Rights-Writing Journal What rights do you have as an American citizen? What gives us these rights? How would you react if someone tried to take your rights.

Rights-Writing Journal

What rights do you have as an American citizen? What gives us these rights? How would you react if someone tried to take your rights away? What could you do?

Civil Rights Powerpoint

14th Amendment

Montgomery Bus Boycott

I Have a Dream

Rosa Parks

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--

Martin Luther King Jr.

Civil Disobedience

Plessy v. Ferguson: separate but equal

How “equal” do these schools look?What is your impression of each of the schools? Which would you rather go to, and why?

Segregated Schools

Brown vs. Board of Ed: Separate is inherently unequal

Integration of Little Rock High School, 1957

There is a deep broodingin Arkansas. Old crimes like moss pendfrom popular trees.The sullen earthis much toored for comfort.

Sunrise seems to hesitate and in the second lose itsincandescent aim, anddusk no more shadowsthan the noon. The past is brighter yet.

Old hates andante-bellum lace, are rentbut not discarded.Today is yet to comein Arkansas.It writhes. It writhes in awfulwaves of brooding.

My Arkansas -Maya Angelou

from “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock” –Gwendolyn Brooks

In Little Rock the people bearBabes, and comb and part their hairAnd watch the want ads, put repairTo roof and latch. While wheat toast burnsA woman waters multiferns.Time upholds or overturnsThe many, tight, and small concerns.

In Little Rock the people singSunday hymns like anything,Through Sunday pomp and polishing.And after testament and tunes,Some soften Sunday afternoonsWith lemon tea and Lorna Doones.

is our businessTo cherish bores or boredom, be politeTo lies and love and many-faceted fuzziness.I scratch my head, massage the hate-I-had.I blink across my prim and pencilled pad.The saga I was sent for is not down.Because there is a puzzle in this town.The biggest News I do not dareTelegraph to the Editor’s chair:“They are like people everywhere.”

In Little Rock they knowNot answering the telephone is a way of rejecting life, That it is our business to be bothered,

I forecast, And I believeCome Christmas Little Rock will cleaveTo Christmas tree and trifle…

The angry Editor would replyIn hundred harryings of Why.And true, they are hurling spittle, rock,Garbage and fruit in Little Rock.And I saw coiling storm a-writheOn bright madonnas. And a scytheOf men harassing brownish girls.(The bows and barrettes in the curlsAnd braids declined away from joy.)I saw a bleeding brownish boy. . . .

The lariat lynch-wish I deplored.

The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.

Martin Luther King Jr. “I Have a Dream”

“…And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character….”