Dr. Julian Bond on "Making the Civil Right Matter"
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Dr. Julian Bond "Making Civil Rights Matter"
A one-day workshop directed by The Center for the Liberal Arts with funding from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
November 19, 2011, The Miller Center of Public Affairs.
Dr. Julian Bond on:
The importance of teaching the Civil Rights movement.
[DR. JULIAN BOND]
My experience has been that students who come to me from the best American high schools know very little about the Civil Rights Movement. Maureen Costello of the Southern Poverty Law Center says they know two words—four words. I'm sorry, "I have a dream." And two people: Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King.
My students generally know this narrative: that there used to be discrimination. Then Martin Luther King came along. There were marches and protests. Some people died. Dr. King died, but it was all over after that. And America's a good place.
Well, that really is both the story of what happened and the most simplistic possible version of what happened. I think it's important for students to know that people their age were major actors in this movement, and that it was made up. It was a movement made up of people who were just ordinary kinds of people—who were farmers, who were sharecroppers, who were school teachers, who were just regular people who did extraordinary things when they felt called upon to do it. I think they need to know that.
And unless they know that, unless they have a fairly complex picture of who the players were, what the movements were all about, what they were doing, then I don't think they could get a full understanding of American history. Because this, after all, is American history.
One of the disturbing things about this study the Southern Poverty Law Center did was that this kind of history is taught primarily in states with large Black populations, as if it were Black history and meant only for Black people, and taught only because they would be interested in it and not anyone else. Of course, that's not true. That's not what it is. It isn't Black history—it's American history, and it ought to be taught to all Americans. All Americans ought to be required to have some understanding of how we came from an apartheid society to the society we have today. Much better—not perfect—but much better than we had then.
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Dr. Julian Bond on:
The importance of "ordinary people" in teaching the Civil Rights movement.
[DR. JULIAN BOND]
I think when you teach this history, you have to focus on the prominent people—the Dr. Kings, the A. Philip Randolphs, the Bayard Rustins.
The people who were at the top of the movement paradigm who were helping make things happen. But at the same time, you can't ignore the so-called ordinary people, the regular people, the people who might have lived next door to you if you lived in this period, the people who are not very different from your mother and your father. The people who didn't have necessarily Dr. King's oratorical ability, didn't have the ability that A. Philip Randolph did to be a great organizer of people, didn't have the skills that Bayard Rustin had who called together the March on Washington and made it such a great success.
People who, not like that, but people who just had courage and conviction that something had to be done. The four young men who sat down at the lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina on February 1st, 1960—they need to know about these people. They need to know who they were and that they were college students. Like every other college student in America today, they need to know about people like Daisy Bates, the woman who was sort of a surrogate mother to the nine young Black kids who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
They got to know about her and what kind of person she was and how this woman, who was pretty much a housewife and business owner—she and her husband owned a newspaper—how they became the protector and the surrogate mother for these kids, and led them through this traumatic experience in which she challenged a president of the United States, President Eisenhower, and won.
So they need to know about her, and the list of people they need to know about is just so long and so rich, and the people who make up this history are so fascinating. At least to me, I can't imagine they wouldn't be fascinating to somebody else.
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Dr. Julian Bond on:
Teaching Civil Rights in the classroom.
[DR. JULIAN BOND]
I think they need to come away with a deeper understanding of what could be taught, about how these lessons can be taught, how they can be learned, what a curriculum ought to look like, what books are available, what texts are available, what study plans are available, how you can get from the web and other sources, and from people in your own community who can come in the classroom and talk about this.
What I find most interesting in my classrooms is if I get somebody who is an active participant in the movement, who can come and say, “I did this, and then I did that.” I lead a civil rights tour through the South every year, and I have speak to them in Montgomery, a white man named Reverend Robert Graetz. No one knows his name outside Montgomery.
Robert Graetz was the white pastor of the Black Lutheran Church in Montgomery, and he got my people's attention when he said, “When they bombed my house the third time, they sort of pulled back—you know, actually it was the second time.” But he told this story and he had their attention so much because this was a real person who really did this, who worked with Dr. King, who was his associate, who was present at the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, who knew Rosa Parks, who just was a firsthand witness to this.
I think teachers need to know who these people are in their community, and they are in every community in America, and how they can bring them into the classroom and have them act as living witnesses for their students.