I’ve been teaching U.S. History to high school juniors for 25 years, but in the past five years I have begun to rethink the way that I teach the civil rights movement in the 20th century. In thinking about the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmad Arbery and many others, I really wanted to improve my students’ understanding of the topic so that they could decide the relationship between the civil rights era and more modern day calls for protecting civil rights. 

For years I would begin my unit with segregation in education, leaning heavily into Brown v. Board of Education. But for the past five years my teaching partner and I made a deliberate effort to shift the narrative and begin our unit with the unofficial and then later official desegregation of the U.S. military under Executive Order 9981. We’ve found that this starting point is a meaningful way to look at the civil rights movement through a lens of federalism: When does the U.S. government take action or push back? When do states take action or push back? What can citizens do when they are dissatisfied with the lack of response by various levels of government? 

When I discovered the Retro Report film on the 1942 lynching of Cleo Wright in Sikeston, Mo., I found myself rethinking my approach to the civil rights movement yet again. Wright’s story is punctuated by the experiences that people of color were facing in the 1940s at the same time that the U.S. Government was entering a war for democracy and liberation.

I realized that the obvious holes in the story (which are highlighted in the film) exposed some challenges to be considered. Do students know how to discern opinion from fact in a narrative? Do they know how to fill the gaps in what is unknown? How do we create context to an event? 

SHARI CONDITT teaches Social Studies at Woodland High School in Woodland, Wash. She is a member in Retro Report’s Council of Educators.

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