Project Overview

"The revolution has always been in the hands of the young. The young always inherit the revolution."

Huey Newton

The Perpetuation of a False Narrative

Instead of perpetuating the myth that a select handful of heroic figures made change on their own, we should be putting these figures within the larger context of collective struggles for justice (Kohl, 2003; Picower 2012). We should be interrogating what these figures really stood for and stood against, and we should be disrupting the whitewashed narratives presented in popular media and curricular materials (Kent, 1999).

The Civil Rights Movement Timeline Project

This project is designed to be completed over an extended period of time, ideally six to eight weeks.

Students will be exposed to a wide range of events and people involved in the African American Civil Rights Movement and the Chicano Movement. After learning a bit about each of these movements, students will work individually or in groups to then select one topic to research further. Students will spend the next three weeks researching their topics, and will then create a posterboard presentation to showcase their event.

At the end of the project, students will hang their posters in chronological order throughout the classroom, creating one large timeline of the Civil Rights Movement, and will each prepare short oral presentations to teach others about their topic. I encourage teachers to celebrate the publication of these projects by inviting families, community members, and other classes to come walk through the timeline to learn from students as they stand by their posters and present their work.