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The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States

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The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States TEACHING THE MOVEMENT The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States Foreword by Julian Bond • Introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. MARCH 2014 Teaching the Movement 2014 The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States MEDIA AND GENERAL INQUIRIES Ashley Levett Southern Poverty Law Center 400 Washington Ave., Montgomery, Ala. [email protected] (334) 956-8200 www.splcenter.org The SPLC is supported entirely by private donations. No government funds are involved. © Southern Poverty Law Center. All rights reserved. SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER About the Report This report was prepared by the Southern Poverty Law Center under the guidance of Teaching Tolerance Director Maureen Costello. The principal researcher and writer was Kate Shuster, Ph.D. The report was reviewed by Hasan Jeffries, Ph.D. and Jeremy Stern, Ph.D. It was edited by Maureen Costello, Alice Pettway, Adrienne Van der Valk and Monita Bell and designed by Scott Phillips and Sunny Paulk. About the Southern Poverty Law Center The Southern Poverty Law Center is dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry and to seek- ing justice for the most vulnerable members of our society. Using litigation, education, and other forms of advocacy, the Center works toward the day when the ideals of equal justice and equal opportunity will be a reality. About Teaching Tolerance Founded in 1991, Teaching Tolerance is dedicated to reducing prejudice, improving inter- group relations and supporting equitable school experiences for our nation’s children. The program provides free educational materials to educators for use by millions of students. Teaching Tolerance magazine is sent to 410,000 educators, reaching nearly every school in the country. Tens of thousands of educators use the program’s film kits and more than 6,000 schools participate in the annual Mix It Up at Lunch Day program. Teaching Tolerance teaching materials have won two Oscars, an Emmy and scores of honors from the Association of Educational Publishers, including two Golden Lamp Awards, the industry’s highest honor. On the cover: (Gov. George Wallace blocks the entrance to the University of Alabama 1963) AP Images; (Voters March Washington 1963) Marion S Trikosko/Library of Congress; (Daisy Bates at her NAACP office 1957) Thomas D. McAvoy/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images; (Segregated school following the supreme court case Plessy vs Ferguson 1896) Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images; (Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X 1964) Marion S. Trikosko; U.S. News & World Report Magazine/Library of Congress; (Vivian Malone, at University of Alabama 1963) Rolls Press/Popperfoto; (Bayard Rustin with Cleveland Robinson 1963) O. Fernandez/World Telegram & Sun/Library of Congress; (President John F. Kennedy addresses nation on civil rights 1963) Abbie Rowe/National Park Service; (Pete Seeger with Fannie Lou Hamer 1965) David Gahr/Getty Images; (Little Rock integration protest 1959) John T. Bledsoe U.S. News & World Report Magazine/Library of Congress; (President Lyndon Johnson signs Voting Rights Act 1965) Yoichi R. Okamoto/U.S. Government; (Abernathys march with MLK in Selma to Montgomery march 1965) Abernathy Family Photos; (1943 “Colored Waiting Room” sign) Esther Bubley/Library of Congress; (Crossing of Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma 1965) AFP/Getty Images; (Firefighters spray children at Birmingham Children’s March 1963) Bill Hudson/AP Images/Corbis; (Integrated D.C. classroom 1957) Warren K. Leffler U.S. News & World Report Magazine/Library of Congress; (Black Panther demonstration New York City 1969) David Fenton/ Getty Images; (Rosa Parks 1955) Bureau of Public Affairs; (Ku Klux Klan rally 1967) Ed Eckstein/CORBIS; (Federal troops on University of Alabama campus 1963) Warren K. Leffler U.S. News & World Report Magazine/Library of Congress 2 TEACHING THE MOVEMENT Contents Foreword . 5 Introduction . .6 Executive Summary. .8 2014 State Grades . 10 The Civil Rights Movement: Why Now? . 11 Our Approach . 13 How Do States Compare to Each Other? . 16 Content in the Major Documents . 25 Conclusions . 30 Recommendations . 31 Endnotes . 32 Appendix A: States’ Report Cards . 33 Appendix B: Methodology . 131 3 TEACHING THE MOVEMENT Foreword BY JULIAN BOND In the three years since family produced such a racist response the sponsor had the Southern Poverty Law to withdraw the comments section. Center first reported on the In real life, a Washington Post columnist said the state of civil rights educa- interracial family of New York’s new mayor elicited “a tion, the nation dedicated a gag reflex” from “people with traditional views.” memorial to Martin Luther The star of a popular reality series about a successful King Jr., and commemo- Southern family was temporarily taken off TV when the rated the 50th anniversaries family patriarch expressed the view that, until the civil of James Meredith’s admis- rights movement stirred them up, blacks were happy and sion to Old Miss, the killing content, singing in the cotton fields. The show was rein- of Medgar Evers and the stated after an avalanche of support from viewers. Birmingham Children’s President Obama has been the butt of racist claims, March. Despite this atten- caricatures and criticism since he was elected. tion, the bad news is that ignorance remains the Racist attacks against the President; racial illiteracy operative word when it comes to the civil rights move- among the population. ment and much of African-American history. Some of us remember a song from the musical, We saw this when the cast of the Real Housewives of South Pacific: Atlanta visited a church in Savannah where holes had “You’ve got to be taught to be afraid been bored in the floor to provide ventilation on the Of people whose eyes are oddly made, Underground Railroad. Porsha Stewart, granddaughter And people whose skin is a different shade, of civil rights leader Hosea Williams, quickly piped up You’ve got to be carefully taught. to explain. “Well, there has to be an opening for a railroad at You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late, some point,” she said. “Because somebody’s driving the Before you are six or seven or eight, train. It’s not electric like what we have now.” To hate all the people your relatives hate, The civil rights illiteracy of the American people You’ve got to be carefully taught” is without dispute. The reasons are many. One, as this This report strives to insure we are carefully and cor- Teaching Tolerance study suggests, is the failure of our rectly taught, not to hate, but to understand and know educational system. each other. When I taught at Harvard University some years ago, worried that I would be speaking down to my students, I devised a simple test of their knowledge of the civil rights movement and its major figures. Not one student could identify Alabama Governor George Wallace, whom Julian Bond chaired the NAACP Board of Directors one student described as “a television commentator who from 1998–2010 and is now Chairman Emeritus. He is covered the Vietnam War.” a Distinguished Scholar in the School of Government at They knew Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. American University in Washington, D.C., and a Professor Beyond that, ignorance. in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. We know that racial animosity exists throughout the He is also an emeritus member of the Southern Poverty land. A Cheerios television ad featuring an interracial Law Center Board of Directors. 5 SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER Introduction BY HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. WANT TO HAVE A are in charge of what is and what is not covered. As sur- CONVERSATION ABOUT prising a fact as this is, Robinson fares better than other RACE? game-changing pioneers of the civil rights movement, “The right of every American including James Meredith, required teaching in seven to first-class citizenship is states; Ruby Bridges, in two; and Charlayne Hunter the most important issue Gault, in one. What, you ask, do they have in common? of our time,” baseball’s first Like number 42, they understood the struggle for cit- black major leaguer once izenship to be the struggle of their time, except the said. Really, it is the most fields they broke into were public schools, each of them important issue of every braving the cold stares—and worse—of hate in order to time. Not only is citizenship receive the best possible education in their communities. in a democracy a status one This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Supreme inherits or receives, it is a his- Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Ed. decision ending tory each must carry forward to shape the future, a right segregation in American public schools. They are among that withers without constant vigilance and renewal. those who forced its enforcement with their feet, hands Few understood this better than Jackie Robinson, the and minds. son of Georgia sharecroppers who, after lettering in four The movement they embodied wasn’t one or two or sports at U.C.L.A. and a court-martial trial prompted by a dozen famous faces in the crowd, however; it involved his refusal to sit in the back of an army bus, stepped onto generation after generation of faces, most of them anon- the field as a Brooklyn Dodger in April 1947 as a symbol ymous but equally resilient, doing all they could to ‘make of African Americans’ centuries-old quest to be regarded a way out of no way,’ as we say in the tradition. Yet how as citizens of equal rank with an equal opportunity to test many in our schools today can even identify the contours their talents. At the time, the America Robinson lived in of their struggle, the forces that opposed them, the strat- was largely defined by a stark and vicious color line, on egies and tactics they developed, and the countless ways the books and in the streets.
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