When discussing college student voice, the historical narrative has generally focused on large-scale student activism as the definitive medium through which students expressed their beliefs. However, this inevitably leaves more subtle forms of student expression left uninterrogated, specifically in the South, and other areas of the country where…

Purpose: This article explores the expressed thoughts and feelings of 24 research participants who processed and articulated their lived experiences. They each attended the same private, religious, historically, and predominantly White institution and participated in a three-credit course that covered the history of the Civil Rights Movement of…

History tells the Civil Rights struggle through the lens of Selma, Alabama. Bloody Sunday, an event that galvanized a generation, provided the background for an interdisciplinary team of scholars, educators, local historians, and community members to focus on place-based learning experiences and explore civil rights education. The Selma event is…

The story of Black veterans and their experience in the Vietnam War is one of little investigation especially with regard to those who are from the state of Alabama. This study particularly focuses on the experiences of African American Vietnam War veterans from the state of Alabama. The observations are based on the educational, occupational, and…

December 1, 2015, marked the 60th anniversary of Rosa Parks' arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus in 1955. This incident sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the mid-20th century civil rights movement. A century before Parks' act of resistance, African American schoolteacher Elizabeth Jennings was…

This paper focuses on how shifting conceptions of youth underpinned young people's activism in the 1950s and 1960s. This paper specifically examines conceptions of youth as it changed throughout the twentieth century. G. Stanley Hall articulated a distinct notion of "adolescence" in the early twentieth century. But the "Scottsboro…

Exploring controversial and difficult events and issues with young children can be challenging. The Civil Rights Movement is an abstract, perhaps remote, issue for young children today. However, it is an important part of our country's history and a theme worthy of study. This article suggests ways to use photographs to explore this mature subject…

This article examines the historical relationship between political power and the pursuit of education and social equality from the Reconstruction era to the present. The chief argument is that education equality is historically linked to and even predicated on equal political power, specifically, equal access to the franchise and instruments of…

Drawing on theories of multi-modality and critical visual literacy, this article focuses on images that five-and six year-olds painted in a class-made book, Voice on the Bus, about racial segregation. The article discusses how children used illustrations to convey their understandings of Rosa Parks' bus arrest in Alabama. A post-structural view…

The September 2011 report, "Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States 2011," was prompted by the news that American high school seniors knew little about the civil rights movement. Knowing that low expectations often contribute to poor student achievement, the report took a close look at the content…

These days, when people want to travel a long way, they take an airplane. But once, not so long ago really, only rich people flew in airplanes. Most people took a train or a bus. Back then, in the Montgomery Greyhound station, one could notice a bricked-up doorway that was once an open door with a sign above it that said "Colored…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress--commonly called "The Nation's Report Card"--tells a dismal story: Only 2% of high school seniors in 2010 could answer a simple question about the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark "Brown v. Board of Education" decision. And it's no surprise. Across the country, state educational…

In this article, the authors describe a lesson that helps elementary students build a sense of citizenship and moral consciousness about justice. Children participated in the struggle for civil and voting rights in Selma and in other places in the South during the 1960s. Initially, it was children's literature that sparked these third grade…

When Morris Dees was a young man in Alabama, the law said that black people couldn't drink from the same water fountain as white people, or sit at the same lunch counter. Back then, the government created and sanctioned divisions between human beings. The Civil Rights Movement changed all of that, of course, and ended state-mandated apartheid in…

Reviews a fascinating lesson plan designed to acquaint students with the methods and devices used to deny blacks the right to vote in the pre-Civil Rights era south. Students take the same test that Alabama required of resident blacks to vote. Includes a copy of the exceptionally difficult test. (MJP)