Recently, I taught a course on the Long Civil Rights Movement. In the course, students engaged the study of African American history in ways that transcended an exclusive focus on the 1950s-60s stories of voting rights and school desegregation. I wanted them to think as deeply about Washington and Du Bois as they did Arkansas schools and Selma riots. I was not disappointed. For many students, it was the first time they had engaged with figures like Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, and Septima Clark. They dove in, and it was a delight to see students make mental connections between periods and issues far beyond the simple desegregation narrative of their High School histories.
Still, the reality remains that desegregation and voting rights matter tremendously. I wanted students to take the bottom-up, social history they studied and revisit the 1950s-60s with fresh eyes.
To do this, I created the following assignment. It was given to students in a liberal arts-based, regional university in North Carolina. About half of the students were history majors, and the other half political science or social science majors.
Project Description: Research the desegregation of your home community (either city, town, county/parish) or, if distance precludes, local areas (either Cleveland, Rutherford, or Gaston Counties). Explain the challenges of understanding these events correctly from a historical perspective. Why did this community integrate in the way that it did at the time that it did?
Final papers were 15 pages in length.
Research began when students read excerpts of major monographs on the history of desegregation in multiple contexts: the rural Deep South (Mississippi), urban New South (Atlanta, Charlotte, Baltimore), and suburban South (Greensboro, Charlotte).
Then, students contacted home town libraries and schools. Discussion days allowed us to sift through research findings and brainstorm new directions when they got stuck.
Research notes and Rough drafts were due to each other by mid-semester. Students with similar types of schools (urban, rural, suburban) were grouped together. Reading peer-work sparked good discussions. Many students got ideas from one another’s work far more than my suggestions.
Results:
– One of the greatest student research papers I have ever overseen came from this assignment. The research was based on a small town in North Carolina. Initially, the student discovered literature from a local history society praising the town’s peaceful and friendly desegregation process. Once he studied the local newspaper archives, however, he discovered Klan violence in the Police Department, Judges winking at hate crimes, and a clearly divided community in the midst of immense social turmoil. This led to a fabulous paper examining both history and historical memory. The student is currently revising the paper for publication.
– Most students did admirable jobs. Especially rewarding were students who identified non-school related issues at work in desegregation. The Long Civil Rights paradigm was getting through! One student noticed the intersection of civic job discrimination (an ongoing concern of civil rights advocates) with the school integration question. Another found religious outliers whose racial egalitarianism (predating the movement) became the object of local scorn – a scorn that turned violent in the storm of school integration.
Lessons learned
– get students IRB certification early in the course. Students inevitably ran into people they wanted to interview, and obtaining IRB piecemeal was a headache.
– do a mini-research methods prep for students in other majors. I had several bright Political Science majors who struggled because they were not used to thinking about research as historians do. Yes, they grew, but I also could have helped them grow more by showing them the way.
– Remember non-local and international students will need help. Letting them study local history is great, but because it is not “home” they will not know where to begin. Identify local history archives and good local history books to acquaint them with the area.