As a historian and educator, I always do my best to connect the past to the present to help my students see how our modern world has been shaped and is still being influenced by the past. (🧵)
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Whenever I teach the Civil Rights Era, I discuss the range of activists, from the well-known, like MLK, to the lesser known, and often overlooked women, like Claudette Colvin. Colvin was the brave teen who refused to give up her seat on a bus before Rosa Parks’s activism placed her in the history.
When I get to the end of the lesson, I show my students this picture of Colvin today - a living connection to our dark, racist past under Jim Crow Laws.
After Colvin, I show them this picture to remind my students that we not only remain connected to courageous individuals, but we also still walk among those who supported and celebrated bigotry, hatred, and racism.
I use this to emphasize that once Jim Crow Laws were struck down as unconstitutional, not one teacher, cop, lawyer, judge, doctor, CEO, or politician who worked to uphold a racist system were fired for being racist. They remained in their roles and found ways to bend the system around the new laws.
I want to make sure my students leave knowing that sinister forces like racism did not cease to exist after the Civil Rights Era, it merely adapted itself within the systems of power through those who benefited from White Supremacy.
We still live in a society shaped and still influenced by our racist past. Therefore, we must remain constantly vigilant to identify and call out racism, homophobia, transphobia, and all forms of bigotry that still exist and, in some places, thrive in our modern world.
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