Jefferson's Newspaper

Somewhat self-righteously, I consider myself a pretty good teacher.  I teach high school modern American History on the west side of Cleveland where some consider making it to the end of the day a victory.  I’ve been slowly pushing myself and my students to aim for goals much higher however.  Call me audacious. The recent explosion amongst the ranks of historians, history teachers, and digi-gurus in promoting both historical thinking skills (See Wineburg and the site) and web 2.0 technologies demands serious attention with this goal in mind.  The two can be intimately tied together to achieve a mastery of both.

My experimentation with these concepts and methodologies has been occasional up until this year.  I’ve used primary source documents in class before and typically in a constructivist fashion.  Combining web 2.0 would allow students to publish their final products on a public medium.  I decided to start a Myspace page to serve this purpose. I know, I know, Rupert Murdoch has already purchased my soul and sold it to Bernard Madoff who in turn sold it to some Mormons in a bizarre pyramid scandal.  I’d estimate that about 60-70% of my students have Myspace pages and about half of those use Myspace seem to use Myspace as their primary internet activity.  In fact, about two years ago, a community center up the street from the high school had a computer lab where Myspace use was so rampant the center had to make certain times “Myspace free.”  In other words, the site seems extremely popular amongst my student population.  Regardless, I figured Myspace would be an easy way to trick kids into thinking I was playing in their world in hopes of greater participation.  And it worked…. kind of.

We had been studying the Civil Rights movement, and I really wanted students to figure out, using primary sources, how de-centralized the movement was.  I wanted them to grasp how normal folks, including students in high school like them, were moved to courageous action.  Young people are increasingly aware of leaders beyond Martin Luther King Jr. but knowledge of groups like SNCC is sparse.  I wanted to encourage my students to see beyond the master narrative of “I have a dream” speeches to understand just how involved folks their age were in this push for freedom.

Students were divided up into groups of three to four and given six front pages from 1957 editions of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.  They had to use articles from these newspaper front pages to write a three paragraph blog entry on the Little Rock Nine and post it alongside their peers’ on my Myspace page. The results were an interesting mix from fairly terrible to pretty interesting.  None were shockingly brilliant, however.  This is not surprising though.  My guess is that few, if any, history teachers in these students’ classrooms have encouraged them to look at primary documents, decode them, and then “publish” a written recreation of their contents.  Take a look at your old college essay on the Vietnam before you’re too critical of these kids.

Nonetheless, there were some apparent obstacles that need to be considered for future activities of a similar nature.  First, the use of the articles as not just primary sources but the only sources they could use proved difficult and problematic at times.  Some groups really struggled to put together a coherent narrative beyond essentially cutting and pasting interesting facts from the newspaper.  Some failed to even do this chronologically.  One group stated, “After 8 Africans [sic] entered the school across the street. They tried to call other students to join them but they were pushed back by guards.”  This was after they already mentioned the students entering the building and members of the 101^st helping them.  While this might be intellectual Viagra for a few choice grad students looking to deconstruct the Western obsession with chronology as history, any educator would see it for what it is: an inability to properly read the articles together rather than as separate documents.

Additionally, several groups included sentences like, “As six negros tried to enter NLR high white students pushed them back because they did not want them at there school.” Frustrating grammar and spelling errors aside, I’m hoping you noticed the antiquated term “negro” in that depiction of the Little Rock Nine.  Seeing as how the kids in this group are all Puerto Rican and not rednecks, they were clearly just adopting the language of the 1957 Arkansas Gazette journalists.  While most groups did not make this mistake, it’s clear that more work needs to be done on the interpretation side of using primary sources.  Thinking historically does not necessitate using outdated language.

Another component that troubled me was the discussion of violence within the narratives.  Clearly, anyone with even a basic understanding of the Little Rock Nine case is aware of the intense mob violence that accompanied the desegregation of Central High School in 1957.  Some students failed to grasp the level of violence through these primary sources though.  “That caused a big chaos because at lest 100 parents of the students and other adults lined up on the side walk in front of the high school an hour before classes recessed for the noon hours.” [sic] There is no mention as to what these students and parents did once they lined up in front of the school and this is where the blog entry abruptly ends.  Lacking detail is to be expected, to a degree, in an assignment like this, but this clearly lacked understanding.  Did this group really go away thinking this racist family picnic mob was there to simply “be heard?”

The issue of responsibility also arose in the blog entries.  One group placed the white riots squarely on the Little Rock Nine’s boldness. “Due to court orders Faubus removed the National guard. After they were removed, the African Americans tried to enter the school causing the white young students to form a riot.” [sic]  Perhaps this is splitting hairs, but there is no discussion of white racism being the source of these riots in this entry.  I doubt the group of students, a racial mixture of whites, Puerto Ricans, and Arabs, meant for it to read this way.  The difficulty comes into getting students to grasp that how they phrase things is perhaps more important than what their intentions are.  This is an integral part of thinking and being able to write historically.  When others read your interpretation of the past they do so with their own understanding, not yours.  Getting students to convey their analysis of something as complex as the Little Rock Nine case is difficult but they should be encouraged to do so as clearly and thoroughly as possible.

One group attempted to retell the tale through the modern civil rights narrative which goes something like: “Black Americans worked hard to be recognized for their contributions and are now allowed the same opportunities as whites today.”  It’d be interesting to see if this was sparked by group members comparing their experiences today to that of the Little Rock Nine but alas, this was not the assignment.  The group concluded that “the students were allowed to go to the school with problems but at the same time they wre getting an oportuinty in life because some people dream of an opportunity while orthers wake up and work hard for it,” [sic].  I read this as an attempt to fit African-Americans into the American ethos of “hard work = success”, which is essentially what many watered down versions of the Civil Rights movement have become.  This view lacks a historical understanding of the barriers of white supremacy and the struggles of grassroots organizing.

Clearly there is much work to be done here.  Students need to engage and investigate primary sources much earlier on in order to be more comfortable and familiar with interpreting them.  Perhaps they also need a little more scaffolding to get to the point where they can take on similarly styled projects.  Nonetheless, the students did work with primary sources and did produce a piece of historical work on the topic.  Like getting President Obama to publicly condemn Cambridge police officers for acting “stupidly,” it’s a relatively small victory but an important one.  In doing so the participating students gained a greater understanding of the importance of historical interpretation, grassroots organizing during the Civil Rights movement, and their role in deciding what matters from the past.