This is probably going to seem pretty last minute – it is – but I have a request for any of my readers with even a passing knowledge of nonfiction materials.
I’m planning a nonfiction unit for my seniors next semester on civil disobedience and nonviolent protest. I hope to build in some texts that they should have had last year as juniors but didn’t, such as Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” (more commonly known as “Civil Disobedience”) and King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail (which I generally teach with Thoreau, anyway), but I need some suggestions for other texts. Critical texts are fine – it will be good practice for students to look through more scholarly works – as are other primary texts. I’m already thinking about Gandhi’s Non-Violent Resistance (although I have to find it and make copies of some sections) and a critical text called Civil Disobedience in Focus by Hugo A. Bedau (of which I will likely only use the introduction as a primer of sorts). This is not enough, however; the unit will last approximately 3-4 weeks, if I can sustain it, so that I can use these texts to teach research skills such as notetaking, paraphrasing, summarizing, citing sources, etc.
So, faithful readers, I need your help. I need any works that are either reasonably short or that can be excerpted (so as not to overwhelm my students at the beginning of their last semester of high school) that have to do at all with civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance, or nonviolent protest. Of particular interest would be information about the Civil Rights Movement (including the Montgomery bus boycott), the satyagraha movements in India and South Africa, American protests over the Vietnam War, Chinese protests in Tiananmen Square, and even contemporary American protests over issues like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Republican National Convention protest in 2004. I’m also not limited by medium; I’ll take hypertexts as well as any links to print sources. If you’ve got a PDF version (especially for any journal articles – I’m very limited in that regard) that you can share (this is all fair use, remember), feel free to E-mail me – docereestdiscere AT SIGN gmail PERIOD com. I will be incredibly grateful for any help any of you can offer.
Thanks again, readers – looking forward to more great conversations in the Ten! (2010, that is.)
Docere Est Discere 
January 4, 2010 at 4:38 am
Have you tried Facing History? They’re a great organization and they have three units on civil rights, including one on the Selma to Montgomery marchest. They use film clips from Eyes of the Prize. Check out the web site:
http://www.facinghistory.org/
I’ve been to one of their workshops, so I have access to more than you might, but you can get lots of stuff from them on that one unit.
I’m going to use a play by Jeffrey Sweet, based on an incident that happened during WW2. Black women had joined the WAC and been trained as medical technicians, then were reassigned to janitorial duties by the base commandant. Several requested transfer to the motor pool and were denied–so they went on strike, were court-martial and found guilty, but their convictions were overturned on a technicality when Eleanor Roosevelt intervened. Here’s the link for the script–you can read most of it (but not all) on line:
http://www.playscripts.com/play.php3?playid=1140
I’m just developing this unit myself and hope to include primary sources–the playwright found that this incident was hardly reported in the white press but was reported a lot in the mainstream press.
That’s all I an do at 4:37 am on a school day. Hope it helps!
January 4, 2010 at 7:31 am
It helps a great deal; the Eyes on the Prize materials alone sound like they’ll be very useful. (I’ll have to see if we have that documentary at our library – could happen.) That will certainly help supplement some of the primary texts I’ve already got.
Good to hear from you again, JWM. I assume today’s your first day back from break as well?