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Mississippi’s McComb High and Washington’s The
Overlake School Adopt
The
FOG MACHINE
in Innovative Pilot Program for Civil Rights
Education
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“Immensely enjoyable, with
characters you want to know what
happens to after the book ends. Covers
the high points of the movement from
both sides of the color line. Offers
young adult readers a way to
understand the world and history
through relationships—the way they
learn best.”
—Vickie
Malone, McComb High social
studies teacher, whose Local Culture
class informed Mississippi’s K-12
public school mandated civil rights
education curriculum; collaborator
with San Francisco’s The Urban School
on
Telling
Their Stories Oral History Archives
Project
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As author Barbara
Kingsolver said in a 2012 NPR interview for
her novel Flight Behavior, fiction
has the power to create “empathy for the
theoretical stranger.” |
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Students at Mississippi’s McComb High and
Washington’s The Overlake School put this
theory to the test by reading
The FOG MACHINE.
Their teachers, Vickie Malone
and David Bennett, set out to explore the
value of historical fiction in teaching
history to young people. More essentially,
they sought a shared language to allow the
students to talk about civil rights history
and race when Overlake visited McComb in
April 2014.
Indeed, the two schools are
worlds apart. |
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Bob Moses came to McComb in 1961 to begin
the work of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in helping
secure voting rights for Mississippi’s black
citizens. Herbert Lee, a black farmer, was
murdered for his role in the campaign, as
was witness Lewis Allen. In 1964, SNCC
arrived in force as part of Freedom Summer.
Violence escalated, earning McComb the name
“the bombing capital of the world.” Today,
the McComb school district is predominantly
black, and the median household income
(2011) is $28,000.
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In contrast, The Overlake School is a
private college prep day school with an
enviably low student-teacher ratio in the
affluent suburb of Redmond, Washington.
Overlake’s Service Learning Program, part of
Project Week, emphasizes experiential
learning. The 2014 group of twelve students
and two teachers was the second to visit
McComb and other sites of significance in
the civil rights movement. |
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With its report “Teaching
the Movement: The State of Civil Rights
Education in the United States 2011,”
the Southern Poverty Law Center hoped to “spark
a national conversation about the importance of
teaching America’s students about the modern
civil rights movement.” Mississippi, one of only
12 states to receive a grade of C or higher and
the first to mandate civil rights education in
public schools K-12, rolled out its curriculum
in 2011. McComb High and Vickie Malone’s Local
Culture class served as a model for the
Mississippi curriculum.
As Henry Louis Gates Jr. said in The Root,
August 12, 2013: “Want a meaningful
‘conversation about race’? That conversation, to
be effective and to last, to become part of the
fabric of the national American narrative,
must start in elementary school, and
continue all the way through graduation from
high school.”
As Bob Moses said to SNCC workers gathered in
McComb in 1964, singing “I’m on My Way to the
Freedom Land” shortly after the Freedom House
was bombed: “If you can’t go, let your children
go.”
Let the
national conversation begin.
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