INTRODUCTION
Studies of social movement outcomes have typically emphasized efforts to win concessions from institutional political bodies, including the establishment of new laws, policy reforms, organizational niches, and judicial action (Amenta et al., Reference Amenta, Carruthers and Zylan1992; Andrews Reference Andrews1997; Einwohner Reference Einwohner1999; McVeigh et al., Reference McVeigh, Welch and Bjarnason2003; Rojas Reference Rojas2007; Szymanski Reference Szymanski2003). While other studies have broadened this focus to examine how contentious mobilization impacts the social structure of communities, sometimes over a long period of time (see, e.g., McVeigh and Cunningham, Reference McVeigh and Cunningham2012; McVeigh et al., Reference McVeigh, Cunningham and Farrell2014), there remains limited understanding of how movement mobilization creates a basis for civic action that crosses generations, extends to a broad range of issues, and interacts with new political contexts. Drawing on insights from research that highlights how social movements provide resources for continuity across generations of political action, this paper focuses on the ways in which past contention shapes possibilities for contemporary civic action. In particular, we examine the conditions under which previous mobilization translates into durable civic practice, emphasizing the interplay among historical trajectories, movement resources, and the social composition of communities.
The case we explore focuses on public education in Mississippi. In 2006, Mississippi’s state legislature passed the Civil Rights/Human Rights Education in the Mississippi Public Schools Curriculum bill (Miss. Code 37-13-193) requiring the integration of civil rights and human rights (CRHR) understandings into the curricular requirements for all K-12 public schools in the state. Comprehensive implementation of the curricular framework developed by the Mississippi State Department of Education (MSDOE) began in the fall of 2011, making Mississippi the first state to mandate civil rights and human rights education in its public schools (Spears Reference Spears2011). The development of such applied educational objectives in public school curricula represents an opportunity to shape collective memories of racial processes and produce cultural change through youth engagement in communities throughout the state. However, a number of structural constraints have inhibited the MSDOE’s capacities to enact these changes through legislative mandates alone, with early implementation depending almost entirely upon the civic energies of local youth development efforts, operating either within or outside of the educational system. By 2011, only two communities had fully integrated CRHR education into formal school curricula or durable civic structures.
Clear and significant barriers to implementation (which we discuss in more detail below, alongside our standards for identifying successful implementation) explain to a large degree this modal nonimplementation outcome, and we focus here on the pair of cases that adopted civil rights educational initiatives in the face of such constraints, treating those without sustained implementation counterfactually to isolate the conditions for success. We identify three primary outcomes tied to civil rights education in Mississippi’s public schools: (1) school-centered civic practice, (2) out-of-school civic practice, and (3) the absence of civic practice. Footnote 1 We then relate each outcome to the community contexts that facilitate or hinder CRHR practices, highlighting the role played by historical and contemporary civil rights organizing infrastructures, levels of prior “anti-civil rights” resistance by local authorities, and the degree of contemporary public school participation by White families. We argue that successful implementation of CRHR education occurs only in the presence of longstanding civil rights organizing efforts, and that, among communities with durable CRHR initiatives, the form and character of such civic efforts is conditioned by the degree of historical White resistance to civil rights initiatives and the extent of White participation in local public schools. These findings integrate insights from literatures on civic practice, collective memory, and social movements, as they relate to the durable civic benefits of activism in local communities while also highlighting how past political struggles—specifically the institutionalization of anti-civil rights resistance—constrain the reach of contemporary civic initiatives.
CONCEPTUALIZING THE LONG-RUN IMPACT OF MOVEMENTS ON POLICY IMPLEMENTATION
A long line of research has interrogated the ways in which social movements and other political arrangements shape the formation of social policy, including the passage of legislation (Amenta et al., Reference Amenta, Caren, Chiarello and Su2010; Andrews Reference Andrews1997; Quadagno Reference Quadagno1992; Walgrave and Vliegenthart, Reference Walgrave and Vliegenthart2012). Other work addresses the evolution of the “substantive character” that defines the practice and impact of such legal measures (Jenness Reference Jenness1999), emphasizing how movements and professional organizations (Epstein Reference Epstein2008), various state capacities (Amenta and Carruthers, Reference Amenta and Carruthers1988), and bureaucratic discretion (Akerstrom Reference Akerstrom2006; Ellis Reference Ellis2007; Lipsky Reference Lipsky1980) can alter the implementation of legislation and thereby shape de facto practices associated with established policies.
This study seeks to build on this work, by applying its general insights to assess and explain the uneven implementation of legislation. We highlight the centrality of past contention in local communities, both because the legislation in question seeks to address such conflict by integrating its causes and consequences into curricula, and because the dynamics of implementation, we argue, reflect in various ways the legacies of prior civil rights struggles. Demonstrating the conditions under which contentious mobilization translates into civic practice allows us to diverge from existing work in two primary ways. First, rather than focusing on the proximate relationship between social movement mobilization and policy outcomes (as oriented to the stated goals of the movement itself), we emphasize how the infrastructures developed by those movements continue to matter long after the ebbing of the protest cycle in question (Andrews Reference Andrews2001; Tarrow Reference Tarrow2011; Taylor Reference Taylor1989). Second, by focusing on a case characterized by a pronounced gap between legislation and implementation, we highlight how barriers to implementation relate to longstanding patterns of resistance to change wrought by prior social movement and governmental action (Crespino Reference Crespino2007; Irons Reference Irons2010). By demonstrating the changing terrain for waging such struggles, we complicate the straightforward and often short-run assessments of analyses that view tangible political gains—such as the successful passage of legislation—as the terminal outcome of political contention.
Our sense of how movement legacies operate centers on Kenneth Andrews’ (Reference Andrews2001, Reference Andrews2004) movement infrastructure model, which highlights medium- and long-run implementation processes that follow the emergence of contention around particular political issues (Lind and Stepan-Norris, Reference Lind and Stepan-Norris2011). The model highlights the importance of movements with a diverse and complex leadership structure, an organizational base embedded in informal indigenous networks, and access to independent resource streams. Such characteristics enable movements to build and maintain strong infrastructures, and subsequently win policy concessions and ensure elite accountability, as those elites respond to the potential threat posed by the movement base (Andrews Reference Andrews2001). These conditions for movement durability overlap with work on abeyance structures (Taylor Reference Taylor1989), which emphasizes the continuity of activism across “waves” of mass mobilization. While abeyance processes highlight the mechanisms that directly link discrete periods of mass mobilization (Bagguley Reference Bagguley2002; Holland and Cable, Reference Holland and Cable2002; Taylor Reference Taylor1989; Ulsperger Reference Ulsperger2002), here we examine the processes through which prior infrastructures more flexibly serve as foundations for later generations of activism that may work toward new goals. As such, our analysis extends to questions of the variable degree to which infrastructures maintain continuity in personnel, and the degree to which infrastructures incorporate new participants and allies as political environments evolve. As such changes cumulate, infrastructures maintain continuity through rhetorical and cultural appeals to their movement forebears, and thus rely on and help to construct collective memories of their roots.
Indeed, such emergent campaigns can sometimes (as in the case here) center on a collective recognition of the legacy of prior mobilization, and thus constitute what Raj Ghoshal (Reference Ghoshal2013, Reference Ghoshal2015) terms a “memory movement.” As such, the case examined here builds on prior work on collective memories associated with the Civil Rights Movement. Research focused on the “micromobilization” of memory and its attendant effects on the cross-generational transmission of activism has demonstrated how activist motivations can be transmitted interpersonally in ways that interact with the social location of those exposed to accounts of prior movements (Griffin Reference Griffin2004; Harris Reference Harris2006; Savelsberg and King, Reference Savelsberg and King2011). Bridging studies that emphasize these kinds of bottom-up interactive processes and those that focus on more formal, top-down memorialization efforts (e.g., Romano and Raiford, Reference Romano and Raiford2006), the case of civil rights education in Mississippi provides occasion to explore local, and often grassroots, efforts to mobilize both networks and collective representations associated with past struggles to enact a legislative education mandate.
Additionally, following the predominant strain in the social movement literature focused on interactive accounts of struggles between challengers and authorities (Tarrow Reference Tarrow2011), our analysis emphasizes how the existence and form of such infrastructures emerge in interaction with authorities and counter-movements that oppose movement aims. As discussed in more detail below, in Mississippi the forces opposing school desegregation and attention to civil rights concerns have been broad, ranging from the organized vigilantism of the Ku Klux Klan and other militant organizations to significant elite support for a shadow private academy school system to preserve racially homogeneous educational institutions (Bolton Reference Bolton2007; Cunningham Reference Cunningham2013; Porter et al., Reference Porter, Howell and Hempel2014). Contentious interactions associated with these parties have shaped contemporary political capacities directly (and also indirectly) through their effect on the demographics of communities and school systems, and thus in our view the legacies of such interaction are bound up in ongoing possibilities around policy implementation efforts.
In sum, past mobilization can produce a movement infrastructure that provides the capital required to reactivate grassroots responses to new opportunities or challenges to prior movement-oriented gains. Crucially, such infrastructures emerge in interaction with forces of resistance that seek to limit the sweep of past movement gains. The presence of these infrastructures, in turn, shapes possibilities for civic action associated with a range of community venues, including public education. By examining civic efforts around civil rights education, we gain insight into how efforts to institutionalize memory of the African American freedom struggle in Mississippi is enabled and constrained by prior mobilization and reactionary dynamics within local communities.
MANDATING AND IMPLEMENTING CIVIL RIGHTS/HUMAN RIGHTS EDUCATION
Edgar Ray Killen’s 2005 conviction by a state trial jury over his involvement in the infamous murders of three Freedom Summer workers during the summer of 1964 marked a watershed moment in Mississippi civil rights history. The week following Killen’s conviction, the University of Mississippi’s William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, led by its founder, former Governor William Winter, and its Executive Director Susan Glisson, convened a group of state leaders in Jackson, MS, to talk about how momentum provided by the trial could best be directed toward progressive change in the racial climate of the state. Susan Glisson (Reference Glisson2011) recalled the atmosphere of that meeting:
There was a lot of energy and excitement…civil rights activists either in the room or on the phone that had been called in, and the leaders of the state who could make it all happen…There was a consensus of urgency, of “let’s do this quickly.”
Shortly thereafter, however, initial efforts were temporarily stalled by the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the state’s gulf coast, and the consequent demand for local leaders to focus attention on the needs of citizens in the affected areas. When the group reconvened in 2006, they began simultaneously working toward creating both a statewide truth and reconciliation process and a “welcome table” project that would engage local church leaders and community organizations by providing them with tools to build safe places to tell the stories of their own communities. These efforts, which grew to include active collaboration with Jackson State University’s Fannie Lou Hamer Institute, led to the formation of an ad hoc committee that would create the framework of the Mississippi Civil Rights Education Commission (MCREC), charged with providing or assisting education officials “with information, coordination, modification of courses or programs that include the Civil Rights Movement” (Miss. Code Ann. Section 37-13-195).
Precursors to the MCREC had begun drafting the legislation that would become Senate Bill 2718 in the fall of 2005. Winter Institute staff undertook research on the formulation and legislation of a similarly conceptualized bill that had passed a year earlier to support Holocaust education in Mississippi schools. That earlier bill specifically mandated the creation of the Mississippi Commission on the Holocaust for the purpose of bringing Holocaust education into the public schools of the state. While in many ways this bill served as a model for the proposed CRHR legislation, the composition of associated education commissions differed across these mandates. In particular, while the Holocaust Education bill empowered the state’s governor or lieutenant governor to appoint members of the Holocaust Education Commission, the CRHR Education bill reflected concerns over the historically compromised nature of state officials’ orientation to civil rights efforts. The bill instead stipulated that the MSDOE work with the Civil Rights Education Commission to implement the guidelines for curriculum development, without giving the state government any direct control or power over who would comprise the commission itself. Rather, the structure of the MCREC, as outlined in the bill, included representatives from four universities with deep connections to civil rights initiatives in the state (Jackson State University, Tougaloo College, the Southern Oral History Project at the University of Southern Mississippi, and the University of Mississippi’s Winter Institute), who then selected a geographically diverse group of eleven additional state residents from a pool of applicants (Mississippi State Senate Bill 2718, Regular Session 2006).
The MCREC began meeting in 2007, and worked with other members and volunteers in each of the state’s regions to compile guidelines and materials for associated curricular changes. The Commission then submitted its recommendations to the State Department of Education in 2008. Initial changes were made to U.S. History objectives in the May 2009 MSDOE revisions, and then piloted for two years. Despite the de jure intention that these pilot reforms be applied in districts across the state, a lack of mandate power, resources, oversight, and accountability (described in detail below) resulted in highly uneven implementation throughout this period. In the analysis that follows, we explain how, in the face of such constraints, a robust local movement infrastructure provided an enabling–though not necessarily sufficient–condition for the successful emergence of civic action associated with CRHR education.
DATA AND DESIGN
This study draws on interviews, site visits, and archival documents related to the contours of civil rights era contention and present-day civil rights education efforts in the two communities that instituted CRHR initiatives in the first five years following the 2006 legislation, as well as other districts that have yet to engage in sustained CRHR educational efforts. We situate these community accounts with background on Mississippi’s CRHR legislative and curricular efforts, drawing on documents and interviews with MSDOE, State Education Commission officials, teachers, administrators, and civic leaders.
The bulk of the data was collected by a research team headed by the two authors and composed of undergraduate and graduate students from Brandeis University, Jackson State University, and the University of Mississippi. Footnote 2 Beginning with a core set of interviews associated with key leaders in the campaign for CRHR education who were members of the MCREC and their institutional partners charged with training and implementing new curricular efforts in the Hamer and Winter Institutes and the MSDOE, the authors isolated McComb and Philadelphia as the sole districts with documented implementation efforts. By “implementation,” we refer to the presence of a curricular structure that involves ongoing, programmatic engagement with student/youth learning with regard to Civil Rights and Human Rights understandings, and support from one or more of the state’s established institutional advocates for the CRHR curriculum (i.e., the Winter Institute, the Hamer Institute, and the MSDOE’s Office of Curriculum and Instruction). Footnote 3
In June and July 2011, the research team conducted nearly three dozen interviews in those districts, as well as observed workshops, meetings, and events organized by school systems and local civic organizations, and collected more than 17,000 documents associated with the historical contours of civil rights era reform (including archived local newspaper articles, school board minutes, and training and curricular materials pertaining to civil rights/human rights education content at various grade levels) in each research site. The authors followed up with 2012 site visits to the two communities highlighted below, including field observations of CRHR events both within and outside of the classroom.
The analysis below begins with a discussion of the significant cross-pressures associated with the state’s historical resistance to racial reform in public education, the CRHR legislation itself, Department of Education staffing, limited resources for teacher training, the absence of assessment or accountability mechanisms, and incentives tied to federal consent decrees. These cross-pressures hindered the widespread implementation of civil rights education in Mississippi. This limited foundation for implementation explains what we identify as the baseline modal outcome: an absence of sustained civil rights education in Mississippi school districts. Working from that baseline, we then introduce two cases of successful civil rights education, in McComb and Philadelphia. For both, we highlight local Civil Rights Movement histories, demographic and educational profiles, and institutional infrastructures that have guided those cities’ present-day educational initiatives. We then offer an integrated analysis of those threads and introduce two distinct models through which successful implementation occurred. This analysis demonstrates, more generally, how the legacy of civil rights contention interacts with contemporary demographic and institutional dynamics to create possibilities for civic action.
CROSS-PRESSURES ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF CIVIL RIGHTS EDUCATION IN MISSISSIPPI
Amy Binder’s (Reference Binder2004) study of advocacy for Afrocentric curricular changes in public schools highlighted the fact that successful campaigns tended to occur in schools with larger racial minority populations. Such successes were strongly tempered, however, by a lack of funding, training, and alignment with mandated testing instruments, which limited incentives for teachers to effectively implement approved measures. Similarly, in our case, we note that though the passage of the CRHR Education bill mandated the inclusion of civil rights topics within public school curricula, early implementation prospects were limited by factors associated with the state’s political history, the bureaucratic organization of its public education system, and the availability of resources for teacher training and assessment. When considered in tandem with the political will represented by the bill’s passage, these factors created cross-pressures that complicated the straightforward inclusion of relevant materials into school curricula. We argue that such cross-pressures operated unevenly across local districts, with the likelihood of overcoming constraints around resources and political resistance (both active and inertial) increasing in the presence of movement infrastructures that could marshal the civic will to implement curricular changes. Before engaging the local contexts within which associated civic action occurred, we discuss here three distinct types of cross-pressures operating at the state level, associated with: (1) the legacy of resistance to civil rights, (2) MSDOE priorities and bureaucratic purview, and (3) constraints on resources for training and assessment.
Anti-Civil Rights Resistance in Mississippi
Throughout the civil rights era, Mississippi’s political leaders engaged in a comprehensive “massive resistance” campaign, seeking to maintain the state’s traditional segregated order in the face of growing activist challenges and federal government mandates. From 1960-1964, Governor Ross Barnett built a well-deserved reputation as a defiantly hardline segregationist. The state-sponsored Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission worked to defend the state from the “encroachment” of civil rights forces, investigating integrationist activists, supporters, and sympathizers. Beginning in the mid-1950s, tens of thousands of the state’s business and civic leaders joined local Citizens’ Council chapters, which worked to maintain “racial integrity” through a range of economic reprisals against civil rights forces. School boards retaliated against activist teachers and students through expulsions and firings. State legislatures and city councils passed statutes and ordinances that buttressed segregation by circumventing or otherwise limiting civil rights challenges. Local police forces often tacitly or actively supported the Ku Klux Klan and other grassroots vehicles of segregationist terror (Crespino Reference Crespino2007; Cunningham Reference Cunningham2013; Dittmer Reference Dittmer1995; Irons Reference Irons2010; McMillen Reference McMillen1994).
As federal efforts to enforce civil rights legislation intensified later in the 1960s, many of these institutions began loosening their hardline stands, to accommodate rather than resist desegregation mandates. In many cases, these accommodationist tactics served to maintain White supremacy, following the letter of the law but ensuring de facto segregation (Bolton Reference Bolton2007; Crespino Reference Crespino2007; Irons Reference Irons2010). This gambit operated most clearly in the state’s public schools. Following several years of “freedom of choice” plans that, by design, resulted in little racial mixing within schools, the Supreme Court handed down an October 1969 ruling in Alexander v. Holmes that mandated districts across the state to “terminate dual school systems at once.” Enrollments in all-White parochial schools immediately boomed, buttressed by a broad network of new private “seg” academies across the state (Bolton Reference Bolton2007). In the year following the Alexander decision, the state’s private school enrollment nearly tripled from its 1968 level, from 23,181 to 63,242 students (Clotfelter Reference Clotfelter2004). Combined with “White flight” migration from many districts whose demographics made even these sweeping institutional efforts to maintain racial separation tenuous, such strategies ensured that Mississippi’s education system remained largely segregated by race. Though many public school districts transformed into predominantly African American spaces, the school boards that controlled budgets and other administrative matters tended to remain in White hands (Bolton Reference Bolton2007; Curry Reference Curry1995). Longstanding conflicts over the teaching of the state’s racial history have thus endured, with their form and intensity varying in part based on the presence or absence of White students in particular public school districts. Footnote 4
The MSDOE’s Bureaucratic Purview
Several factors complicated the extent to which the Mississippi State Department of Education (MSDOE) oversaw the processes and practices through which local districts enact the goals outlined by the MCREC. The Department of Education’s charter in the Mississippi State Constitution ensures that no specific instructional guidelines can be imparted or enforced by the MSDOE within public school classrooms, because decisions regarding instructional design and lesson plans remain firmly under local control at the district level. As a result, the MSDOE plays only an indirect role in integrating CRHR content into students’ educational experiences by developing a set of standards within which grade-level competencies are outlined in the context of Social Studies “content strands.” Under this rubric, the MSDOE can provide “objectives” to school systems, but not mandate particular curricular materials. As Glisson (Reference Glisson2011) notes, this model by definition produces uneven outcomes but also provides at least an opportunity for curricular reform:
You don’t give curriculum to the teachers—you give them objectives and they develop a curriculum that goes along with the objectives. It is not the best way to do it, because if they don’t have a uniformity of training with the teachers you get uneven lessons. There [is] a whole long list of problems to make that work, right? But at least we have the infrastructure starting to be in place.
In addition to limitations on the formal power of the MSDOE to impose specific implementation guidelines on individual districts or teachers, resource shortfalls also pose a number of challenges. Because the MSDOE is accountable to the U.S. Department of Education for meeting performance requirements on students’ standardized tests, subject areas that align with these tests receive priority for its finite resources. As Social Studies lies outside of the common core subject areas designated by federal legislative guidelines outlined in the 2001 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, better known as “No Child Left Behind”) bill reauthorization, the MSDOE’s 2011 organizational restructuring—which reshuffled the content-specialist personnel in the Office of Curriculum and Instruction—reflected these priorities. The official formerly designated to oversee the Social Studies curriculum was moved into a Division Director position, and his former position was not filled. That official noted that although additional curricular funding could in theory have produced more content-specific personnel designations, Social Studies was not prioritized during the period examined here due to its lack of fit with current standardized testing sections. Given the significant number of underperforming public schools in Mississippi subject to heightened federal scrutiny and possible forced closures, the stakes behind standardized test scores are acutely high, intensifying the challenge associated with prioritizing initiatives and curricular areas not directly captured by those tests.
Teacher Training and Professional Development
As Glisson notes, one straightforward way to standardize educational experiences in the absence of state-level guidelines is to provide consistent, ongoing teacher training focused on best practices around CRHR educational objectives outlined by the MSDOE. The MCREC has recognized the value of such training, though a number of factors limited its ability to realize these aims. Most importantly, augmented teacher training required a sustained stream of financial resources that fell outside of established MSDOE budget priorities. The Commission itself received funding from the state in its first year of operation, but no public resources were allocated for this work since that time (Spears Reference Spears2011).
The obvious result of these limitations was the lack of consistent training opportunities for teachers. Training offered through 2011 was ad hoc and made available to districts on a voluntary basis. When the MSDOE provided funding for trainings tied to the initial rollout of the 2009 changes to the U.S. History curriculum, the office collaborated with Teaching for Change, a Washington, DC-based organization, and had teachers from twenty-six districts around the state signing up for the trainings (Spears Reference Spears2011). Similarly, the MSDOE and the Winter Institute collaborated to offer one-day teacher training to support the comprehensive integration of the CRHR standards, and the Hamer Institute offered targeted trainings for teachers in the Jackson City Schools through a federal Teaching American History grant that emphasizes the African American experience (Deardorff Reference Deardorff2011; Kolnick Reference Kolnick2011). The portion of funding contributed by the MSDOE to these efforts was drawn from the overall educational curriculum development budget, because no specific funding had been allotted for ongoing professional development in CRHR education despite the mandated changes.
Beyond the small proportion of teachers across the state exposed to these ad hoc trainings, and the voluntary nature of the program, it only reached those teachers who elected to pursue CRHR professional development opportunities of their own volition. Thus, educators less experienced and/or less comfortable engaging with the topics raised in the CRHR objectives could easily elect to forego training, with limited session slots filled by those most actively interested in the topics at hand. The MSDOE’s emphasis on local autonomy meant that individual districts could elect to mandate training for teachers within their school systems in hopes of achieving greater uniformity across classrooms. However, as the McComb discussion below demonstrates, such efforts were likely to be met with resistance from teachers, schools, and/or parents. To our knowledge, based on surveys of the institutions charged with marshaling CRHR trainings, mandatory local training initiatives did not emerge between 2006 and 2011 in any districts other than McComb.
SUCCESSFUL IMPLEMENTATION OF CIVIL RIGHTS EDUCATION: MCCOMB AND PHILADELPHIA
As the previous section demonstrates, the CRHR Education Bill, while a symbolic victory for advocates of racial justice and progressive social change in Mississippi, suffered from various structural barriers to robust implementation in the first five years following its passage. How then might we explain why and how a small number of communities have managed to successfully implement CRHR education initiatives in the face of these challenges, either through the public school systems or through extra-curricular youth civic engagement programs? Here, we undertake case studies of McComb and Philadelphia, the two Mississippi locales that had developed significant and sustained civil rights education initiatives by 2011. Footnote 5 Contrasting these cases with the larger set of communities where sustained civil rights educational programming remained absent provides analytic leverage to isolate enabling (if not sufficient) factors associated with successful implementation, and also points to models that other communities across the state might emulate to mount durable CRHR education initiatives of their own.
Importantly, both of Mississippi’s most significant success stories with CRHR education have emerged in communities characterized by histories of significant and militant civil rights era racial contention, which has created a context for contemporary mobilization around curricular initiatives. These cases demonstrate the power of infrastructures for civic action, which provided the resources for the strong and committed leadership required to overcome durable pockets of resistance and the absence of accountability or oversight by state or federal bodies. While McComb and Philadelphia are both racially diverse, their demographics vary, along with their consequent degree of contemporary segregation and interracial contact in their respective public school systems. A common link, however, is the fact that exposure to these communities’ successful CRHR education initiatives has almost entirely been limited to African American students.
In McComb, this isolation of CRHR education within schools that serve a predominantly African American student body is due largely to the fact that White students in the district continue, in large numbers, to attend Parklane Academy, a private Christian school organized in 1970 to circumvent the Alexander desegregation decision. Efforts to institutionalize CRHR education efforts have been advanced against a backdrop of political pressure exerted on the school district to demonstrate compliance with previously legislated federal civil rights mandates. In contrast, the demographics of Philadelphia and its adjacent county school district enable a much higher rate of interracial contact within schools. The higher participation rate of White students has, paradoxically, posed difficulties for broad-based school-centered CRHR initiatives, and related cocurricular programs have instead emerged outside of schools. These programs were organized and led by community members committed to creating opportunities for youth civic engagement. In the sections that follow, we examine in more detail the evolution of CRHR education in both cities.
CRHR Education in McComb
A small city (pop. 3419 in 2010) in southwestern Mississippi, McComb’s strategic location midway between Jackson and New Orleans made it a key early railroad center. The city’s traditional economic base, formerly centered on the railroad, oil, and manufacturing, has faded, and currently a third of its families have incomes below the poverty line—a figure more than three times the national average. In 2007, McComb’s median household income was $31,680. Approximately one-third of its current residents are African American, and the remaining two-thirds are White (U.S. Census 2010). Footnote 6
McComb was an early beachhead in the Mississippi Movement. In 1961, activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), supported by local NAACP President C.C. Bryant and others, initiated a voter registration drive. That summer, SNCC workers also sat in at the local Greyhound bus terminal and Woolworth’s department store—an unusual tactic in Mississippi, where unlike many other areas of the South, direct action was generally considered prohibitively dangerous (Carson Reference Carson1981; Dittmer Reference Dittmer1995). Later in the year, students at Burglund High School staged a walkout after fifteen-year-old Brenda Travis was expelled following her arrest as part of the group sitting in at the bus station. SNCC returned to McComb in 1964, and a group of COFO Freedom Summer project volunteers arrived that July to continue voter registration and other community work and open a freedom school. Throughout this period, McComb also maintained a large and active NAACP branch; in 1966, the city’s NAACP membership exceeded 150 (Andrews Reference Andrews2004).
The reactions to that latter wave of the McComb movement by the city’s segregationist forces cemented McComb’s status as perhaps the most viciously contentious community in the civil rights era South (Carson Reference Carson1981; Dittmer Reference Dittmer1995). Deadly violence in reaction to civil rights mobilization had occurred prior to Freedom Summer—the movement’s incipient momentum in 1961 was temporarily halted after Herbert Lee, a farmer and active NAACP member, was shot and killed by state legislator E. H. Hurst in nearby Amite County. Witness Louis Allen faced months of intensive harassment following his decision to speak to the FBI about the crime, and in January 1964, he too was murdered. Correspondingly, as the summer of 1964 approached, several large and exceptionally active KKK units organized in McComb, alongside chapters of hardline segregationist vehicles Americans for the Preservation of the White Race (APWR) and the Citizens’ Council. During the summer and fall, the KKK carried out more than a dozen bombings of African American homes, churches, and businesses, and McComb received national attention as “the world’s bombing capital.” Aided by the support of local police and other officials, the violent campaign continued unabated until a group of White civic leaders published a “Statement of Principles” calling for an end to lawlessness in a November issue of the local McComb Enterprise-Journal (Dittmer Reference Dittmer1995; Luders Reference Luders2010).
The legacy of White resistance to civil rights reform generally and school integration mandates in particular has contributed to continued practices that promote and maintain racial separation in local schools. A strong majority of the city’s White students attends Parklane Academy, established in 1970 as an alternative to desegregated public schools. The public school system, in sharp contrast, is almost entirely African American. More specifically, as of 2010-2011, the McComb Public School District served approximately 2870 enrolled students. The district was pronouncedly poor, with 92% of McComb’s enrolled students living below the poverty line. Overall, 88% (2523) of those enrolled identified as Black, 11% (302) as White, and less than 1% as Asian (23), Hispanic (20), or Native American (2). With most White families opting out of the public education system, the high percentage of African American enrollments held across schools and grade levels, as demonstrated by the enrollment data for 2012: 87% (219) at Kennedy Elementary, 89% (652) at Otken Elementary, 89% (604) at McComb Middle School, 87% (333) at Denman Junior High, and 87% (715) at McComb High School (Mississippi Department of Education 2012).
Both the city’s racial history and its school demographics contributed to its initial efforts with civil rights education. In 2004, two years prior to the passage of statewide CRHR legislation, the Winter Institute began working with the public school district to implement a local mandate to develop curricula with significant CRHR components. The initiative began when local community organizer Jackie Byrd Martin, a veteran of the 1961 Burglund High School walkout who had been arrested in the subsequent City Hall protest, provided then-superintendent Pat Cooper with a copy of Putting the Movement Back in Civil Rights Teaching, a textbook produced and published by Teaching for Change (Menkart et al., 2004). Cooper’s self-described “epiphany” around such topics led to the District initiating voluntary trainings with Teaching for Change as well as representatives from the New Orleans-based anti-racism organization The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. While these initial voluntary programs went well, subsequent mandated versions were met with resistance from educators in the district, some of whom felt that these CRHR trainings restricted their academic freedom in the classroom (Glisson Reference Glisson2011; Martin Reference Martin2011).
In part, Cooper’s move to institute this local mandate was based on the positive feedback conveyed by the small group of self-selected teachers in the district who voluntarily attended the trial training session. There were, however, additional political and educational factors that incentivized CRHR teacher training and curricular reform in McComb. Back in 1971, the local school district had been placed under consent decree by the federal government for its failure to demonstrably implement school desegregation mandates. In 2004, the McComb Municipal Separate School District’s motion for “unitary status” was denied in District Court; but if it had been granted, it would have removed the decree and freed the district from federal control over redistricting and other decisions. When the civil rights training mandate was implemented by the superintendent’s office in 2006, the district was in the process of attempting to appeal to the federal government again for a release from the scrutiny of the consent decree. In part, the case made by the McComb superintendent on behalf of the school district was based upon demonstrating good faith effort to create equitable educational opportunities for all of McComb’s students, and the early enactment of a CRHR curriculum was cited as primary evidence (Glisson Reference Glisson2011). Additional changes in institutional procedures regarding classroom and extracurricular segregation were specified in the version of the consent decree negotiated in 2008 and, in January 2012, McComb successfully achieved unitary status (Freeman Reference Freeman2012).
As these legal negotiations played out, McComb’s CRHR education initiatives evolved, spurred by the backing of Superintendent Therese Palmertree (who had stepped into the position following Cooper’s move to direct the New Orleans-based Early Childhood and Family Learning Foundation in 2007), the work of several dedicated teachers in the district, and partnerships with a number of outside organizations. Vickie Malone, a teacher at McComb High School who has developed a number of the school system’s local history initiatives, described work with Teaching for Change as formative to the district’s development of civil rights education:
They had been working with us already on professional development with teachers, and it was a kind of, a process that had just kind of dovetailed with those people who were working with the racial reconciliation piece, to give them some skills now that their eyes had been opened—give them some tools and some skills to make some kind of different changes in their classrooms, and in dealing with their students. And so that work that they did became—it was the root of—a civil rights curriculum that we decided to create in the district. You know we piloted it here, in this district, and it ended up being the model that has been looked at for the state after they wrote the bill that said that they were going to require the civil rights curriculum taught in every grade (Malone Reference Malone2011).
As a member of the planning group that sought to actualize the district’s civil rights education goals, Malone also worked with junior high school history teacher Larry Johns, who had long incorporated the Civil Rights Movement into his seventh and eighth grade United States History courses. To complement and extend the knowledge that McComb students gained in Johns’ junior high school history courses, Malone and other educators in the district established the goal of developing two courses that could be implemented at the high school level.
Malone has been responsible for teaching the first of these courses, “Local Cultures,” since its inception. Through her personal outreach, the program established a partnership with Howard Levin at the Urban School in San Francisco, whose non-profit “Telling Their Stories Oral History Archive” provided training resources focused on oral history as well as teaching young people to conduct life history interviews. This oral history work became a central component of the “Local Cultures” course, which drew from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Teaching Tolerance” curriculum to engage students in team-building as well as local, state, and national civil rights research, culminating in student-produced videotaped interviews with McComb-based civil rights veterans (Malone Reference Malone2011). By 2011, students in the course had conducted and recorded interviews with sixteen local civil rights veterans active in SNCC and/or the Burglund walkout, providing a direct vehicle for the cross-generational transmission of civil rights knowledge in the community.
While the school district did invest in the technical equipment needed to make high-quality recordings, the program’s development occurred in the face of a number of obstacles. Because the course content lies outside of federally-mandated standardized test topics, the class continued to be offered only on an elective basis and, according to Malone, was not prioritized by school guidance counselors concerned with advising students toward core educational requirements for graduation. As a result, to fill the class, Malone regularly engaged in a personal recruitment campaign, a process she describes as “usually…just start[ing] with one kid and then get[ting] them to help me figure out about other kids, and then we just keep doing that until we have about fifteen kids, and I do that every semester” (Malone Reference Malone2011). Further, the “Local Cultures” class was originally conceptualized as the first half of a two-part curriculum, which would introduce students to civil rights and human rights issues at the local level and then go on to teach broader CRHR principals through a second course titled “Global Studies.” By 2011, however, the “Global Studies” course had not yet been introduced, in large part because of the tenuous semester-to-semester status of “Local Cultures” and its lack of integration into the core graduation requirements for McComb students.
The efforts of a cadre of educators, led by Superintendent Palmertree, and including Malone, Johns, and junior high school teacher Gloria Stubbs, enabled continued collaborations with Teaching for Change, the “Telling Their Stories” Oral History Archive at the Urban School of San Francisco, and the University of Southern Mississippi. Such partnerships have dovetailed with external support from the Kellogg Foundation and the U. S. Department of Education to encourage civic participation by engaging students in oral history work with members of their communities (Glisson Reference Glisson2011; Malone Reference Malone2011; Martin Reference Martin2011; Palmertree Reference Palmertree2011; Stubbs Reference Stubbs2011). According to the website mounted by the McComb School District to describe and share this work, the program “provides students the opportunity to critically analyze texts, read primary documents, collect oral histories, and through this process develop the skills and disposition to be active in civic life today” (McComb Legacies 2011).
Notably, consistent with Andrews (Reference Andrews2001), the strong emphasis on civic engagement, oral historical methodologies, and civil rights history in McComb’s public schools has drawn on the infrastructure that sustained the community’s past Civil Rights Movement activity. Though key personnel like Malone and Stubbs had no direct link to the local Civil Rights Movement, their work built on connections and resources provided by those who did. Jackie Byrd Martin possessed longstanding connections to McComb’s movement community, local activists provided the bases for many Local Cultures interviews, and durable civil rights networks facilitated the partnerships that the district forged with the Winter Institute, Teaching for Change, and other schools and foundations. Indeed, much of the resonance of the “legacies” approach to local history stemmed from the fact that the work was done in McComb, a community with a rich and politically-charged civil rights past. As the Department of Education’s Chauncey Spears notes, the program’s “therapeutic” power stemmed from the fact that “a lot of those people who were instrumental in navigating” McComb’s volatile civil rights history “are still around… a lot of their children are going to school there now, a lot of their grandchildren are going to school there now, and these stories are not known” (Spears Reference Spears2011).
Another related initiative that has crossed generations and explicitly drawn on the city’s civil rights infrastructure involves the Young People’s Project (YPP), which linked local students to a range of movement veterans and expanded the base of connections from which a number of teachers in the school system have drawn to extend the pedagogical resources provided by existing partnerships with the Winter Institute and the Kellogg Foundation. The mission of the YPP is to “develop students aged 8-22 from traditionally marginalized populations as learners, teachers, leaders, and organizers through math and media literacy, community-building, and advocacy in order to build a unique network of young people who are better equipped to navigate life’s circumstances, are active in their communities, and advocate for education reform in America” (The Young People’s Project). The initiative was led by Omowale Moses, the son of legendary SNCC activist Bob Moses, whose arrival in McComb in 1961 catalyzed the city’s initial voter registration campaign.
The YPP in McComb formed a team of junior high school and high school students in December of 2010 with the support of YPP staff from Jackson. The group committed itself to expanding literacy throughout the McComb community, and also hosted a fiftieth anniversary conference event to commemorate the Burglund High School walkout of 1961. The students invited Movement veterans and members of the community to participate in the event at Higgins Middle School, housed in the former Burglund High School facility. Many of the youth who emerged as civic leaders through the YPP of McComb were exposed to CRHR education through the “Local Cultures” course (Malone Reference Malone2011). Likewise, the orientation of YPP work reinforces cross-generational connections to local civil rights history. Lisa Deer, who coordinated planning for the Burglund event, underscored this theme repeatedly to youth involved in the commemoration by noting how the event’s power centered on the fact that “many family members have an important story to tell about this [civil rights] era” (2011).
In sum, such initiatives directly demonstrate how legacies of civil rights contention relate to possibilities for contemporary civic action around civil rights education. The charged nature of McComb’s desegregation struggles throughout the 1960s contributed directly to White flight from the city’s public schools, thereby reducing the base of resistance to CRHR education among the student body. At the same time, longstanding activist networks within the African American community have provided an infrastructure for durable action, in particular the marshaling of resources and collaborative networks that have allowed Local Cultures programming to develop in the face of significant pedagogical constraints. Alongside the efforts of a determined cadre of teachers and administrators, and spurred initially by the added incentive of escaping federal oversight stemming from the district’s historical resistance to school desegregation mandates, these demographic and infrastructural dynamics enabled the development of McComb’s vibrant CRHR educational programming.
CRHR Education in Philadelphia
Located in the state’s east-central “pines region,” Philadelphia is the Neshoba County seat. The city’s economy has long centered on logging and, more recently, two large-scale casino operations run by members of the Choctaw Tribe. Of the city’s 7719 residents in 2007 (shortly after the CRHR education was passed), 51.5% were White, 41.8% Black, and 5.7% American Indian. Its median household income was $34,177, and in 2007 18.7% of families were below the poverty line (U.S. Census 2010). Philadelphia’s infamous civil rights reputation was secured in the summer of 1964, when local KKK members and law enforcement officers conspired to murder Freedom Summer volunteers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. The killings, and the subsequent summer-long search for their bodies, became a major national story, as did the city’s notorious silence in the wake of the terrible events and the state’s failure to prosecute known perpetrators (Cagin and Dray, Reference Cagin and Dray1988; Huie Reference Huie1965). In 2005, sparked by the efforts of the interracial Philadelphia Coalition, the State of Mississippi tried the architect of the murder plot, Edgar Ray Killen; a jury found him guilty of manslaughter charges on the forty-first anniversary of the killings (Romano Reference Romano2014). As discussed above, the mobilization of various civic forces (including, most prominently, the Philadelphia Coalition) that advocated for and supported Killen’s conviction led directly to the initial convening of a forum that ultimately produced the structure and language of the CRHR education bill.
The relationship between the Freedom Summer murders and Philadelphia more broadly was in part rooted in the depth and intensity of local segregationist resistance. The murder plot itself involved at least twenty-one local residents, including known KKK members, prominent landowners, and police officials. The KKK was a significant local presence—both in terms of membership and political impact—and benefited from strong ties to Sheriff Lawrence Rainey. The more above-board Citizens’ Council was highly active as well, especially in the 1950s. Beyond the murders themselves, an exceptionally large number of beatings, burnings, and other acts of segregationist intimidation occurred in Philadelphia (Andrews Reference Andrews2004; Cagin and Dray, Reference Cagin and Dray1988). Such tactics did not preclude mobilization in the local African American community (indeed, to a significant degree they were a response to such mobilization), which maintained a large NAACP branch and cast nearly 500 votes in the mock election sponsored by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in November 1964 (Andrews Reference Andrews2004; Clemons 2011).
As in McComb, the legacy of sustained civil rights contention interacted with the contemporary composition of the school district to shape the community’s orientation to CRHR education. Philadelphia maintains its own city school district, alongside the separate Neshoba County system. During the 2010-2011 academic year, the Philadelphia Public School District enrolled 1218 students, with 76% (863) living below the poverty line. Within the overall student body, 72% (872) identified as Black, 25% as White, and fewer than 2% as Native American (9), Hispanic (18), or Asian (15). As in many Mississippi districts, private education options disproportionately reduce the number of White students enrolled in public schools. In Philadelphia, however, this trend is considerably less pronounced than in McComb, with the nearest private academy school located not in Neshoba but rather in neighboring Leake County, nearly twenty miles away. While that school, like most of Mississippi’s private academies, is overwhelmingly White, the fact that it does not draw heavily on students from Neshoba County results in public school enrollments that more closely match overall community demographics. African American students consistently constitute a numerical majority, though their representation declines slightly at the higher grade levels. Students identifying as Black comprised 74% (529) of the elementary school population, 72% (128) of the middle school population, and 66% (215) of the high school population in Philadelphia (Mississippi Department of Education 2012).
Racial splits also exist between the city and county school districts. The contrast between Philadelphia city schools and the Neshoba County Public School District is both significant and important to note, especially since the local CRHR initiative described below occurs outside of school and thus draws on students from a broad area served by both districts. Compared with city schools, students enrolled in the county district are both more affluent (with a student poverty rate 29% lower than in Philadelphia) and more likely to be White. In effect, the two districts have inverse racial compositions, with two-thirds of Neshoba County’s student body identifying as White (Mississippi Department of Education 2012).
Considered separately or in tandem, the Philadelphia/Neshoba County school systems are significantly more diverse along racial lines than the public schools in McComb. This diversity is due to three interrelated factors: (1) the overall demographic differences between the communities; (2) the fact that McComb sustained more serious White out-migration following the 1960s (prior to 1970, the city was approximately two-thirds White and one-third Black; those ratios have since reversed); and (3) the pronounced role that has been played by private academy schooling in McComb. Such distinctions have significant implications for the implementation and form of CRHR education. Whereas the predominantly African American public school student body in McComb was receptive to the CRHR curriculum offered through the Local Cultures class at the high school level, such initiatives did not receive broad public support in Neshoba’s more racially heterogeneous public schools, especially in the predominantly White Neshoba County schools (Clemons 2011; Glisson Reference Glisson2011). Footnote 7
As a consequence, within the school system the absence of catalytic leadership and the perceived breadth of opposition to CRHR education precluded a sustained campaign to integrate curricular changes as outlined in the 2006 education bill. Like-minded civic efforts, however, coalesced outside of schools. The Philadelphia Coalition, which gained national attention for its role in the 2005 Killen trial, was at the center of efforts to propose and draft the original CRHR education bill. Indeed, before the Killen trial was complete, the Philadelphia Coalition collaborated with the Winter Institute to forge connections between racial justice and education. The groups co-sponsored the 2005 Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner Living Memorial Civil Rights Education Summit that sought to develop teacher training through lessons centered on the Civil Rights Movement. Emphasizing how “properly address[ing] and begin[ning] to eradicate racism in our country” requires “sustained education about America’s racial history,” summit organizers drew on grassroots networks that harked back to 1960s civil rights action to impart resources for CRHR education (Ladd Reference Ladd2005). Jewel MacDonald, whose mother and brother were among those beaten by the KKK in the 1964 incident that preceded that Mt. Zion church burning and the subsequent murders of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, was one of several members of the coalition who continued to work towards ongoing civil rights education initiatives in the aftermath of Killen’s conviction. MacDonald has frequently shared the story of her family’s experience in the context of her work with the Coalition, framing her participation as a means through which she could finally “get something done about” what happened to her mother and brother (MacDonald Reference MacDonald2011).
Similarly, broader civil rights and racial justice networks were mobilized to advance education initiatives in the community. In reaction to the paucity of institutional efforts to incorporate civil rights education within local schools, Philadelphia Coalition Co-Chair and Neshoba County NAACP President Leroy Clemons in October 2010 began facilitating the work of the Neshoba Youth Coalition (NYC), a grassroots youth civic education effort. NYC meetings were typically held on a weekly basis at the Depot, a community facility located in a predominantly African American area of the city. The location of the Depot is symbolically significant as it is adjacent to the stretch of road that comprised part of the route taken by marchers led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who, in the aftermath of the Freedom Summer murders, faced down a hostile White crowd as they advanced from the Mt. Zion Church to the Philadelphia courthouse.
Clemons credits two local youth leaders with the initial conceptualization of the group, recalling that he was approached by the high school students with a request for his assistance in forming a youth group after they returned from an annual Summer Youth Institute organized by the Winter Institute (Clemons 2011). The NYC began as a forum through which participants could raise issues of concern to young members of their communities. Many of these lessons involved civil rights and race relations, but topics also included high school drop-out rates, teenage pregnancy, and crime. Due it its success thus far, the NYC has been used as a model for fledgling youth development initiatives in Tallahatchie County, which as of 2011 centered on one-day youth Civil Rights Education exchanges between the two communities.
Consistent with the civil rights tradition that Clemons, MacDonald, and others sought to impart through the NYC, the group evolved from a forum for discussion to a network of engaged youth leaders who proactively work to address problems in their communities that they identify and prioritize. Clemons explicitly described approaching his work with the NYC as an opportunity to cultivate social consciousness and critical thinking skills among the young people that he encountered. To this end, he regularly utilized civil rights and human rights education concepts and content to contextualize the contemporary, youth-identified issues of concern within broader social and historical circumstances and structures (Clemons 2011). In one representative meeting in 2011, for instance, Clemons used a PowerPoint presentation to lead a discussion of slavery and its legacies that developed into a freewheeling dialogue around issues associated with mass incarceration and students’ own family experiences. In addition, Clemons drew from personal accounts of his upbringing within the community of Philadelphia in his work with youth; for example, he has shared his own recollections of playing in a nearby field as a child, where he and his friends would come across the charred remnants of crosses that had been burned during local KKK rallies.
While the NYC’s issue-based topic selection process was youth-driven, Clemons exposed participating students to civil rights and human rights education as a tool to facilitate deeper understanding and critical analysis of the topics at hand in their communities. Crucially, the local NAACP, the Winter Institute, and the Philadelphia Coalition imparted the infrastructure that Clemons and other adults in the community have utilized to catalyze youth-driven calls for contemporary action around CRHR education. While the demographic and political dynamics emphasized above precluded the development of pedagogical initiatives within the schools, such civic infrastructures have enabled parallel civic efforts to develop within the community.
Discussion: Insights from McComb and Philadelphia
Generalized from their specific contexts, these community case studies allow us to differentiate between CRHR education practices present in public school curricula or organized and promoted through local community associations operating outside of schools, and contrast both categories with settings within which CRHR initiatives remain absent. Our consideration of Mississippi’s two sustained successes provides analytic leverage for identifying the contexts within which policy implementation is possible, and by extension provides insight into how and why communities are able to overcome the significant constraints associated with translating state civil rights education legislation into durable practice. At the same time, the residue of resistance to civil rights education in communities where significant numbers of White families participate in public schools also highlight the limitations of either model in reaching students in the state who are not African American.
The McComb and Philadelphia cases point to the importance of demography (the percentage of African Americans residing in the community, the degree to which families are segregated residentially, and the extent of “White flight” from the public school system) as well as the strength of past local civil rights organizing – particularly the grassroots organizing tradition associated with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), alongside the NAACP’s longstanding and continuous presence in many local communities. The latter factor affirms social movement theories that emphasize how long-run civic and policy outcomes are spurred by movement infrastructures rooted in—but, crucially, extending beyond—the mass protest phase that initially defined the political influence of associated organizations and campaigns (Andrews Reference Andrews2001; Taylor Reference Taylor1989).
As a number of counties with strong Civil Rights Movement legacies did not actively mobilize to implement civil rights education during this period, we do not view movement infrastructures as determinative, but rather as a core facilitative factor for translating legislation into implementation under the current political/educational climate. Counties with movement infrastructures possess resources that can enable such transitions, providing an important alternative path to implement CRHR education in the absence of broader institutional resources and support. While the close fit between the civil rights infrastructure emphasized here and the teaching of civil rights history creates a strong incentive for mobilization, the significance of such resources have been apparent across a range of policy regimes. For instance, in the electoral realm, Andrews (Reference Andrews1997) finds that Pike County was among the first areas in the state to run multiple African American candidates for local office during the 1960s, while Philadelphia made national headlines when the city elected its first African American mayor in 2009 with strong NAACP support. Leroy Clemons, whose leadership work cross-cuts the NAACP, the Philadelphia Coalition, and the Neshoba Youth Coalition, has also noted how he and his colleagues helped forge a new style of collaborative negotiation that successfully diverted funding from a park located directly adjacent to a local jailhouse (“there was the problem: it was right across the street from the jail. I did not want the kids playing and the inmates sitting there watching them and saying here it is–this is your future right here”) and reinvested those resources in the renovation of a community center in the historic African American community (Clemons 2011). Finally, the degree to which White authorities and vigilante elements like the KKK met civil rights organizing in the 1960s with violence and other forms of repression matters as well, as such resistance continues to be reflected to varying degrees in the presence of all-White private academies (Andrews Reference Andrews2002; Bolton Reference Bolton2007) as well as providing an impetus (and sometimes a reluctance) to engage with local civil rights histories.
In sum, these cases demonstrate the potential to enact school-centered civic practice in communities marked by strong civil rights organizing infrastructures, high levels of contention with White authorities throughout the civil rights era, and low participation in public schools by White families. Conversely, in communities marked by high levels of civil rights era contention but higher rates of contemporary White participation in public schools, youth civic practice is more likely to coalesce through out-of-school initiatives. While it is possible that localized ad hoc efforts have emerged autonomously from the statewide supports provided by the Winter and Hamer Institutes and state DOE, we find no examples of cases that meet our standard for implementation of CRHR education in communities that lacked sustained civil rights era organizing. Active opposition to such initiatives emerged most clearly where significant percentages of White students remain enrolled in public schools. In such settings, the barriers to robust civic practice through either CRHR curricula in schools or vibrant grassroots associations outside of schools are highest.
CONCLUSION
This paper integrates insights from literatures on civic practice and social movements. Its findings contribute theoretically to the former, by recognizing the importance of past contention in shaping the scope and scale of contemporary civic initiatives centered on learning tied to equity and democratic process. It also expands social movement scholars’ traditional conceptions of the impacts of political contention. While most past work has centered on the achievement of tangible short-term political goals, or else longer-term benefits for constituents tied to representation or concrete resources, our research broadens this range of outcomes to incorporate how civic practice interacts with policy implementation and demonstrates the continuity of grassroots action even in periods when public protest is sporadic or absent. In short, we extend the assertion that pre-existing social and organizational infrastructures enable movement mobilization by showing how that infrastructure contributes to cross-generational civic initiatives that exhibit significant continuity with, and provide a basis for reproducing memories of, past contention.
This research uncovered significant unevenness in opportunities for civic learning and civic action among youth. While legislation mandated a standard Civil Rights/Human Rights curriculum in Mississippi’s public schools, in the five years following the passage of the bill, little accountability for implementation existed. While to that point no systematic effort had assessed the degree to which this curricular initiative had been adopted in classrooms around the state, few school systems (perhaps only McComb) had fully integrated the curricular strands into their offerings by 2011. In other districts (e.g., Philadelphia and Tallahatchie County), out-of-school initiatives stepped in to provide parallel educational and civic opportunities for high school students. But to the knowledge of the institutions charged with supporting such efforts statewide, nearly all other communities lacked sustained outlets for civic learning in this Civil Rights/Human Rights arena. The models that did exist, however, were in many ways exemplars of high-quality civic engagement, providing opportunities for students to augment traditional classroom learning with oral historical and documentary work that connect youth to other generations of residents. By closely documenting ongoing programs in McComb and Philadelphia, we emphasize the organization and associated infrastructure of such benchmark curricular and extra-curricular initiatives, and thus point to resources and models that might be effectively deployed in other school districts.
Obvious programmatic recommendations would include instituting some mechanism to ensure accountability with mandated curricular programs. In the absence of required teacher training and classroom oversight, there appears to be little to ensure that legislated curricular mandates shape classroom activities in meaningful ways. Less obviously, this research demonstrates a subtler set of opportunities and constraints governing the development of civic capacity. In particular, the contours of past contention significantly shape the degree to which curricular programs are mandated and enforced, as well as whether out-of-school initiatives can garner sufficient community support to provide alternative outlets for civic action and civic learning. In communities where the civil rights struggle was most fierce, there appears to be increased opportunity for dynamic civic initiatives. In those settings, the organizational infrastructure that supported earlier Civil Rights Movement action often continues to provide a foundation for vibrant and credible out-of-school programs, as well as a wellspring of primary resources to elevate and transmit memories of civil rights action across generations. Also, prior intense opposition within the White community has frequently resulted in a virtual abandonment of the public school system by White families (Andrews Reference Andrews2002; Bolton Reference Bolton2007), paradoxically tempering the intensity and tenor of debates over the appropriateness of civil rights-oriented learning and action.
Yet, while the legacies of intense civil rights contention have contributed to infrastructural support for the implementation of CRHR education initiatives in both McComb and Philadelphia, those same local histories also reveal the limitations of such efforts to reach a broad and multi-racial population of students. Though these communities are characterized by differing degrees of White presence in public schooling, participation in CRHR education initiatives in both places was pronouncedly skewed by race. As a result, White youth remained almost entirely insulated from serious civic engagement with civil rights issues and the state’s racial history (see also Binder Reference Binder2004).
We have found such insulation is reproduced in different ways across communities. Beyond the pronounced barriers within schools discussed above, Leroy Clemons (2011) references the Neshoba Youth Council’s difficulties with engaging students from a variety of racial backgrounds, in part stemming from the concern and resistance expressed by White parents with regard to having their children participate in interracial peer-group discussions. Describing their own hopes that the NYC would eventually become more racially diverse, several NYC youth participants pointed to the significance of the boundaries that separated the neighborhoods of Philadelphia along racial lines (Clemons 2011). Footnote 8 As with the McComb scenario, despite vibrant programmatic opportunities, the majority of White students remained untouched by the CRHR initiatives and the opportunities for civic engagement that such efforts cultivate. In historically charged settings, identifying and instituting initiatives that expose the lessons of CRHR education to a diverse audience and foster intergroup understanding and dialogue remains a considerable challenge.
With that significant caveat, we close by reiterating that this project’s focus on the legacy of past contention points squarely to the importance of cross-generational partnerships as drivers of civic action. In particular, we highlight two aspects of such partnerships. First, while the activation of local CRHR initiatives drew upon durable Civil Rights Movement infrastructures, their impetus sometimes came from allies who themselves lacked direct connections to the Movement. In both communities examined here, the primary roles played by White political and university officials (e.g., former Mississippi Governor William Winter and Winter Institute Executive Director Susan Glisson) as well as local teachers and school officials (e.g., past and present superintendents and teachers in McComb) may seem surprising given those institutions’ traditionally contentious and charged associations with civil rights efforts. However, the efficacy of these official efforts emerged only in interaction with movement infrastructures that could both impart legitimacy to their calls and provide the bridging resources to translate those calls into vibrant civic action. Such interactions point to a more expansive sense of the environments within which movement infrastructures can successfully support contemporary campaigns.
Second, and consistent with extant research on collective memory that highlights how political entrepreneurs and interpersonal connections elevate the salience of particular historical events (e.g., Harris Reference Harris2006), our observations demonstrate how, as youth become exposed to the significance of activism by members of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, they engage with older residents in richer ways while solidifying a collective conception of local movement history. While future research might productively engage with how such processes operate across a broader range of age groups (mirroring the K-12 grade-level modules associated with the mandated Mississippi Civil Rights/Human Rights curriculum) at all stages the possibilities for such cross-generational discourse provides an institutionalized means to transmit civil rights knowledge to youth in ways that privilege directly the diversity of their forebears’ experiences. These initiatives move beyond the often-static nature of “official” narratives rooted in memorials and museums by linking institutional efforts to the demonstrated value of interpersonal settings in shaping collective memory as well as contemporary racial attitudes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research was supported by Spencer Foundation grant # 201000101. The authors also would like to acknowledge the helpful feedback provided by Susan Glisson, Elena Lewis, Robby Luckett, Claire Whitlinger, and the anonymous reviewers, as well as the research assistance of students in the 2011 Justice Brandeis Semester program, co-sponsored by Brandeis and Jackson State Universities: Anwar Abdul-Wahab, Yosep Bae, Jesse Begelfer, Micha Broadnax, Alfonso Franklin, Edwin Gonzalez, Jermaine Hamilton, Kat Hughes, Loretta Johnson, Talya Kahan, Elly Kalfus, Madison Pennaman, Gabi Sanchez-Stern, Molly Schneider, and Jake Weiner.
