ABSTRACT
In a few weeks, Miss Anderson will start a unit on the Civil Rights Movement in her 8th grade U.S. history class in her Midwest suburban school. She wishes there was a way to help students experience the conditions across America at the outset of the Civil Rights movement. She’s heard of teachers doing simulations that recreate feelings of anger over discrimination but she’s afraid that a simulation might trivialize the realities of the period. She wouldn’t think of doing a simulation on the Holocaust or the Middle Passage and, for the same reasons, is hesitant to do a simulation related to the Civil Rights Movement. In former years she has started the unit by telling the story of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago who was murdered while visiting his cousins in Mississippi. White men tortured and brutally killed Emmett Till because he whistled at a White woman. His killers, who later confessed to the murder, were acquitted by an all-White jury in spite of overwhelming evidence against them. Eighth-grade students can relate to Emmett Till. They are about his age. And most of them have committed a prank, have taken a dare, or said something dumb. It’s shocking for them to imagine that such a minor offense could be used to justify murder in the segregated South in 1955. She tells the story because it draws students into a world very different from current conditions, a world that seems remarkably foreign to students in spite of its closeness in both time and space.
