and hurtful things to each other. Remember all those people screaming at Ruby Bridges every day outside her school. But also remember—some day we’re going to be the past. So how do we want people to look back and remember us? “Thou who hast by Thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path, we pray.” (I couldn’t help it, I was starting to sermonize.)

They came up with a list of character traits which included: honest, meaningful, peaceful, generous, trustworthy, thoughtful, helpful, thankful, and my favorite—forgiving.

Can you be more specific—thankful for what?

K. (African American third grader): If not for them, like in civil rights, we

might still have segregation. We shouldn’t forget what they did, how they

made it better for us.

R.: We owe them.

E. (gesturing with her hands): People in the old days sculpted the future!

Everyone, including E., laughed.

Did you make that up, or read it somewhere?

E: I—just—made-- that--up!!!

We absolutely believed her.

Jim Strathdee’s (1985) “Song of Hope” also got us thinking about never giving up, even in the face of huge problems. The song begins

When the darkness overwhelms us to dim our sight and mind,

When all roads lead to confusion and hope’s impossible to find.

Free our minds for dreaming of a time when war shall ever cease,

Free our eyes for vision that leads us to the ways of peace. (pp. 28-29)

I asked fourth graders where they thought “darkness” might be overwhelming people today, where hope might be hard to hold onto. They did not find this question difficult to answer. They cited situations like people getting killed over drugs in Mexico, roadside bombs going off in Iraq, “untouchables” being shunned in India, and people buried under collapsed buildings in Haiti. I was surprised at how much local murder and mayhem some of them knew about.

After Jim Strathdee mentions big problems, how does he always finish the verse?

K: [With] ways to fight against them.

That opened a discussion of the kinds of action the five verses recommend.

The lyrics urge us to keep dreaming of peace, keep looking for ways to help others, keep loving life and other people, keep speaking out for what you believe, keep singing. Just as I thought the conversation was petering out, a quiet boy new to our school suddenly spoke up.

C: But we can’t do anything about those things.

What things do you mean?

C: All those problems they’re talking about.

Big silence in the room, which I let hang for a minute.

What do the rest of you think? Is there nothing we can do?

With no further questions or prompting from me, kids leaped to disagree.

A: We adopted a family, we bought them clothes at Christmas.

J (who rarely speaks): There’s this place called Loaves and Fishes, homeless

people go there, every year my family takes clothes and food down there

and we give it to the people who are homeless.

L: You can give kids what they ask for on those lists, when they’re wishing

for things.

Others: You mean “Make-a-Wish.”

C: My brother constantly sends money to a website that tells things that

schools need, around the country. You go to that website and read what

the school wants, you can send money to them. He does that constantly.

As I reflected on all of this later, I felt that C. had been slightly misunderstood, in an intriguing way. When he said “we can’t do anything about those things,” he was surely referring to things like Mexico’s drug wars, India’s untouchables, and Iraq’s political conflicts. But the rest of the class didn’t really address those issues. In response to his realistic but negative comment, perhaps without realizing it, the other children essentially changed the subject and began cataloging ways they and their

78 families help people (mostly with charitable giving). I was struck by these children’s innocent and ingrained optimism—their assumption that something can always be done about difficulties, especially if you are generous with your money. They are not stymied by the big world problems they hear about (partly because they aren’t personally touched by most of them). They do not feel helpless or indifferent. They seem to believe whole-heartedly what they are continually told: that even the little things they do know how to do, like have bake sales for Rwanda or take clothes to the homeless shelter, matter and make a difference. J. R. expressed his view, in a nutshell:

“Everything helps.”

I think it is very important that children feel this way, and I believe that teaching “Song of Hope” and other socially conscious songs can help promote a healthy kind of optimism amongst children. That’s why I also included “If You Miss

Me at the Back of the Bus” and “What Can One Little Person Do?” in the program.

With theorist Maxine Greene (1995, 1998), I feel that such songs, and other art experiences, “release the imagination” in a crucial way for children, helping them maintain hope in an all-too-gloomy world. I believe that the lyrics of these songs, and the experience of speaking out about them, can help my students withstand cynicism and apathy, grow into optimistic people, and see themselves as agents for positive, effective change in difficult situations. “Song of Hope” urges us not to let “fear of war’s destruction paralyze heart and breath…[or let] songs and laughter vanish in terror of the sounds of death” (Strathdee, 1985, p. 28). One thing clearly not paralyzed in these children is their imagination. Or their breath.

If you miss me at the back of the bus, and you can’t find me nowhere,

Come on up to the front of the bus, I’ll be riding up there.

If you miss me in the cotton fields, and you can’t find me nowhere,

Come on down to the courthouse, I’ll be voting down there. (Carver Neblett,

as cited in Harley, Crocker, & Higgins, 1996, p. 10)

I think such lyrics reflect what Greene (1995) has called an “as if” point of view. They speak of things as if they were right and just, of things as they could and should be. The singer, whether civil rights marcher or student today, goes to that place imaginatively, and expresses belief in those possibilities or celebrates someone else’s belief in them.

Rosa Parks sat on the bus and the driver said you must

Move to the back of the bus or else be thrown in jail.

But she stayed and stood her ground, she brought that old law down,

‘cause she knew she had justice on her side. (Sally Rogers, as cited in Brack,

2005, p. 41)

After each verse in Rogers’s song resounds the chorus, which every grade I teach finds so satisfying to ask and answer:

What can one little person do, what can one little me or you do?

What can one little person do to help this world go ‘round?

One can help another one, and together we can get the job done,

What can one little person do to help this world? (Brack, p. 41)

Do songs like this influence behavior, stimulate people to positive action? I cannot absolutely prove a cause-and-effect relationship between that song and the fourth grade’s wildly enthusiastic CD sale for Haitian earthquake relief last week. But I keep teaching and watching, and I wonder.

Applying the Moral Lessons

Now in Week 5, two small incidents have given me hope that some of these history lessons may take on personal meaning for some students and influence their thinking today. The first concerned the aforementioned second grader Q, who is assigned the following lines to transition between the slavery and the civil rights part of our assembly: “Well, what has this got to do with me? Slavery was abolished over

100 years ago, at the time of the Civil War. Why are we still talking about this old stuff now?” In the past, Q was often inattentive in class, restless, sometimes downright defiant. Though he is obviously very bright, he has always read haltingly in my class.

Yet he has taken our civil rights discussions seriously and thought hard about the issues. He also leaped to memorize his speaking part, and the first time he delivered it in class I was astounded by his clear, eloquent, word-perfect delivery. He beamed when I announced that on a scale of 1 to 10 he deserved a “15.” As he walked out of class, he looked me in the eye and said gleefully, “I just believed in myself—I told myself I could do it, and I did!” Q became a very positive presence in music class during this project and never returned to his defiant ways. I was reminded that some fidgety little White middle-class boys may need and use the personal lessons—

81 including the emotional inspiration – of the Civil Rights Movement just as much as some minority students do.

The second incident involved Y, an even more disruptive and unfocused

(African American) second grader, who has had ongoing social problems with classmates. He, too, has become markedly calmer in class during this unit. He offers carefully considered opinions rather than blurting out thoughtlessly and is reading independently about the Amistad and about Harriet Tubman. Our principal told me that during a playground quarrel two weeks ago one student emphasized a final point by stomping hard on Y’s foot. Y stared at him, then walked away, and when all of this was reported to their teacher, Y did not mention being stomped. When witnesses later told the principal the whole story, she asked Y why he had walked away without retaliating or even complaining. He told her: “I was trying to be the Black person.

Even though A. hurt me, I didn’t do violence back to him.” When I first heard this story, I wondered if Y was confusing non-violence with apathy, which was a volatile issue during the Civil Rights movement too. But Y is not a passive person; it surely took effort for him to resist hitting back or tattling to the teacher. The principal felt sure that he had been inspired by Ruby Bridges and other civil rights figures to deliberately refuse to fight back; and she felt that for all his immaturity, Y had won that day, coming away with more dignity than the others. He, at least, may be taking these lessons to heart.

Rehearsing the Assembly

In this fifth week, Z has been chosen to portray Rosa Parks in our bus reenactment. She is a tall, African American second grader, very quiet in class. One of her parts reads: “The Underground Railroad wasn’t a train. It was people—White people and Black people—who helped slaves escape to the northern states and

Canada, where African Americans could live in freedom.” After studying these words carefully, she asked me if she could change “African Americans” to “all people,” considering that a more precise wording. I was gratified that she had reflected on the nuances of this sentence by herself, and I thought her wording made good sense, so we changed it. I love it when kids think for themselves like that. The many who are thinking as she is more than balance out the first grader who asked me in the fifth week, after weeks of film and discussion, “So, was Rosa Parks a Black woman?”

Second, third, even first graders are beginning to ask to sing the songs even when they’re in afterschool day care, if I’m around to play the piano. It seems that they have grown to love the sound and the mood created when they come together on these songs, including the difficult “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” I find this even more satisfying than the music they make when asked to sing in class.

In the sixth week, the second grade put together the mechanics of the assembly. I had prepared a script, adapting it from a program by Judith Brack (2005), and the children had been practicing their parts at home for several weeks. Now for three grueling class periods they practiced stepping forward, using the microphones, helping each other keep up in the script, reenacting the bus incident. Most have

83 learned their lines at home, but we practiced enunciation and expression a lot in class.

How we labored! On the fourth day, I saw them begin to come together as a team.

Many began to anticipate what was coming next in the script, reminding each other with a minimum of impatience, and most began to speak with real clarity and strong expression. Hallelujah! Thursday’s practice ended with red licorice all around, which I save for extra-special accomplishments.

To cap off this week, two long-awaited, special guests visited us on Friday,

February 12th. Jim and Jean Strathdee spent a memorable hour with the third and fourth graders, who packed into the music room to sing Jim’s “Song of Hope” (1985) and favorite civil rights songs. I had told Jim that the children knew his song well, but

I don’t think he was prepared for how well they knew it. They sang it as with one voice, and the clarity of their phrasing gave me goose bumps. Looking back at our journey thus far, I give myself due credit for teaching them the notes and rhythms, for guiding them in understanding the adult vocabulary, for showing them how to sing with zeal; but the spirit and joy that filled our room when they finally got to sing for

Jim and Jean was much bigger than me. No one can compel or teach such singing from the heart. On the fifth verse every student stood, 74 strong, and the wave of sound rolled over us all. When it ended, Jim was wiping his eyes. The power of our 9 and 10-year olds pouring out that music to its human composer -- with its divine

Creator surely listening in – I will not forget. Jim later revealed that “Song of Hope” is his favorite of the hundreds of songs he has written over a lifetime of singing for peace and justice.

That was only the beginning of much great singing that afternoon, as the

Strathdees taught peace songs with hand motions, the room swirled with Jewish dancing, and the kids pounded out “Keep Your Eyes On the Prize” and “Follow the

Drinking Gourd.” Between pieces, third graders showed Jim and Jean their hand- drawn illustrations for “Song of Hope” (1985) and tried to explain what various verses meant to them. At the end, Jim told the children he was proud of them not only for learning the words to these great justice songs, but for taking them deeply to heart. He encouraged everyone to draw courage and hope from the music when facing their own challenges in life, to be voices for positive social change when possible, and in the words of the song he had just taught them, steadfastly “to stand for what is right.” I added my two cents, reminding them again that one of the best ways even kids can make a difference in the world, at any age and in any place, is to sing hope-filled music. With such music I believe children serve and lead us all. Thus I urge them to fill the air with songs like “What Can One Little Person Do?”, to release them into

James Weldon Johnson’s “listening skies,” to proffer them to all who want to listen and, perhaps more important, to those who don’t. Finally, to end this long, somewhat frenzied day of exchanging valentines and candy, children presented flowers and a big valentine to their much-admired guests. But their singing was the sweetest gift I have gotten in a long time, and I was elated that they shared it so eagerly with Jim, Jean, and everyone within earshot.

A week later, on February 19th, we ended our seventh week of study. With only two more school days until the assembly, I suddenly decided to see if first grade

85 could possibly join us on the last verse of “Song of Hope.” This was a bit of a gamble, as I had never tried to teach it to such young children before, and time was running out. Even so, when I sat one group of first graders down in front of the last verse, I could not bring myself to let them learn the words by rote, out of context. So I backed up to the first verse, invited them to read the words out loud with me, and then summed up what I thought the verse meant as simply as I could. Their eyes got big as they watched the words and listened.

When the fear of war’s destruction paralyzes heart and breath,

When our songs and laughter vanish in terror of the sounds of death,

Free our hearts for loving this life so precious and so dear,

Free our voice for singing the songs that overcome our fear. (Strathdee, p. 28)

This is certainly not first grade material. Yet I suspected that some of these kids might grasp some of it, at least imaginatively. I mentioned children in other countries, many afraid to go to school because of car bombs, others haunted by the sight and sound of relatives dying; yet the song encourages us even in frightening, dark situations to keep hoping for better times, to keep believing that war can end, to keep loving those around us, to keep singing. Do you think that’s possible, I asked—to sing, even when danger and sadness is all around you? They were unsure.

Then I repeated a story I recently heard from an American paramedic just returned from earthquake relief work in Haiti, who had been wakened at 4:00 one morning by a woman’s voice singing in the darkness near his tent. He said that in seconds a few other voices joined in, then more and more voices until it sounded like a

86 hundred or so people singing together. He got up to listen, and within a few minutes, maybe 1,000 people were singing this song in Creole together, from all corners of the dark camp. The American remembered feeling speechless, and humbled. I asked my students if they could imagine singing like that—could singing actually make people feel better? I was surprised when several children quickly raised their hands. One said he sings to himself in his room sometimes when it’s dark. One said her mother sings to her when she’s sick or tired, in her bed. Another told of being in a closet once with her little brother (she did not explain why), and because he was afraid of the dark, she comforted him by singing to him. So some six-year-olds can indeed understand this idea, and a few of these children have already wrestled with it in real life.

When in weary isolation we’ve lost our courage to care,

When our captive spirits perish in the bondage of despair,

Free our arms for action, reaching for another’s hand,

Free our feet for marching or to boldly make a stand. (Strathdee, p. 29)

I asked: What can arms do, to help people stay strong in hard times? C. shouted out:

“Hug!” Other kids didn’t bother to speak but linked arms in the human chain they love to form during “Keep Your Eyes On the Prize.” Who in the days of segregation boldly made a stand? “Rosa Parks!” “Ruby Bridges!” Who marched to make people wake up and change their ways? “Martin Luther King!” “Bus boycotters!” These six- and seven-year-olds were making connections right and left between the Civil Rights

Movement, Jim’s song (conceived, he said, during America’s invasion of Granada), and our classroom books and movies.

When our sisters are in slavery, when our brothers are in need,

When the cost is human misery for the nation’s power and greed,

When the ties are broken, when we’ve lost our human soul,

Free our lives for serving to make the human family whole. (Strathdee, p. 28)

Is there still slavery in the world? “Yes, lots, in other countries!” Are there brothers in need today, here in Sacramento? “Homeless guys!” Where are they? Someone suggested: “By the river!” Where do they go to get help? According to L: “food shelters.” I didn’t go into “the nation’s power and greed,” but asked: What kinds of people spend their lives serving others? I was even more astonished when many hands shot up. I heard: National Guard! Firemen! Church ministers like Martin Luther King,

Jr.! Police! Nurses! Surgeons! Lawyers! The governor! President Obama! Workers who build houses! Teachers! Ambulance drivers! Forest firefighters! Taxi drivers! Air force men! The people [staff] who work at Sunrise [Assisted Living]! Yes, I thought, they do understand the concept of “service.”

The owner of the last frantically waving hand concluded our list with

“Eskimos.” I asked how Eskimos serve the human family, and he gave a complex explanation of how Eskimos work to protect others by seeing danger coming from far away with special goggles. For a moment the class paused and seriously, in complete silence, mulled this over. Then without another word, but with a kind of collective shrug of acceptance, they moved on to Jim’s final verse. In two class periods most had managed to pick up both words and melody.

Let the mountains ring with freedom, let the valleys sing with peace,

Let the rivers swell with justice, let our unity increase.

May the sun’s warm healing and the ocean’s mighty roar

Bring the day of justice when peace shall reign forevermore. (Strathdee, p. 29)

Can you show “unity” with your hands? How about the opposite of unity? What other justice song that we know talks about the mighty sound of the ocean? I really did not expect an answer to this, but N. recalled it: “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” What other song this year talked about peace ruling over us all? “Do You Hear What I Hear?” at

Christmas, when the mighty king said the holy Child would bring peace and light. The kids were on a roll, pretty pleased with themselves. And I felt that these young students had made a very good beginning. A foundation, a new level of consciousness, had been raised in these seven weeks, upon which I would have the responsibility and joy of building for three more years. Meanwhile, they would get to participate in

“Song of Hope” with their older schoolmates and would surely sing it with feeling and strength.

Presenting “Lift Every Voice and Sing”

On Tuesday, February 23rd, in a frenzy of excitement, the second graders took their places on our little stage, the first, third, fourth, and fifth grades crowded onto the multipurpose room floor in front of them, teachers and a few special guests sat along the sides, some second grade parents sat in chairs at the back, tech helpers manned the laptop and sound booth, accompanist sat down at the piano, and we finally pulled all the parts of the assembly together in one rousing hour of celebration. After some last-

89 minute technical problems were feverishly resolved by the tech crew, film clips ran smoothly. Every second grader came to the microphone exactly as practiced, and two calmly stood in for absent classmates. To a person, they spoke expressively—some, even passionately—and with confidence. The bus skit went well, albeit Rosa Parks had to make do without the cordless microphone she had planned to hold. After a hesitant start, the classes on the floor saw that the time had finally come for everyone, not just second grade, to sing out together—and joined in with gusto. Jim and Jean

Strathdee were in the audience and reportedly were again moved at hearing 130-plus children sing “Song of Hope” with clarity and feeling. Our accompanist, whose mother had died several days earlier, also seemed uplifted by the whole experience and was glad he had made the effort to be there. Before we adjourned for recess, I asked the children if they’d had fun, and they answered with applause and cheers.

The next afternoon second, third, and fourth grade reconvened, everyone squeezing onstage on risers this time. The room filled with 150 high school students and faculty, and 100 lower schoolers led this second “teach-in.” The musical sound was different, of course, as the children were concentrated together, all facing the audience. They sang energetically, as they are used to doing. As the hour ticked away a few began to look tired, but adrenaline carried them on. A couple of the children spoke a bit more rapidly this time, perhaps from nerves, but the rest spoke just as slowly and clearly as on the first day. I felt hopeful that they would remember these public speaking habits in the future.

The bus skit went much better than in the first assembly, as I spoke at length to the audience about what the children were going to demonstrate, and Rosa had her microphone this time. All the song lyrics were again projected on a big screen, but as expected, most in the audience sang sheepishly, if at all. Instead they listened attentively, clapped along on some songs, collectively “aaaw’d” at the cuteness of the pint-sized policemen in the Rosa Parks skit, and in general treated the presentation with respect and appreciation. When this second assembly ended, there was an almost giddy air of relief and a palpable sense of accomplishment. Then the second grade hopped and skipped out to a well-deserved extra recess, taking it all in stride, cheerfully proceeding on to the rest of their day. I briefly compared notes with the high school principal about the high school’s generally courteous behavior, cleaned up the multipurpose room, and it was over--until next year.

Chapter 4

EVALUATION OF THE PROJECT, PERSONAL REFLECTIONS, AND IMPLICATIONS FOR REPLICATION

Several weeks after the civil rights presentations the mother of a very rambunctious first grader stopped me in the hall. “This morning P. was in a time-out at home,” she chuckled, “and he started singing ‘Keep Your Eyes On the Prize.’ He inserted his own name and yelled, ‘P. and Silas bound in jail, got no money for to go their bail…hold on, hold on, etc.’” I agreed that P.’s was one of the more creative ways I’ve ever heard that song used: get your warden laughing so hard she lets you go.

So the civil rights project is not quite “over.” In this final chapter I will first do my best to evaluate what the children gained from our two-month study and from the assemblies. Did all the discussion and thinking make any observable difference in anyone’s behavior or attitudes? And what of the parents, teachers, guest musicians, administrators, and high school students who attended—what did they seem to gain from the experience? Second, I will sort out my own reflections on what I learned personally during this process, and what I intend to do differently in the future.

Finally, I will consider the project’s implications for other teachers and offer suggestions for those wishing to engage in their own version of the study with their own students.

Evaluation of the Project

How does one appraise such a project’s effect on students and tell if any new consciousness is gained? When I asked second graders what they thought they had

92 learned over the past weeks, I got a variety of exuberant responses. Over and over children mentioned learning a lot from the Rosa Parks bus skit. L., who played a policeman in that dramatization, thought it important that “my part used real words” from history. Everyone who spoke up said they enjoyed learning the songs. The formerly incorrigible Q. was proud that every single child had had a speaking part and learned it well; he also felt that audiences “really listened” to the historical narration.

K. observed that “working so hard [made] it more fun in the end!” The video footage was also mentioned repeatedly; children asserted that they had learned a lot from the news and other film clips. Finally, M. declared that the strongest lesson he came away with was “Don’t give up when things seem hard!”

I also wondered what the teachers, parents, and high school students who shared our musical celebration got out of it. So the morning after the second assembly

I sent the following questionnaire to our high school student body.

Thank you very much for taking a few minutes to think about these questions

honestly and thoughtfully. Mrs.Bennett

1. What did you enjoy most about the lower school civil rights assembly on

Wednesday? (To help you remember: it included children singing, audience

participation, narration by second graders, archival film, bus skit onstage,

2. slideshow with music, song lyrics projected, posters around the room, Jay

Johnson playing piano.)

3. What historical information, if any, did you learn from the presentation? For

example, did it make you rethink any historical assumptions about the Civil

Rights Movement or its leaders? Give you new ideas or information?

4. What, if anything, did you learn about lower-schoolers? Did they surprise you

in any way? Did the assembly cause you to reconsider any assumptions you

have about seven, eight, nine-year-olds?

5. What did you notice about how your classmates, friends, others in the audience

responded to the speaking, film, or music?

6. Would you like to see the assembly again in the future, with film and music

varied?

The following tallies interested me. From 103 student respondents, 26 said they liked the bus skit. Twenty-seven specifically mentioned liking the archival film or slide show. Twenty-eight had something positive to say about the second graders’ speaking parts. The words “cute” and “adorable” were used 32 times. Fifty-four students—77% of junior respondents, 53% of sophomores, 50% of freshmen, and 25% of seniors – said they learned something historical (41 students, mostly seniors and freshmen, said they learned nothing historical, and 8 did not answer the question). Fifty-eight of the

103 students specifically lauded the children’s singing. And 78 students said they would like to see the assembly again, while 11 said they had no wish to see it again, and 10 said they might want to see it again. Three students clearly demonstrated that they hated filling out the survey by making snide remarks and writing “no” all the way down the page. And there were four specific negative comments: one person thought

Malcolm X should have been discussed, one felt there were too many songs, one complained that the piano wasn’t loud enough, and one objected to a reference to

Obama’s election as “hopeful.”

Overall, high schoolers seemed to enjoy the assembly. But reading “cute” and

“I knew all this already” so many times suggested to me that many in that audience did not get enough from the assembly to justify repeating it yearly for them. As I mentioned above, if in the future we continue to present two versions of the assembly,

I will invite parents and selected middle schoolers to the second, concertized program.

I then sent the survey with slightly modified wording to lower-school faculty and second-grade parents.

1. What struck you most about the civil rights assembly this year? e.g. singing?

narration? film footage? stage set-up? audience participation? PowerPoint?

2. What historical information, if any, did you learn from the presentation? e.g.

did it make you rethink any historical assumptions about the civil rights

movement or its leaders? Give you new ideas or information?

3. What did you think of the lower school’s leadership in this assembly? Consider

every grade, but especially second grade. Did anything surprise you?

4. Have you ever noticed any behavior, attitudes, positive incidents, that might be

traceable to any of this civil rights/character study? (Honestly!) I do understand

if you haven’t seen or heard anything explicit.

Ten faculty members responded, each one enthusiastic about the assembly. They unanimously agreed that the civil rights message is powerful when delivered by young

95 children and want lower school students to review and deepen their understanding of this material every year. Two suggested that the film clips be slightly shortened in the interest of time, all applauded the music and narrative speaking, 9 of the 10 respondents professed to learn something from the historical review, and our principal mentioned one incident that seemed directly traceable to the project as a whole. (She repeated the story I related in chapter 3 of this project, about a Black second grader who said he tried out non-violence in a playground argument because he wanted to be like “the Black people who helped Martin Luther King.”) The principal also wrote: “I see lots of evidence of ‘what one little person can do!’ The empathy and organization of the fifth grade around aid to Haiti is the cumulative effect of all you try to instill”

(survey response, C. Vail, March 2, 2010). This refers to our fifth grade’s zealous fund-raising for Haitian earthquake aid, netting more than $3,500 in six weeks. I, too, have observed that the lower school’s “habit of helping” needy global neighbors is at an all-time high this spring—a result not just of the civil rights unit but of many teachers encouraging, modeling, teaching these lessons in many ways. One of our third-grade teachers observed the following about behavior and attitudes:

Yes! I see more tolerance toward their classmates—less negative judgment in

general and I am most grateful for this healthier perspective. p.s. it’s interesting

how the girls in my room are now questioning being considered second to men

and are standing up for gender equality. (survey response, D. Scott, March 15,

2010)

This refers to a book they read about social customs among Plains Indians, from which her class learned that although Lakota women were expected to make and transport tipis, they could only enter them after men had gone in. Mrs. Scott’s girls expressed indignation over this custom and others they had studied in books about colonial

America, which sparked a class discussion of women’s rights generally. Mrs. Scott followed up with even more positive feedback, which she emailed to our whole school.

Dear Colleagues,

In my opinion, Elena Bennett’s generous offering/production of the

civil rights assembly was one of the most significant and memorable school

events of the year. As you know, Elena does an incredibly sensitive and

palpable weaving together of that period of our history through original

dramatizations, current events coverage, music, singing, speeches, etc. Because

of her commitment to the soulful lessons of this period of our history, I am

positive the school environment is blessed with more leaven of kindness and

compassion. I for one, directly experience my students caring more tenderly

about one another. They are also more inclined toward working interpersonal

problems out positively…I would like to share a very moving quote used by

Martin Luther King, Jr. in his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize lecture. It was written

by the British historian Arnold Toynbee: ‘Love is the ultimate force that makes

for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and

evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is

going to have the last word.’ (personal e-mail, D. Scott, March 18, 2010)

Mrs. Scott’s was generous and gratifying testimony indeed.

As for explicit parental response, I can report very little. This surprised me a bit, but parents at our school are not in the habit of giving me much feedback about concerts or programs. Although as a rule they appear to like the concerts, and I often hear their positive comments from other sources, most leave programs without speaking directly to me. Also, the surveys went home in children’s homework folders, and some parents are notoriously casual about reading the contents of those. Several parents spoke positively to me during the course of our civil rights studies, and one second-grade parent anonymously returned my survey. That person called the assembly “a fabulous event,” then concluded with this request: “Please, please do something patriotic in the future—something that highlights not a dark chapter in our past, but rather accentuates some of the great many unique and very ‘useful’ contributions our nation has made to world history. America deserves accolades!” I assume that by “dark chapter” this person is referring to slavery and segregation, institutions upon which Americans certainly do not look back with pride. But in order to assess our progress as a nation, and as Ken Burns says, to understand more profoundly who we are as a society today, we must know where we have come from.

I believe that is why it is so important to teach history, including the painful chapters, in school. I view the Civil Rights Movement as one of the most positive and globally useful movements ever to arise in the United States, and our assembly emphasized that

98 along the path to a just and fair world, America has made great progress. This respondent and I define “patriotic” differently, it seems.

In the end I am left with my own intuition, which is what prompted this project in the first place. I believe in my heart that these historical and musical studies benefit student attitudes and behavior. I did not set out to quantify my students’ attitudes about social justice outside of class and cannot prove any dramatic changes in their thinking. Nor has their outward, everyday behavior changed radically in the last two months. What I do know is that most of them considered the subject of slavery and civil rights seriously for these weeks and continue to do so when the subject comes up.

Some went off and read independently about these subjects. Several made pictures of

King and Harriet Tubman in their free time, not as an assignment but simply because those people were on their minds. A few days after the assembly, first graders started a kind of “after you” movement, to counteract the time-honored elementary school habit of trying to thrust one’s self to the head of every line and pushing headlong through every doorway.

I see many other hope-filled signs on our campus. For example, whenever I propose singing for our elderly neighbors at Sunrise Assisted Living down the street, students clamor to go. I continue to see the usual childish rowdiness, minor teasing, and physical self-control problems on our playground and in the hallways; yet big arguments are uncommon, physical bullying doesn’t happen, and picking on individuals is rare. Our campus is an extremely busy place, with exciting events almost every week, yet it is peaceful. I can’t prove why this is so, but I think that a lot

99 of the character education continually emphasized by faculty and many parents does sink in. When minor irritations surface in my own classes I have begun to invoke the memory of civil rights leaders and ask “What would Rosa do?” or “How does this problem compare with what Ruby went through?” Students stop, consider for a moment, and quickly drop their complaints. Finally, our handful of African American second graders seemed genuinely touched by what they studied and portrayed in the civil rights project. They and some of their parents have told me this face-to-face, and

I feel it in the friendlier, warmer way they treat me personally. The child who played

Rosa Parks in our skit has resumed her reserved, almost bored demeanor in class, however, in the weeks following the assembly. And the hyperactive boy who calmed down during the project has taken up some of his impulsive ways again, though other children seem somewhat more tolerant of him. There was a time, before the civil rights unit, when he could barely twitch a muscle without being tattled on. I dearly hope that the last eight weeks have helped this class to move past some of that ill will, not only by talking about brotherhood but by practicing it with him.

Personal Reflections

I was reminded of many things during this project. For instance, it confirmed what I have believed for many years--that even very young children can learn to lead us all. They are able to proclaim powerful truths to people of all ages when they believe in the messages they are asked to convey, when they understand the materials

(such as songs and speeches) which transmit the messages, when they are given skills and time to seriously practice their delivery, and when they are asked to deliver the

100 messages in a reasonably supportive forum. I worked to provide such conditions for my second-grade students, and they stepped forward to speak out strongly about civil rights, peace, and justice, to all who were willing to gather and listen.

The project also reaffirmed for me on a personal level what I reviewed in chapter two of this paper: that singing can call attention to important issues in a uniquely compelling way. Melody and rhythm focus people’s attention on the cause at hand, help people of any age express emotion, help them remember social topics long after speeches have faded from memory, and bind them into community with each other. It was important that after I taught the songs to the lower school I literally got of the way and let the students enjoy singing to each other. I felt that in the end this began to happen during our class singing and certainly during the public presentations of our assembly. I saw in these two months that children are as able as adults to be empowered by music in this way, and to use it to serve others, if they are sufficiently motivated and excited about the project.

Further, the more I teach spirituals and the kind of music which led freedom movements in the 1950s and 1960s, the more I agree with Pete and Ruth Seeger (1972,

1948) that it is imperative to keep alive the folk tradition in music education and in

American culture generally. Without putting too small a price on the musical splendor bequeathed us by White European males, which will always play a central role in music education, the Civil Rights Movement reminded us that folk music feeds our souls too. Besides the spirituals and original music that came out of the movement, the songs that Jim Strathdee, Sally Rogers, Kim and Reggie Harris, and other

101 contemporary folk musicians continue to write greatly enrich us all. Our children deserve to grow up steeped in all of these traditions.

Most important, the project convinced me beyond a doubt that the history and philosophy of the Civil Rights Movement should be taught, as accurately as possible, to American schoolchildren from first grade on up. As a small step toward that end, I have instituted “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as an annual tradition at my school. I want our students to grow up knowing this particular chapter of American history because as a society we are still working on the deepest issue the Civil Rights Movement raised. By that I mean people’s seemingly limitless capacity for indifference to other humans simply because we are not all the same—neither physically, economically, culturally, in age, in gender, in sexual orientation, in musical tastes, in religious practice, or in political party.

How do we mitigate the destructiveness of such indifference and of its hateful extension, prejudice? How do citizens as diverse as those in this country come to care enough about each other that they are truly interested in each other’s history, present situation, needs, goals— not simply interested in contemplating these as abstract problems or ideals, but impelled to work actively on each other’s behalf? As Jonathan

Kozol points out in Savage Inequalities (1991), Americans hate the idea of “loaded dice,” except when it comes to their own health care, inherited wealth, and school districts. How, then, do we move people to care enough about each other that they support legislation which safeguards health insurance and adequately funds education for everyone? How do we convince people to practice business fairly and honestly? To

102 respect and stand up for each other’s ways of worshipping, voting, marrying? To work to extend the arts to our entire populace, not just to a privileged portion of it? In short, what will induce people to treat their neighbors as they themselves want to be treated in these areas? The refrain of Pete Seeger’s song, “We Shall Overcome” really means: we must overcome our self-centered and parochial ways.

Schools obviously play a crucial role in motivating people to pay attention to each other. My civil rights unit is only one of many classroom studies that can encourage kids carefully to consider people different from themselves—in this case, slaves and disenfranchised people of color in the past—and to pay attention to their stories. This of course presupposes that people are capable of reaching beyond their own self-interest. I want my students actively to practice looking beyond their own immediate needs, their own histories, their own familiar circle of acquaintances, and to allow themselves to become fascinated—or horrified-- by what really happens to humans they don’t know. I want them to look in this clear-sighted, compassionate way at people not only today but in the past, without treating them as figments of the imagination.

It can be an effort for children, as it certainly is for adults, to pay thoughtful attention to strangers, when they are preoccupied with their own growing up, their own trials and tribulations big and small, their own feelings. But as educators we can strive through the teaching of history, literature, the arts—practically, I believe, through any subject-- to get kids to look beyond their own realities. This kind of

“paying attention” needs to become an ingrained mental, spiritual, and physical

103 habit—a way of private thinking which becomes a way of public living-- if we are ever to stop ignoring not only the needs but the very existence of so many fellow humans. I see more clearly than ever that schools need to breed citizens who keenly recognize what they have in common as well as what they don’t understand about each other. Only then can we hope to raise citizens willing to face and constructively deal with each other. As Maxine Greene (1995, 1998) and Paolo Freire (1970) contend, conscientization is a state of mind which makes our neighbor’s suffering unendurable. Might it also make the rest of our neighbor’s life impossible to take for granted, or dismiss?

Next Time

The overall structure of the civil rights unit and assembly worked effectively, given the time constraints of my job as music specialist. I will continue every year to give several weeks to historical study and background, spending subsequent weeks learning the music, narrative, and the mini-drama. In the future I will better introduce

Martin Luther King, Jr. to kindergarteners, to help prepare them for their first-grade studies. I will adapt the unit each year to include a range of human rights leaders and events. Julia Ward Howe (n.d.) came to my attention late in this project, and with the children I want to explore her life’s work next year. I will definitely teach all lower schoolers more about Gandhi and use the assembly’s final slideshow to introduce them to more peacemakers outside the Civil Rights Movement, including Mother

Theresa, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama. Since the theme of

December’s huge Winter Concert is always world peace, I will work rigorously to

104 introduce these global peace advocates in the busy weeks of rehearsal leading up to that concert. This will lay better groundwork for the civil rights unit following in

January.

I will also continue to rethink how I teach the violent side of slavery and segregation and may address this differently in the future. As we viewed films, picture books, and photographs this time, I stepped very carefully around descriptions and depictions of brutality. Depending on the grade level, I did tell stories about the cruel practices American slaves and civil rights campaigners met in daily life and on marches. We did watch some scenes of Ruby Bridges being harshly screamed at, we listened to a marcher describe a man threatening to put out his cigarette in her face, we looked at picture book illustrations of lunch counter protesters having food dumped on their heads, and towards the end I put up a photograph of marchers being firehosed against a wall.

But I did not dwell on the graphic details of King’s shooting, I never showed what happened on the Edmund Pettus Bridge or any other bloody march, I never mentioned lynching or the murderous ways of the Klu Klux Klan. No video clips in our assembly showed explicit violence. Although I meant to show the fourth grade some footage of the Birmingham Children’s March, when hundreds of children were arrested and jailed by furious police, I ran out of time and never did. I skipped over all scenes of firebombing and the white outrage in Montgomery, for example, against the

1955 bus boycott. Nor did I discuss singing which wasn’t peaceful—the wrathful kinds of songs which at some points have helped to inflame violent emotions in

105

America’s journey towards social justice and in liberation struggles abroad. It was difficult to strike a balance between historical honesty and my students’ emotional sensitivities. I did my best to explain the vicious and ignorant practices of those days without showing images so raw that they might haunt children’s dreams. But the cutting-and-pasting of history is a dicey business, especially with those who don’t know enough about the subject to question what we tell them. When we withhold historical information we begin to manipulate and to some extent distort history. It is essential that I continue to reexamine how best to inform children honestly, yet without traumatizing them, about the racist aggression of those days. Our discussion of King’s non-violence will only be meaningful if we properly understand the very real violence to which he was responding.

As for the music, I look forward to adding or substituting new songs in coming years, to keep the assembly’s emotional impact strong. There are so many great songs to learn, and new video footage can also be added. I will continue to rotate in and out the best contemporary social justice songs I know, and Jim Strathdee’s body of work provides a rich supply. I have already enlisted more live musicians, including faculty guitarists, to join us in our presentations next year. I hope Jim himself may sing and play in future assemblies. I will not schedule the civil rights program in a week with three other assemblies, as happened this year, so teachers don’t fret over missed class time. I will try to include an adult speaking dramatically in the first person as Harriet

Tubman, perhaps a parent or high school drama student.

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In future years I also plan to add more literature, dance, and visual art to the whole experience. We engaged in those arts only a little this year. I want children to express themselves in poems, on posters, in portraits of social justice leaders, and in original verse added to songs like “What Can One Little Person Do?” Best of all would be a colorful mural depicting peace leaders around the world. Though I doubt the school will let us paint directly on school walls, I’m sure I could apply a well- designed mural to a wooden frame and mount it on an outside wall or fence. I have ideas, energy, and resources for all manner of improvements to the project. The challenge will simply be to fit them into a practical time frame each winter, and I look forward to it.

One further question I will resolve next year concerns the number of times we present the assembly and who should attend it. Since our first through fifth grades almost fill our multipurpose room, leaving little room for extra participants, we should celebrate the sing-along with those five grades and possibly sixth or eighth graders the first day. We’ll repeat it on a different day for parents, rather than high school students. In regards to the historical aspects of the assembly, I think middle schoolers need the factual review more than high school students do, and parents will more appreciate the historical detail. All parents, regardless of their child’s grade, will be welcome. I think parents will enjoy listening to the children more than our high school test audience did this year and will join in the singing if asked. This will also enable me to accommodate our administration’s request that more parents get to witness the

107 assembly, without having to move it to our gymnasium, which I am determined not to do.

Implications for Replication

For anyone interested in teaching these civil rights lessons and songs at their own school, I offer a few suggestions. First, remember that it can’t be done in a week, which is what many teachers are probably used to spending on Martin Luther King, Jr.

It takes time—at least six to eight weeks to study the history and learn the music well

– depending upon how much time per week is alloted to music class. More important,

I believe it takes years of conscientious review and reflection to absorb both the details and the meaning of such history. I suspect that many of the high schoolers who wrote

“I learned all of this in third grade” are not being completely honest. Many students and adults walk around with vague ideas in their heads about the past, retaining a few key names, dates, and generalizations. They may comprehend not only the Civil

Rights Movement but many other chapters of history only superficially. But to broaden and deepen students’ understanding of critically important topics in history, as in other subjects, good schools should ensure that students study them repeatedly, at various stages in their academic careers. Our students study the Civil War, for example, at least three times: in fifth, eighth, and tenth grade. Some essential math concepts are reviewed for many years, as are skills in music, reading, foreign languages, and other subjects. I think the civil rights material deserves years of study as well, right up there with the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. It would be interesting to conduct a longitudinal study of how children’s social consciousness

108 might change as they learned more and more civil rights music and history over a span of four or five primary school years.

The project as conceived thus far doesn’t require a lot of money and expensive supplies. Certainly one needs good picture books from a library and CD’s of freedom singing, examples of which are listed in Appendix D. It requires a piano and pianist if one has them or CD player if one doesn’t, various sheet music or songbooks available in good libraries, as many good photographic posters as possible, and a well-worded narrative script. The writing and music of Judith Brack’s (2005) “Oh Freedom!” drama inspired me, and I pass along the following counsel from her introduction.

In order to remain relevant to the children who. . .perform [this material], it

must include their loftiest hopes and dreams, their culture, and their sense of

what is important about freedom and justice. Therefore, I urge you to feel free

to adapt [my] script in any way that furthers its aim: to teach the truth about the

struggle for freedom and justice in America, difficult as it may be to face, and

to inspire young people to take the responsibility for furthering those ideals in

their own lives. (Brack, 2005, p. i)

In choosing a gathering space, I deliberately opted for our small multipurpose room rather than the cavernous gymnasium, because the assembly is most effective as an interactive sing-along and not a concert for bystanders to watch. Ideally, everyone in the room participates, sits close together, and feels connected during the assembly.

The presentation doesn’t have to include video, but my students and adult guests responded so strongly to reasonable amounts of musical video that I really recommend

109 editing some in. Superb films can be ordered free from Teaching Tolerance magazine, produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center. I also found inspirational musical slideshows on Youtube, produced by Hopepark Church in Nashville, Tennessee, from whom I then ordered original DVD’s. An ability or person to edit the video is essential. My school’s small multipurpose room now has a projector which projects film or PowerPoints onto a wall, but even a television and VCR would work. Seeing

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks even in grainy black-and-white footage made them seem very real in our midst. It’s worth the effort.

Final Thoughts

It’s possible that some public schoolteachers may read of my project— accomplished without the smallest opposition among prosperous children in our well- equipped private school staffed with open-minded, intelligent administrators and dedicated teachers—with a slightly ironic smile. In such a relatively untroubled, unprejudiced environment does a celebration of the Civil Rights Movement seem too easy, almost glib? At times I think so myself. In those moments I fear that many families at my school view the problems we’ve been singing about merely as sad stories about unfortunate Others. Few here have ever tasted social humiliation or had to cope with the economic inequality and continuing discrimination which impoverished neighborhoods and disadvantaged public schools face daily.

Yet I choose to believe that my students are capable of eventually becoming principled and committed enough to reach beyond their self-interest, as Maxine

Greene (1995, 1998) says, and to live out the lyrics of “Song of Hope” (1985),

110 actively seeking social justice not only for those around them but for strangers. I am here, for the present, to help guide these students’ hearts and minds in that direction.

Though most of them today seem endowed with all the civil rights, social respect, money, and freedom they could ever need, they are not born knowing how to champion the rights of others. That we must teach them. Those who will some day run our businesses, governments, hospitals, schools, courtrooms, newsrooms, police departments, and military need to grow up and stand up with a fire for social justice burning in their breasts. As teachers and artists, perhaps we can help them gain perspective, so they grow up to be grateful people who do not take for granted their socioeconomic advantages. That kind of education, I find, is no small challenge in our school. Thankfully, I am not alone in this crusade. And although I may never get to see these seeds of consciousness which I now sow bear explicit fruit in my students’ lives, I am resolved to plant them any way I can, in as many hearts as possible.

In the raindrop, the ocean. Lao Tze.

(In the note, world harmony. E. Bennett)

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APPENDIX A

Script for “Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Musical Celebration of Black History, Civil Rights, and Hope”

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Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Musical Celebration of Black History, Civil Rights, and Hope Tuesday February 23 and Wednesday February 24, 2010

Opening: “Shed A Little Light” by James Taylor. (slide show by Hopepark Church, sung by Bellevue Community Church choir) * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Speaker 1: Martin Luther King wasn’t the ONLY Black hero in American history.

Speaker 2: But he did something SO important and so needed in this country that we’ve set aside a day to honor him.

Speaker 3: What did he do?

Speaker 4: He opened the eyes of the American people, and the world, by speaking against hatred, racism, and injustice, and doing it without violence, without hatred.

Speaker 5: He made them see and feel the injustice of those days, and DO something about it.

Speaker 6: And he was killed in the process, by those who hated him for saying and doing what most of us agree was the right thing to do.

Speaker 7: Why does it take someone DYING to wake us up?

Speaker 8: It shouldn’t. But sometimes we become blind, we become indifferent to violence and injustice. We see too much of it on TV, and in movies, and even in video games, all the time.

Speaker 9: Sometimes it takes a really painful event to open our eyes. But maybe an event like the election of President Obama can open our eyes too, and help us see new possibilities.

Speaker 10: Sometimes it takes really courageous leaders to help us see what we cannot see.

Speaker 11: Sometimes the hardest times are what make us work the hardest to rise above them.

Speaker 12: Will everyone please rise out of respect for James Weldon Johnson’s historic anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing”?

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ALL SING: “Lift Every Voice and Sing”—verse 1

Lift every voice and sing, ‘til earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of liberty. Let our rejoicing rise high as the listening skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us! Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on ‘til victory is won!

Speaker 13: Well, what was so wrong in the past that this country needed to be woken up?

Speaker 14: And who were the other heroes in this struggle for freedom and justice?

Speaker 15: I can tell you about Harriet Tubman. Over 150 years ago she was a slave who escaped to freedom. But she realized she would never be completely free or really happy until all slaves were free. So she risked her life many times, going back to slave plantations and leading the way to freedom on the Underground Railroad.

Speaker 16: The Underground Railroad? You mean a train?

Speaker 17: The Underground Railroad wasn’t a train. It was people—White people and Black people-- who helped slaves escape to the northern states and Canada where all people could live in freedom.

Speaker 18: People who secretly hid the escaping slaves in their homes gave signals to indicate when it was safe or not. One important way to communicate on the Underground Railroad was by singing spirituals. Many contained hidden messages for slaves trying to find their way to freedom.

2nd,3rd,4th grades sing: When the sun comes back and the first quail calls, Follow the drinking gourd, For the Ole Man is a-waitin’ for to carry you to freedom, If you follow the drinkin’ gourd.

CHORUS: Follow. . .the drinkin’ gourd. Follow. . .the drinkin’ gourd. For the Ole Man is a-waitin’ for to carry you to freedom, If you follow the drinkin’ gourd.

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2. Oh the riverbank makes a mighty good road— Dead trees will mark the way. Left foot, peg foot, travelin’ on-- follow the drinkin’ gourd. (CHORUS)

Speaker 19: In those days, some people in the United States had been buying people from western Africa for over two hundred years. Africans were taken from their homeland by slave traders and bought and sold, as if they weren’t human beings. They were treated horribly.

Speaker 20: Sometimes children were separated from their mothers and sold away to other plantations. People were punished if they didn’t work hard enough, and some masters gave their slaves just barely enough food to live on.

SOLO: When Israel was in Egypt’s land—let my people go. Oppressed so hard they could not stand—let my people go. Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt’s land… Tell old Pharoah. . .to let my people go!

Speaker 21: How could anyone live like that? Didn’t they try to escape?

Speaker 22: How do you escape when slavery is everywhere around you? Where do you escape to? How do you get yourself back home? Especially when home is West Africa, thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean?

Speaker 23: But some slaves DID try to escape, and some succeeded. Harriet Tubman was one.

2nd, 3rd, 4th grades SING: One night I dreamed I was in slavery, ‘bout 1850 was the time. Sorrow was the only sign, and nothing about to ease my mind. Out of the night appeared a lady leading a distant pilgrim band. “First mate!” she called, pointing her hand. “Now make room aboard for this young woman.”

Chorus: Come on up—mm hmmm—I’ve got a lifeline, Come on up to this train of mine. Come on up—mm hmm—I’ve got a lifeline, Come on up to this train of mine. They said her name was Harriet Tubman, And she drove for--the Underground Railroad!

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Hundreds of miles we travelled onward, gathering slaves from town to town. Seeking all the lost and found, and setting those free that once were bound. Somehow my heart was growing weaker, fell by the wayside sinking sand. Firmly did this lady stand; she lifted me up and she took my hand… (CHORUS)

Speaker 24: She was brave alright. After she escaped to the north she got a job in Philadelphia, saved some money, and went back to get her sister and two children to safety.

Speaker 25: In the end she led over 300 slaves to freedom on what we called the “Underground Railroad.”

Speaker 26: Her dream was to see her people free. She never run her train off the track, and she never lost a passenger!

CHORUS: Come on up, mm hmmm-I got a lifeline, come on up to this train of mine!

Speaker 27: Well, what has this got to do with me? Slavery was abolished over 100 years ago, at the time of the Civil War. Why are we still talking about this old stuff now?

Speaker 28: Because the end of slavery did not mean the end of injustice and the cold-hearted ways some people treated African Americans. Misunderstanding, fear, and hate continued long after the Civil War.

Speaker 29: New laws were made to keep Black and White people separate. That was called “segregation.” Black people always got the lowest-paying jobs, couldn’t live in White neighborhoods, weren’t allowed to go to schools with White children.

Speaker 30: “I, Too,” by Langston Hughes

Speaker 31: Our parents and teachers and grandparents may remember those days. It wasn’t easy to be an African American, especially for kids.

5th graders : These verses are based on Black Misery by Langston Hughes.

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Misery is…when the kid next door has a party and invites everyone but you… Misery is…when the taxi won’t stop for your mother and she gets really mad—mad enough to cuss right in front of you. Misery is…when you start to help an old White lady across the street and she thinks you’re trying to snatch her purse. Misery is…when White parents scream and throw things at you when you walk up the sidewalk to the school door. Misery is…when you have to use the restroom, and the only one around is marked “Whites only,” but you sneak into it anyway, and someone sees you coming out, and threatens to call the police if you do that again.

ALL SING: Oh freedom! Oh freedom! Oh freedom over me. . . And before I’ll be a slave I’d be buried in my grave— And go home to my Lord, and be free.

2. No more segregation. . .no more segregation… No more segregation over me! And before I’ll be a slave I’d be buried in my grave— And I’ll fight for my right to be free!

Newscaster #1: Good evening. This is ______, of WMGY Channel 6 News. December 1, 1955-- in Montgomery today, a Black woman by the name of Mrs. Rosa Parks decided to break the law by not giving up her seat to a White passenger on a city bus. She has been arrested, is out on bail, and is awaiting trial.

1st,2nd,3rd,4th grades SING:

If you miss me at the back of the bus, and you can’t find me nowhere, Come on up to the front of the bus—I’ll be riding up there! I’ll be riding up there, I’ll be riding up there. Come on up to the front of the bus—I’ll be riding up there.

2. If you miss me at the Mississippi River…etc. Come on over to the swimming pool--I’ll be swimming over there! etc.

3.If you miss me in the cotton fields…etc. Come on down to the courthouse--I’ll be voting down there! etc.

Bus skit: driver, then five White passengers, get on the bus. Then four Black passengers enter from “back door.”

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Narrator (in the words of Mrs. Parks): One evening in early December, I was going home from work, and I was sitting in the front row of the colored section of a bus in Montgomery. The seats in front of me all filled up with White passengers. (last two White passengers get on) But then another White man got on (White passenger stand in aisle, looking irritated) and had nowhere to sit. The driver looked back and saw him standing there, and called out to us:

Driver: Let me have those front seats! Narrator: None of us moved. We just kind of froze. The driver yelled a second time: Driver: Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats! Narrator: In other words, the driver wanted our whole row of seats so the White man could sit there. The man next to me stood up and moved back, and the passengers across the aisle also stood up. I moved over to the window seat to get out of the way, but I didn’t stand up. I could not see how standing up was going to “make it light” for me. The more we gave in and complied, the worse they treated us. You know, people always say I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired. But that wasn’t true. I was no more tired than usual-- and I wasn’t old, I was only 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in. (White man waits at front of bus—driver comes back to Rosa)

Driver: Are you going to stand up? Rosa: No. Driver: Well, I’m going to have you arrested. Rosa: You may do that.

Narrator: I remember it got real quiet on the bus. The driver got off and called the police, and we just waited there, and eventually two policemen came and got on the bus…The first one asked me:

Policeman: Why won’t you stand up?

Rosa: Why…do you all…push us around?

Policeman #2: I don’t know—but the law is the law-- and you’re under arrest now.

ALL SING: “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” as police take Rosa off the bus, to bench on right. White man sits down in her empty row.

v.1: Paul and Silas bound in jail, got no money for to go their bail, Keep your eyes on the prize-- hold on, why don’t you hold on! Hold on…hold on! Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on, Why don’t you hold on!

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-- After verse 1: White passengers and driver get up, STACK CHAIRS, return to risers. Four Black passengers also STACK THEIR CHAIRS, then form human chain with Rosa and wait, center stage.

v.2: We fought jail and violence too, but God’s love has seen us through… (chorus) v.3: Work all day and work all night, trying to gain our civil rights… (chorus) v.4 The only chain that a man can stand, is the chain of a hand in hand… (chorus)

-- During last chorus, Rosa and four African American passengers go to microphones…

Speaker 32: For one hundred years there were laws and customs in the South that kept African Americans segregated and allowed White people to treat us without any respect.

Speaker 33: It was very hard to do anything about segregation and racism when White people had the power of the law behind them.

Speaker 34: Somehow we had to change the laws.

Rosa: I had no idea when I refused to give up my seat on that bus that my small action would help put an end to segregation. I was not trying to be a hero, but a voice inside me said, “Someone’s got to speak up.”

Speaker 35: That very night, Black citizens all over Montgomery got together and made a plan to stop riding the buses until the company changed its rules.

1st video clip: How the boycott began…“I was informed at 5:00 in the morning…”

Speaker 36: After the first successful day of staying off the buses, there was a big meeting in Montgomery, to discuss continuing the boycott.

nd 2 video clip: “Hello Montgomery…there’s going to be a big meeting tonight…”

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Newscaster #2: Good evening, this is ______, WMGY Channel 6 News. November 13, 1956-- It has been almost a year now since Mrs. Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for not giving up her seat to a White man on a Montgomery bus. Since then Black citizens have refused to ride the buses in an attempt to bring about a change in the laws of that city.

Newscaster #3: Some White citizens have joined them in this bus boycott, and many have been harassed for giving rides to Black workers who have had to walk for miles to get to work and school.

Newscaster #4: Today, as a result of that boycott, the Supreme Court has ruled that bus segregation violates the constitution of the United States, and has outlawed discrimination on Montgomery buses. The law will now be changed. (clapping and cheering!)

rd 3 video clip: “Our people were strong…she started a revolution…which continues to this day….”

Speaker 37: The Montgomery bus boycott was the first successful endeavor of the Civil Rights movement. Many Black and White people showed their determination to change laws so that there would be equal opportunity and treatment for all people—no matter their color, religion, or country of birth.

ALL SING: Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round, Turn me ‘round, turn me ‘round! Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round— I’m gonna keep on a-walkin’, keep on a-talkin’, Marchin’ up to freedom land! v.2—Ain’t gonna let nobody stop us now, stop us now, stop us now…

Speaker 38: Martin Luther King helped get the laws changed, and many people began to see the error of their ways. But many others did not, and hated him all the more. He was assassinated in 1968.

Speaker 39: But the laws WERE changed. We have laws now to protect people from hatred and meanness, unfairness and racism.

Speaker 40: That was the first step. But the struggle isn’t over. There are still people who continue to hate, and hurt, and prevent others from living with respect and dignity.

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Speaker 41: Some people still don’t really trust people of different colors, people from different ethnic backgrounds, people with disabilities, people who are old or young, people of different genders, people from different political parties. Some people still have problems with others they consider “different!”

Speaker 42: We saw that in Germany, and in Bosnia, and in Cambodia.

Speaker 43: We saw it in Rwanda, and it’s happening in Iraq. And sometimes it still happens in the United States!

Speaker 44: Yet throughout history there have been people—old and young, famous and anonymous—who have spoken, written, fought, and sung to end injustice and discrimination.

Speaker 45: We remember and honor those whose stories we know, and we realize that there are many people whose heroism and heart will never be known publically.

Speaker 46: Always we remember what President John F. Kennedy said: “If we cannot end now our differences, we can at least help make the world safe for diversity!”

LAST VIDEO begins: “Life’s most persistent question is…”

1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th grades SING: “Song of Hope” by Jim Strathdee

Verses 1 and 2 (soloists/small groups): When the darkness overwhelms us…

Verse 3 (all girls):When in weary isolation we’ve lost our courage to care, When our captive spirits perish in the bondage of despair, Free our arms for action, reaching for another’s hand. Free our feet for marching, or to boldly make a stand!

Verse 4 (boys): When our sisters are in slav’ry, When our brothers are in need, When the cost is human misery for the nations’ pow’r and greed, When the ties are broken, when we’ve lost our human soul, Free our lives for serving to make the human family whole.

Verse 5 (ALL STAND AND SING, including audience): Let the mountains ring with freedom, let the valleys sing with peace, Let the rivers swell with justice, let our unity increase. May the sun’s warm healing and the ocean’s mighty roar bring the day of justice when peace shall reign forevermore!

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CLOSING (ALL SING): What can one little person do? What can one little me or you do? What can one little person do to make this world go ‘round? One can help another one, and together we can get the job done. What can one little person do to help this world?

1: Rosa Parks sat on the bus, and the driver said you must move to the back of the bus or else be thrown in jail. But she stayed and stood her ground, she brought that old law down, ‘cause she knew she had justice on her side. (CHORUS)

“Thanks for coming! Shalom!”

______

Director’s notes: 1. This program is timed to last 55 minutes. To keep it to that length, excellent verses from “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and “What Can One Little Person Do?” were cut. Given more time, those verses are worth including.

2. Because the vocabulary in this program was challenging for second- grade readers, I broke the narration into many short parts. These could be combined into longer parts for fewer speakers. Of course vocabulary could also be simplified.

3. We acted out the bus skit with children’s stacking chairs in a bus configuration. Because of limited space, our newscasters came forward to standing microphones, but sitting at “newsroom desks” with table microphones would also be effective. Be creative with simple visual props!

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APPENDIX B

PowerPoint Presentation Used in the Assembly: Song Lyrics and Film Footage

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APPENDIX C

Video of the Lower School Assembly, February 23, 2010

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APPENDIX D

Recommended Resources

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Films

And the children shall lead. 1988: Allumination FilmWorks. About two young girls, Black and White, in 1964 Mississippi, “caught up in the firestorm surrounding Black voter registration.” (upper elementary and older)

Black history from Civil War through today. 2007:St. Clair Entertainment Group, Inc. 6-DVD set.

Blind Tom: The story of Thomas Bethune. 1986: Clearvue Video. True story of a slave who became a virtuoso pianist.

Booker: The true story of Booker T. Washington. 2005:Allumination FilmWorks.

Eyes on the prize. 1986: PBS and Blackside Productions. 6-part PBS series, very comprehensive documentary.

Follow the drinking gourd. 1993. Reading Rainbow video narrated by LeVar Burton, includes dramatizations of life on slave plantations, plus a concert and mesmerizing interviews with Sweet Honey in the Rock.

I’ll take you there: A civil rights short film. 2009: Nick Newman Films. Music video from Hopepark Church, Nashville, TN.

Jubilee Singers: Sacrifice and glory. 2000: PBS Home Video. Documentary on the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, 1871. Inspiring story of what ex-slaves accomplished through music (may be best appreciated by third grade and older).

Let freedom sing: How music inspired the Civil Rights movement. 2009: Time Life media (some parts too mature for very young students).

Let peace: A tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 2010: Nick Newman Films. Short music video created at Hopepark Church, Nashville, TN.

March on Washington film. 2007: Quality Information Publishers. 26-minute documentary of the 1963 march, including King’s “Dream” speech.

Martin Luther King: I have a dream. 2005: MPI Media Group. 60-minute documentary of the 1963 march and speech.

Mighty times: The children’s march. 2005. Film and reenactments of Birmingham children’s march. One of the superb free films available from Teaching Tolerance (a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center).

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Mighty times: The legacy of Rosa Parks. 2002. Another great film from Teaching Tolerance.

Perfect harmony. 2004: Disney Films. In 1950s South Carolina, a wealthy White boy from a prep school choir and a Black orphan “with a gift for the blues develop a friendship in spite of the racial barriers that divide the school and town.” (upper elementary)

Pete Seeger: The power of song. 2007: Alliance Films. Great Canadian documentary of Seeger, filled with music and protest singing.

The Rosa Parks story. 2002: Disney Films. Angela Basset plays Rosa. One of my students’ favorite films, though a few parts may be a bit over the heads of first and second graders.

Ruby Bridges. 2004. Another excellent Disney family film. A few scenes may be intense for first graders.

Separate but equal. 1991: Republic Pictures. Rated PG. True story of Thurgood Marshall’s fight in 1950 to get the Supreme Court to end segregation in South Carolina schools. (upper elementary and older)

Shed a little light. 2008: Nick Newman Films. Martin Luther King slide show accompanied by an excellent gospel choir singing James Taylor’s “Shed A Little Light.” From Hopepark Church, Nashville, TN.

Soundtrack for a revolution. 2009. Brand-new documentary on music of the Civil Rights movement, by Bill Guttentag, Dan Sturman, and Danny Glover. Archival news footage, contemporary musicians performing the music.

Unchained memories: Readings from the slave narratives. 2003: HBO Video. Famous actors and actresses retell stories of slavery in former slaves’ own words.

Underground Railroad. 1998: History Channel. Informative documentary.

Books My Students (and I) Love

A dream of freedom: The Civil Rights movement from 1954 to 1968. By Diane McWhorter. 2004: Scholastic Books. Illustrated with excellent photographs.

Building a new land: African Americans in colonial America. By James Haskins and Kathleen Benson. 2001: Harper Collins.

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Expressions of freedom: Anthology of African American spirituals. By Rene Boyer- Alexander. 2001: Hal Leonard. Very complete edition of spirituals, with historical background and Orff instrumentation.

Freedom River. By Doreen Rappaport. 2000: Hyperion Books. True story of ex-slave John Parker and the Underground Railroad.

Freedom like sunlight: Praisesongs for Black Americans. By John Thompson, illustrated by J. Patrick Lewis. 2000: Creative Editions. Gorgeous book of poetry and illustrations about African American leaders.

Freedom walkers: The story of the Montgomery bus boycott. By Russell Freedman. 2006: Scholastic Books.

Lift every voice and sing. By James Weldon Johnson, illustrated by Brian Collier. 2007: HarperCollins Publishers.

Marching for freedom. By Elizabeth Partridge. 2009: Viking. Striking photojournal of the voting rights marches of 1965.

Martin’s big words. By Doreen Rappaport, illustrated by Brian Collier. 2001: Scholastic Books.

Minty: A story of young Harriet Tubman. By Alan Schroeder, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. 1996: Dial Books.

Moses: When Harriet Tubman led her people to freedom. By Carole Weatherford, illustrated by Kadir Nelson. 2006: Hyperion Books. Stunning illustrations.

My brother Martin: A sister remembers growing up with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. By Christine King Farris, illustrated by Chris Soentpiet. 2002: Simon and Schuster.

Portraits of African American heroes. By Tonya Bolden. 2003: Dutton Books. Short biographies and beautiful paintings.

Remember: The journey to school integration. By Toni Morrison. 2004: Houghton Mifflin. A moving collection of photographs, with poetic text.

Rosa. By Nikki Giovanni, illustrated Bryan Collier. 2005: Henry Holt.

Rosa Parks: My Story. By Rosa Parks, with Jim Haskins. 1992: Scholastic Books. Enlightening for all ages.

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The bus ride that changed history. By Pamela Duncan Edwards, illustrated by Danny Shanahan. 2005: Houghton Mifflin.

The story of Ruby Bridges. By Robert Coles. 1995: Scholastic Books.

This is the dream. By Diane Shore, illustrated by James Ransome. 2006: Harper Collins.

Through my eyes. By Ruby Bridges. Edited by Margo Lundell. 1999: Scholastic Books. Everyone should read this book.

Up before daybreak: Cotton and people in America. By Deborah Hopkinson. 2006: Scholastic Books. Photographic chronicle of the history of cotton and slavery.

Walk together children: Black American spirituals. Selected and illustrated by Ashley Bryan. 1974: Ashley Bryan. Beautiful woodcut illustrations.

We all sing with the same voice. By J. Philip Miller and Sheppard Greene. Song about diversity with a very catchy refrain, includes CD.

Whoever you are. By Mem Fox, illustrated by Leslie Staub. 1997: Voyager Books. A colorful celebration of diversity, great for very young students.

Working cotton. By Sherley Anne Williams, illustrated by Carole Byard. 1992: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Simple, poignant story of a Black migrant family.

Books for Adults

Music and social movements: Mobilizing traditions in the twentieth century. By Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison. 1998: Cambridge University Press.

Sing a song of social significance. By Serge Denisoff. 1983: Bowling Green University Popular Press.

Starting small: Teaching tolerance in preschool and the early grades. By the Teaching Tolerance Project. 1997: Southern Poverty Law Center.

CDs

Get on board: Underground Railroad and civil rights freedom songs, vol.2. By Kim and Reggie Harris. 2007: Appleseed Recordings.

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I will be your friend. 2003: Teaching Tolerance. Outstanding collection of songs about diversity, peace, and justice. Available free from Teaching Tolerance.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: In search of freedom. 1995: Polygram Records. Excerpts from 9 of his best speeches.

Rolas de Aztlan: Songs of the Chicano movement. 2005: Smithsonian/Folkways Records.

Sing for freedom: The story of the Civil Rights movement through its songs. 1990: Smithsonian /Folkways Records. Original field recordings.

Stand for what is right. By Jim and Jean Strathdee. 2007: Caliche Records. Social justice songs from a Christian perspective.

Steal away: Songs of the Underground Railroad. By Kim and Reggie Harris. 1997: Appleseed Recordings.

Voices of the Civil Rights movement: Black American freedom songs, 1960-1966. 1997: Smithsonian/Folkways Recordings. 2-CD set of live recordings from the civil rights era.

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APPENDIX E

Student Artwork and Photographs

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REFERENCES

Arnstine, D. (1967). Philosophy of education: Learning and schooling. New York:

Harper and Row.

Baird, P. (2001). Children’s song-makers as messengers of hope: Participatory

research with implications for teacher educators. Unpublished manuscript,

University of San Francisco.

Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and

Penguin Books, Ltd.

Boal, A. (1979). Theatre of the oppressed. London: Pluto Press.

Brack, J. (2005). Oh freedom! A tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil

Rights movement. Edmonds, WA: Judith Teicher Brack.

Burns, K. (1985). Introduction. The Shakers: Hands to work, hearts to God. New

York: Florentine Films and the Television Laboratory at Thirteen/WNET.

Campbell, P. S. (1998). Songs in their heads: Music and its meaning in children’s

lives. New York: Oxford University Press.

Carawan, C., & Carawan G., (Eds.). (1963). Songs of the southern freedom movement:

We shall overcome. New York: Oak Publications.

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