MY MLK Day

I put the gauntlet down last week by requiring my students to avoid floating through MLK day brain dead. I encouraged them to educate themselves and learn something about Dr. King's life and/or the Civil Rights Movement.

I chose to head straight to a magnificent primary source: this morning I read King's 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail." It took me about a half hour to process the essay, and I really thought about his message to various ministers in the Birmingham community. So many of them resented that he, an outsider from Atlanta, had the chutzpah to demonstrate in Birmingham.

I was most impressed with King's measured tone, punctuating his lucid arguments to resist unjust laws, quoting from the Bible, Socrates, Aquinas, St. Augustine, Jefferson, Lincoln, and a plethora of other greats. Honestly, one could design a course of intensive study to last months just based on this historic letter.

I have always cherished the quote, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," but I had little idea that it was from "The Letter."

Read it for yourself, and don't wait until the next MLK day to do it!

http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

Bearing Witness

My freshman English class is reading 1984 by George Orwell, and one of its major themes has to do with totalitarian regimes needing to scrub the memories of its citizens in order to stay in control. Big Brother's government demands a population of non-thinkers, people who know nothing of past unpleasantness or inconvenient truths about the world around them.

Leonard Pitts Jr., one of my favorite editorial writers, bemoans how in the African-American community there is a pervasive feeling of needing to forget the hell inflicted upon blacks during the Jim Crow South, and he mentions that in his own community there remains a "marked tendency to avoid the grit, gristle, and grime of our own history." He begins his article by admiring how Jews obsess about remembering the details of the Holocaust, deftly institutionalizing it, and educating others so that such a thing cannot happen again to them.

Millions of Americans today suffered terribly under Jim Crow, and untold thousands felt the heat of having neighbors and family members lynched. Pitts' article certainly serves as a wake-up call; we need to fight deliberate and accidental amnesia by being educated, critical thinkers. Could forgetting and failing to educate ourselves usher in a time when Americans again live in fear of being lynched or "vaporized?" Are Jim Crow and Big Brother relatives?

Read Pitts' article for yourself.

Using Voicethread to Teach Inferno