Welcome to the Tuscaloosa City and County Schools Teaching American History Discussion Board! Laurie Fowler, Director of Staff Development (and Technology Maestro) from the Tuscaloosa County Schools set up this discussion board for us. We'll use it in real time Thursday, but can then change it to a digest format where you'll get a compilation of the messages once a day. Someone can post a question or comment one day, you can respond, and then the next day everyone gets the responses. I've been a member of a national TAHP digest and have found it very helpful. We'll see it how it goes. I look forward to seeing everyone who can make it to Thursday's workshop at Hillcrest and/or our recruiting meetings over the next two weeks. ZuZu
Hi, Chris! Good to see you here this morning and everything working well! I am so excited; you should hear the GREAT conversation they have been having the past hour - all sparked by your writing! :-)
I don't know that movie, Ryan. I know that the case is in a 1980s documentary, "Eyes on the Prize" and a later docu by the History Channell called "The Fifties," but I didn't know of a movie based on the case. I'll have to track that down.
Hi Chris, I have two questions for you from one of our teachers who wasn't able to come. "In your timeline on p. 123, why didn't you include Truman's two Executive Orders in 1947 which integratedthe U.S. military and which banned discrimination in federal government hiring? (Just an oversight, or were they really not all that important in your opinion? Those two decisions seem to me to be incredible acts of moral courage by Truman ---on I reason I consider Truman to be the greatest president of the 20th century). Also, I'd love to know whether [you] consider the G.I. Bill, which enabled thousands of black men to get college educations, to be a major catalyst for the Civili Rights Movement." This is from David Truhett who teaches in the high school.
I just consulted the book, THE LYNCHING OF EMMETT TILL: A DOCUMENTARY NARRATIVE by Christopher Metress, a professor of English at Samford University, and I don't see any mention of a movie. There was a 1956 Twilight Zone tele-play, "Noon on Doomsday" by Rod Serling that was based on the case.
Hi Chris, I found the books enlightening and depressing because of man's inhumanity to man. In our conversations we were wondering who the two black men were that assisted in the beating of Emmett? Were they forced (I would assume)? What happened to them after the trial? Were they killed? Do we know if they are still alive today? Thanks, Becky
David, that's a good question. In an early draft of the book, I had a much more extensive timeline, I think it began with the Fugitive Slave Act, but as the book developed, I wanted to stay closer to events that had, in some way, a closer connection to the case. Truman's integration of the armed forces was a landmark event, and of course it has a place in civil rights history. The GI Bill was also very important---and I wonder if Emmett's mother used it (did it provide widow/survivor benefits?) when she went back to school after Emmett's death.
Good morning Chris. Thanks for taking the time to do this with us. I have two questions for you. 1) Did Emmett understand the time and social attitudes of the South or did he dismiss them due to his age? 2) Were the characters of Hiram and R.C. based on anyone?
Lisa: I think you have an interesting question, and I wonder if he COULD understand understand the social attitudes due to living in Chicago. While there was segregation and similar issues occuring there, I do not think that socially it was as extreme in the way actions were carried out as a reaction to issues. Can you really undertand such things just by hearing accounts of them? I imagine that he could only situation his understanding within the framework of his own experiences.
Becky, writing the books was depressing. For several years I was immersed in memories of how the various Civil Rights acts had failed.
I don't know who else was involved in the torture and death of Emmett, but I know that more than Bryant and Milam were involved. A young filmmaker, Keith Beauchamp, has a documentary, as yet unreleased, that he's shown in various cities. I've not seen it, but apparently he interviewed several African American men who were at the scene. Beauchamp's film and lobbying combined with the PBS documentary by Stanley Nelson are what led to the case being re-opened. Anyway, based on what I've heard, I think that some of those men were forced to participate and are still alive today. I think they stayed silent after the trial because the reaction against them would have been furious and terrible.
Lisa, I think that Emmett's fatal flaw was his naivete about Jim Crow in Mississippi. Of course, Chicago was segregated in 1955, but it wasn't enforced with the same passion as it was in the Delta. His mother told me that when she tried to warn Emmett about what to expect and how to act in Mississippi, that he laughed at her.
Hiram was based, more or less, on me. R.C. is a composite of all the bullies and creeps I've known in my life.
This is a good point, and it remains true today. Many people think that today, after all of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s work that everything has been "fixed," that all people have equality in America. This perception resides in folks who haven't themselves felt the sting of racism and discrimination.
I am still on my thought about contextualizing our understandings within the framework of our own experiences, and in continuing to think about that beyond my first post, I think it has implications to our classroom instruction. It certainly fits with Louise Rosenblatt's reader response theory where we first make personal connections and responses to texts before moving onto making experiential and intellectual connections. I think then, that in terms of classroom practice and actively engaging students in learning history, that it has implications regarding selecting texts that will evoke a more personal response than dry textbooks (as we were examining earlier) and then allowing for those personal responses rather than JUST examination of the facts.
Any idea how to get in touch with Beauchamp about his documentary?
I teach 10th and 11th grade US History. I plan to get a classroom set of both of your books and have my students read both books and do a comparison of non-fiction and fiction of a historical event. I will use this as an introduction to The Civil Rights Movement. This will be the first time I have done this type of activity. Do you have any suggestions or resources that I could use with this type of activity? Becky
The reader response approach is the one I advocate most for secondary classroom instruction, and I hope that books like mine will help young readers, many of whom share a naivete about racism similar to the real Emmett and the fictional Hiram, gain some personal sense of what our country was like in the 1950s. I've always loved the 'story' part of his-story, and it's sad that textbooks don't have the space to tell the stories that make history. Writing these books certainly acquainted me with a version of history I'd never read about in the textbooks I'd encountered as a student. As a teacher of YA literature, I recommend that history teachers use good YA fiction and nonfiction to complement their textbooks and the study of history.
Becky, Beauchamp has a website that includes a trailer from the film. I can never recall the exact title, but it has Emmett Louis Till in the title. A Google search will probably turn up his website. Now I recall the title: "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till." There.
Here's some information about other resources:
There are some great resources available for teachers. The PBS documentary, "The Murder of Emmett Till," and its accompanying website. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/ The video/DVD is wonderfully done (with no help from me), and the website is loaded with material, including a teacher's guide. Another source comes from CBS News. On October 21, 2004, 60 Minutes aired a special update on the case. I'm sure a video of that is available, but the full text, including a recent photo of Carolyn Bryant, is on the internet too: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/10/21/60minutes/main650652.shtml Finally, Christopher Metress' book, The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative, is loaded with newspaper and magazine reports about the kidnapping, murder, and trial, and also has essays, poems, and other works written in reaction to the case.
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