Next February, this blog will be celebrating its ten-year anniversary! Leading up to it, I’m re-starting a series I tried to do in the past called “A Look Back.” Each week, I’ll be re-posting a few of my favorite posts from the past ten years.

You might also be interested in A Look Back: Best Posts From 2007 To 2009.

I originally shared this series of posts in 2010. You might also be interested in The Best Sites To Teach About African-American History.

if-people-understood

 

The New Yorker has an exceptional article about pioneers in the civil rights struggle, accompanied by quite a few images.

I was particularly struck by this passage:

“One thing that I think the history books,and the media, have gotten very wrong is portraying the movement as Martin Luther King’s movement, when in fact it was a people’s movement,” Diane Nash, a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, said. “If people understood that it was ordinary people who did everything that needed to be done in the movement, instead of thinking, I wish we had a Martin Luther King now, they would ask, ‘What can I do?’ Idolizing just one person undermines the struggle.”

In community organizing, we often taught and discussed the long-term dangers to social change brought about by idolizing charismatic leaders.

As a teacher, though, it’s easy to lose sight of that important concept when dealing with trying to help students learn so many other things.

We’re in the middle of teaching a unit on Nelson Mandela now in our mainstream ninth-grade English classes, and this passage is prompting me to think about how I can integrate a bit of discussion on the role of others in that country’s liberation struggle.

How do you avoid just teaching the “cult of personality” or the “cult of the hero” in your class?