 Money, Mississippi- July 2011- Photo by Josh Montgomery This blog is on the Teaching Tolerance website at: www.tolerance.org Through a grant from Teaching American History, I was part of a group of teachers who spent months reading, listening and watching films and videos about the civil rights movement before we took a trip to the South. But still it was history—far away, untouchable and remote. That was until the first day in Sumner, Miss. During the school year, I had taught the Emmett Till story to my high school students. Till was a 14-year-old black youth tortured and murdered because he flirted with a white woman. This story is also about the courage of Till’s mother who decided to have a glass-lid casket created so the world could see what had happened to her son. My students were mesmerized by the story. But now, I stood in the courthouse in Sumner, where Emmett’s uncle, Mose Wright, had bravely pointed out Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam as the men who’d come to get Emmett out of bed in the middle of the night from his Money, Miss. home. And I stood by the stairs where Milam made out with his wife for the cameras in celebration of the innocent verdict. We met a retired teacher who lived in Sumner. At the time of the trial, she was 15 years old and was “paying attention to boys, not the news.” She now had fascinating insider knowledge. Her teaching assistant was Mose’s daughter, Emmett Till’s cousin. Mose became more real to me, not just a man from long ago, but Uncle Mose, Father Mose to this woman working at a local school. It was the strangest feeling—almost as if history was in the cobwebs of that courthouse and I could touch it. It was a long day of travel. We started in Branson, Mo., ended in Greenwood, Miss., with a stop in Money. There’s not much in Money. There are a few houses, some railroad tracks and the ivy-covered skeleton of the store where Emmett flirted with Roy Bryant’s wife. I felt nothing there—no brushes with history, just a spot in the road with a historical marker. I wanted to follow Emmett’s last footsteps, to go to the shed where he was beaten, to stand on the riverbank where he’d been shot before a roughly 70-pound fan was tied around his neck with barbed wire and he was rolled into the river. I wanted to offer an emotional memorial. Rosa Parks said that she saw Emmett’s story in the news and it inspired her. A few months later she stayed in her bus seat, an action that began the Montgomery Bus Boycott. A young pastor was asked to lead the boycott and Martin Luther King Jr. said yes. Unlike so many other deaths that were swept under the rug, the horrors of Emmett’s death were brought into the open. Although the killers went free, his death helped light the fires of the civil rights movement. This was only the first day of our trip and I was just beginning to see that, although many might wish it, the past was not buried but was here in the stories of a local, in the bricks of the court room and in every cotton gin fan like the one that was placed around Emmett’s neck. During our visits to the civil rights “hotspots” I had almost felt history brushing by, so close to me, something I’d never experienced before. Now I can pass that on to my students. Blevins is a high school English and journalism teacher in Missouri.  Photo by Chris Searle - Flickr  A favorite and most dreaded time in my classroom is about to begin: the reading of "To Kill a Mockingbird." I love this book. It's an important book. It received a Pulitzer Prize and is on the Must-Read lists of books for a bzillion organizations. It contains characters and quotes that have entered our culture and our lexicon. Once again, I love this book. What I dread are the students who love to whine during the month we read this book. They don't give it a chance because it looks long. They don't give it a chance because they don't like reading. They make their opinions known very loudly and make it yucky for the students who like it, the students who aren't sure if they like it but they are giving it their best shot and for me. I have devised a WHINING FORM (below) for the students who persist in vocalizing their hatred. I have also a new attitude and way to communicate why we are reading this book due to another book, "Readicide" by Kelly Gallagher. I'm not asking my students to like the book. I hope they do and I think they will if they give it a chance but that's an aside, not the main point. What's the main point? That they read a classic, an important book, one that every Freshman or Sophomore in the United States and England and who knows how many other countries read every year, a book that challenged ideas of racism and prejudice in the 60s during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, a book we can relate to through it's stories of a small town and of a brother and a sister playing in the front yard in the summertime. I'm not dreading it anymore... To Kill a Mockingbird, here we come! 
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AuthorKim Blevins is a teacher-consultant with the Greater Kansas City Writing Project. Archives
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