“Civil Rights Memoir” Syllabus

Recently, I’ve been thinking about different courses that I would want to teach in the future. In the last post, I discussed a course entitled “Literature of White Estrangement.” Today, I want to think about a course entitled “Civil Rights Memoirs.” I’ve been thinking about this course for a few weeks, and I started thinking about it because, after teaching John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell’s March trilogy last spring I began to think about the countless individuals and events that the trilogy, due to various reasons, doesn’t cover. Specifically, I thought about Pauli Murray’s contributions to the movement. With that thought in mind, I started to consider a course that uses March as central memoir and expand out to look at memoirs by others about the movement.

Course Overview:

John Lewis’ graphic memoir March (co-written by Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell) addresses what the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) calls the “nine word problem” that we encounter when thinking about the Civil Rights Movement. According to the SPLC, the “nine word problem” arises from the ways that we teach the Civil Rights Movement, specifically in the P-12 setting. The nine words that “U.S. high school graduates” learn are “Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, ‘I Have a Dream.’” Thus, individuals view the movement in a myopic manner, bookending it with 1955 and 1963. We cannot bookend the movement and limit it to these nine words.

For this course, we will use March as a jumping off point to expand our understanding of the Civil Rights Movement and to examine the ways that the genre of memoir helps present a more accurate picture of the movement. As such, we will read various texts, spanning from the mid-twentieth century to the end of the twentieth century by individuals involved directly in what we will term the Long Civil Rights Movement. We will look at the Civil Rights Movement between 1954–1968, but we will also examine the years before and after those dates, not limiting ourselves to a simple teleological framework.

Over the course of the semester, we will read texts by African American and White activists who confronted white supremacy and fought for equality. While each individual did not necessarily agree on everything, the all fought for civil rights and social justice. During this course…