We Are Not Removed from Our Past

Over the past week or so, I have seen multiple people on my social media feeds post this timeline. I don’t know who originated it, or who wrote it. However, I do know that almost every semester I construct my own timeline and break it down in class, usually going back to the end of the Civil War. When doing this, I break it down by familial generations, tracing backwards to show students that we are not far removed from these moments in history. In doing this, I strive to show them that while we may have “legally” ended Jim Crow and “overt” legalized segregation, the roots of those institutions remain because people who were alive during that period and supported those institutions didn’t necessary relinquish their beliefs when the laws changed and they continue to pass those beliefs down to their subsequent generations.

When I walk students through this timeline, I use myself as an example, telling them I was born a decade after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968, what many see as the end of the Civil Rights Movement (1954–1968). I tell them that my parents were born in 1951, right before the “start” of the Civil Rights Movement with the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. That means that their grandparents, along with my parents and grandparents, lived through the Civil Rights Movement. That means that they are only two generations removed from the movement. That…