Teaching To Kill A Mockingbird: MLK

I don't remember reading much of Martin Luther King's work as a high school student. Certainly we read the I Have A Dream speech - and I remember the movement to have his birthday declared a national holiday - and the movement to resist it.

I wasn't made aware of his move towards a broader call for social justice and civil rights for poor people until college. It fascinated me though and engaged me. As a high school teacher I used "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam," and students were always surprised that Dr. King talked about the Vietnam War. It seemed Dr. King had been celebrated and canonized and stood stagnant on the I Have A Dream posters hanging in classrooms, relegated to the January holiday that celebrated his life and as assigned reading during African American history month.

Taking up Dr. King as a common talking point with students - as both as a person and as a symbol of the movement -  to begin an inquiry around civil rights in the time of TKAMB and in our own time.

I often use Marc Bamuthi Joseph's Savage Inequalities from NPR - a piece that does a nice job problematizing our engagement with Dr. King's legacy - to begin a discussion around these issues. In tonight's class though, I think I'm going to start with this ABC news clip:



I think we will also listen to some of "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam," listen to the Bamuthi Joseph piece, read some Langston Hughes and maybe even watch this Kanye WEst video:





Of course we'll do some of our own writing about MLK - some reflecting and talking about how we were asked to engage with him as students and what cvil rights means to us. I found this short piece (which I think would eb good to use with students) written by a young white male about MLK, Public Enemy and what it all means to him. Later we'll look into some of the youtube clips and writing around Occupy Wall street and ask ourselves if this movement is part of Dr. King's legacy. We'll also look at my all time favorite teacher created site about a year-long inquiry project in Detroit.

This should help frame our inquiry around issues of race, socioeconomics and the ongoing civil rights movement as we start reading TKAMB.