The 2016 Civil Rights Movement Timeline Exhibition

I am just blown away by the work our fifth graders did for their civil rights timeline presentations!  We have spent the past six weeks researching both the African American civil rights movement and the Chicano movement, all of which led up to this amazing timeline exhibition.  We started out by talking about the dominant narrative (the story that’s usually told), and decided that the story that’s usually told about the civil rights movement, especially in elementary schools, is that: 1) Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream, and 2) Rosa Parks sat down at the front of the bus.

This story left us wondering…is this all that there was to the civil rights movement? Whose stories are we not hearing?  Were African Americans the only people fighting for rights, and is Martin Luther King really the hero of this story?  So we set off to challenge this dominant narrative, and to see what else we could learn.

Our 5th graders studied an amazing selection of events and topics, including:

• The Murder of Emmett Till
• The Montgomery Bus Boycott
• The Integration of Central High School
• The Greensboro Sit-ins
• The Freedom Rides
• March on Washington
• Birmingham church bombing
• The Children’s March
• Freedom Summer
• The Selma March
• The Black Panther Party
• East LA Walkouts
• UFW Delano Grape Strike & Boycott

They worked so hard, and pulled off an amazing event.  Way to go, Little Longhorns!  For everyone who wasn’t able to make it, here are some of the highlights:

Thanks so much to everyone who came out to support our 5th graders, and a huge congratulations to our 2016-2017 class of Little Longhorns. I think I can speak for our whole community when I say, we are so proud of you!