In this lesson students will engage in a project-based learning experience to create a presentation and answer the central question: “How was nonviolence used in the Civil Rights Movement?” In the wake of the Brown decision, white Southerners grew increasingly vocal and violent in their resistance to advances in civil rights. Despite the very real threat to their own safety, civil rights advocates and black Americans throughout the nation organized their movement for civil rights around Martin Luther King Jr.’s leadership and philosophy of nonviolent direct action and protest. In the form of boycotts, sit-ins, so-called “freedom rides,” and other nonviolent demonstrations, the small movement leveraged nonviolent protest to gain the attention of white Americans beyond the Deep South, ultimately influencing the new Kennedy administration to propose a Civil Rights Act.
What Does Success Look Like?
Scholars understand the forms of nonviolent protest used in the Civil Rights Movement and create a presentation that conveys how the form of protest they research embodies the philosophy of nonviolence.
Planning (35 minutes)
Teacher Model (5 minutes)
- Show scholars your completed planning guide as a model for how scholars will create their own projects.
- After viewing your planning guide, scholars discuss the following questions as a whole class. Insist that scholars answer your questions with specific evidence from your project example.
- What argument about nonviolent protests does my planning guide convey?
- How did I express my idea in my planning guide?
- How did I organize my evidence in my planning guide to support my idea?
Investigate (15 minutes)
- Explain that scholars will be working in groups to create a presentation on an assigned method of civil disobedience. Remind scholars that before they create their presentations, they must begin with an idea. Their presentations must portray a powerful
and compelling idea supported by strong evidence, just like the teacher model.
- Remind scholars that projects, just like written pieces, make arguments, and all arguments require a strong idea with supporting evidence.
- Tell scholars that they will be making their projects as either digital presentations or posters, with text and images to convey their argument about nonviolent protests.
- Divide scholars into groups and assign each group one of six protests: Children’s March (page 22 of the Unit 3 Sourcebook), Freedom Riders (page 23 of the Unit 3 Sourcebook), Little Rock Nine (page 24 of the Unit 3 Sourcebook), March on Washington (page 25 of the Unit 3 Sourcebook), Montgomery Bus Boycotts (page 26 of the Unit 3 Sourcebook), or Sit-Ins (page 27 of the Unit 3 Sourcebook). Each group reads and annotates the documents for its assigned topic. After reading, scholars should write a main idea next to the title of the source.
- While scholars work, circulate to determine the major trend in scholars’ work.
- Spend 2 to 3 minutes working with three to five scholars.
- Have each scholar tell you the main idea of the document he or she is reading. What is the main idea of this document? How do you know? How does this document help answer the Central Question?
- Hold scholars accountable for staying focused on the main idea of the documents.
Planning (15 minutes)
- Scholars meet with their small groups and use their planning guides to plan their presentations, writing their ideas, planning the evidence they will use to support them, and mapping out how they will organize this information in their presentations.
- While scholars work, actively circulate to reinforce your expectations for strong ideas and persuasive visual evidence in project work and to determine major trends in scholars’ work.
- Spend 2 to 3 minutes working with three to five scholars.
- Have each group tell you the idea conveyed by his or her presentation plan. Can the idea be made stronger? How can the presentation express the idea more effectively? Is the presentation or poster interesting and visually compelling?
- Hold scholars accountable for implementing the feedback you’ve given them.
- Hold scholars accountable for staying focused on conveying an argument about their nonviolent protest.
- If you notice trends across scholars’ planning, bring the class together and deliver whole-class feedback. Either show an exemplar plan to the class that precisely and compellingly communicates a clear idea or show a non-exemplar plan that demonstrates the whole-class trend and have the class revise.
