When I teach lessons about Martin Luther King Jr., I always wonder exactly how students will connect with the events and themes. My adult students are refugees and immigrants from different cultural backgrounds. Some of them were cultural minorities in their countries. Others are experiencing racial discrimination for the first time in the United States.
This year, I used a short graphic novel in class that told about Martin Luther King’s childhood and gave a good overview of his work that is an easy read. At the beginning of the book, the novel shows a white father yanking his boy away from a game of marbles with Martin. We stopped reading at this point.
“Why do you think he didn’t want the two boys together?” I asked the class.
“Because black people and white people they wanted separate,” a student replied.
“Exactly,” I responded. “And what was that about?”
So we talked about the long legacy of slavery in U.S. history and about how many African Americans in this country could not vote even 100 years after slavery had ended.
Students wanted to include geography in the lesson, asking about the differences between the South and the North. I was surprised at how quickly students drew parallels between the civil rights movement of the 1960s and immigrant rights today.
One student mentioned the recent controversy over Alabama’s anti-immigration law HB 56.
“They can ask for the papers of anyone who looks brown? That’s discrimination.”
While talking about the Montgomery bus boycott, another student mentioned the recent boycott of the state of Arizona over their strict immigration policies.
“The baseball players didn’t even want to play games there, because they have so many Latinos playing,” the student said.
Another student talked about Cesar Chavez and the grape boycott. I was amazed at how quickly they brought everything together.
Many of my students are undocumented workers or have family members who are working here illegally, so civil rights issues are very close to their hearts. We talked about personal rights and about who can ask for their immigration papers in Minnesota.
They talked about the best ways to stay out of trouble with immigration (Don’t drink. Don’t get pulled over. Better yet, don’t drive.) They talked about the divide between their younger, U.S.-born children with their rights as citizens, and their older children who live in the gray area of being culturally American but not having legal status.
I asked the students, “What do you think Dr. King would have said about immigrants and refugees?”
The students had noticed that the book made no mention of Latinos or East Africans or Asians. The students talked amongst themselves for a few moments and then came to the consensus that Dr. King would have supported their struggles the same way that he struggled for the rights and full inclusion of African-American people.
They fully understood that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Anfinson is an ELL civics teacher in Minnesota.
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