Mr. History is the pseudonym for a first-year teacher of court-involved youth in Queens.
“You’ve been showing that movie for a long time,” said a fellow teacher disapprovingly. This, however, transpired just an hour before one of my students, a young man named Miguel, pointed out the faces he knew from the photo in that day’s New York Post from the Selma March. Clinton, Obama, and yes, I know this dude. From the video. He’s old now.
I decided to show a large chunk of the award-winning PBS series Eyes on the Prize to my classes, which are predominantly African American. It had been a few weeks since something other than a video was on in my class and one of the teachers began to think I was that teacher; the teacher who shows “movies” for two weeks to get out of having to do any real kind of planning. I did my best to assure others in the building that this series was well worth it. Like Ken Burns’ “Jazz” or “Civil War,” only better! In fact when the two-week marathon of videos was over, I found myself having to defend to disappointed students not having gotten to the assassination of Dr. King and the other important moments in the late 1960s. The video series is over 15 hours long and my choices and self-imposed censorship pained me. No more video, man? No. No more video.
The colleague reminded me that these students probably won’t be helped much by a video when it’s their turn to take the GED. I politely disagreed — keeping that disagreement to myself, of course. Keeping their heads off of the tables and keeping their eyes open, I thought silently in response, seems to be half the battle. If it takes two weeks of attention and engagement by way of video, then I just may do this every year no matter what other teachers think. By the end of the video, the students thirsted for more, asking questions about Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton. And naturally it warmed my heart when Miguel brought the paper to me, flipped open to the photo of the two Democratic presidential candidates walking arm and arm with the original Selma marchers, and pointed at one such marcher: John Lewis. Lewis was a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) member and leader of the march on Bloody Sunday back in 1965. Miguel looked at me as if to say, These people are still around? Perhaps it was hard for him to reconcile the very modern faces of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama with that of a man he had just seen on a very “ancient” black-and-white video.
One particular observation from the video that, to me, made the two-week marathon worth the showing, despite implicit objections from colleagues, was the student response to the acquittal of the accused in the Emmett Till case. Emmett, you may remember, was the young black boy killed in Mississippi for allegedly flirting with a white girl. Having seen the video and knowing the story well, I must have forgotten how outrageous the verdict seemed to someone experiencing this story for the first time. As the students watched, the announcer on the video stated that the men accused of killing Till were acquitted. What happened next startled me a little bit. What?! They can’t do that! That’s not right! I turned my head toward the collective outburst. One young man seemed to be on the verge of tears and shifted his desk with a harmless kick. That these young men were so invested emotionally in the outcome of a trial from decades ago opened my eyes again, reminding me why I wanted to teach history in the first place. I recalled my first few days of college education courses and student teaching when I wondered if I could be a vehicle for such a thing. Could I make history relevant and engaging? Isn’t that the point? To get students to react to the past as if it were the present.
What a moment. I took it all in and looked at the frustrated faces of my students. They were angry, and justifiably so. I felt that a tiny battle had been won. And I did not feel bad about it for even a second, nor did I feel manipulative. They should be mad. Because, in my view, these kinds of things are the things worth being mad over. For the first time, it seemed, in my new, short teaching career, I saw what it looks like when the past truly comes alive and history seems relevant.
