Katherine Schmidt

Civil Rights in the Middle School Classroom

During the first year of the documentary theater course Civil Rights and Education in Richmond, VA, one of the most compelling moments came from sharing an early version of our play with Henderson Middle School students—694 out of 700 of whom are African American.¹ Gathered in the dark auditorium, we shared our first performance with forty students followed by a group conversation about racial segregation in Richmond's history. Our young audience members challenged us with lively questions, feedback about our performance, and honest reflections on their experiences as Richmond public school students. Yet we were shocked to hear them define segregation as a thing of the past. We left Henderson that afternoon feeling stirred by this conversation and fired up with the conviction to more intentionally weave young people's voices into this project by incorporating their work into the archive. My previous experiences mentoring and developing close relationships with Henderson students made documenting their experiences important to me—and gave me a set of facilitation skills and cultural currency necessary to create a complementary project moving forward.

In the second year, we worked with Henderson's site coordinator for Communities in Schools program, Rosemarie Wiegandt. Rosemarie helped us set up an elective class for seven eighth-grade students. She secured a private conference room in the library—a luxury in a school whose noisy classrooms were generally divided only by partitions. Twice each week, we met for an hour and fifteen minutes, offering a blend of civil rights history and creative writing in a safe space. I developed a discussion-based curriculum that explored local history and current events, with plenty of time for reflecting and for creating work based on their personal experiences.

We began by examining the immediate impact of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. We discussed how this affected schools nationally and how it impacted life in Virginia. Here, Prince Edward County, Warren County, and the Norfolk metro area elected to shut down their schools in opposition to integration. This major act of resistance was news to my students, who had never learned about this time in the state's history. We discussed the highly controversial issue of mandatory busing, with which Richmond families—both black and white—grappled in the early 1970s. During this time, students were bused to different areas in a renewed effort to integrate the school system. Implementing it required students to forgo traditional alliances to their neighborhoods and attend schools across the city, which were occasionally in rival areas. This dilemma was especially salient with Jaquan, who was anxiously preparing to begin playing football for John Marshall High School just down the street from Henderson.² When he thought about what it would mean to pick up his life and move to George Wythe High School, a rival school in Richmond's south side, he was dismayed. "I couldn't do it," he said.

To further familiarize students with their connections to national and local civil rights history, I brought a variety of archival materials and primary texts to our discussions. We listened to audio recordings of several of Martin Luther King's most famous speeches. We looked at slides of Richmond from the 1950s and 1960s, which included beautiful images of Jackson Ward, a once-thriving black neighborhood in the city. We examined pictures of Virginia's segregated schools. We compared images of one of Charlottesville's deteriorated black middle schools with a photograph of the majestic high school for white students. The students were frequently energized by this material, particularly when they could link images with places or areas with which they were familiar. Through these materials, we explored questions of privilege, prejudice, agency, and social change. I linked our conversations to current events, including controversial stop-and-frisk policies and the death of Trayvon Martin. Each week, students wrote reflection essays or poems on these themes. At the end of the semester, the students selected the pieces they wanted to include in the archive.

Students sometimes shared contradictory sentiments about contemporary issues of racial inequality. Their ideology frequently clashed with their lived experience. One morning, a student talked about witnessing a white man call his father a "nigger" in a nearby bank parking lot. Another student explained that she felt unwelcome and conspicuous while visiting a Chick-fil-A in one of Richmond's mostly white neighborhoods. But the following week in a separate conversation, the group unanimously agreed that racial issues were no longer problematic for their generation. "Anybody can be friends with anybody," one girl mused.

Several factors may have contributed to this discrepancy. Many of our discussion topics were difficult and sensitive, and I worried that my identity as a white woman made it difficult for them to be emotionally available to these painful conversations. In addition, as the semester marched on, it became difficult to compete with the change in routine wrought by the annual standardized testing. In addition, I am not sure that the school's test-driven curriculum had adequately prepared them to contextualize contemporary instances of racial inequality that they encountered. Research indicates that many young people may have difficulty articulating and conceptualizing racism in relationship to contemporary American culture. In 2012, the Applied Research Center interviewed 80 young people of different racial backgrounds from around the country. According to this study, Millennials have a hard time identifying racism in institutional, systemic, or structural terms. Instead, many conceptualize racism in terms of overt, deliberately racist, interpersonal reactions (Apollon et al. 2012).

It was sometimes hard for me to gauge how students understood the legacy—and present reality—of school segregation in their lives. Yet when one student, Vazya Herman, was selected to present one of her poems during the postperformance panel, she performed and spoke with incredible poise, confidence, and maturity. By the end of our semester, students shared that they felt "more connected" with Richmond's history. In contributing to the archive, the students gained a sense of ownership in telling their personal narratives, as well as the narratives of their city, and pride in being part of Richmond's history.

Works Cited