“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…