“Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.”
―Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“Real education should consist of drawing the goodness and the best out of our own students. What better books can there be than the book of humanity?”
— César Chavez
Lincoln High School is located in Walla Walla, Washington, a short distance from Whitman College, where I am an undergraduate student. Lincoln is Walla Walla’s alternative high school. With fewer than 200 students, Lincoln serves the teenagers in the community who are most in need, those who would have fallen through the cracks at the traditional high school. I visited Lincoln with eleven other Whitman students to teach a one-hour lesson entitled Viva La Causa as part of the Whitman Teaches the Movement program. The Viva La Causa lesson teaches the history of César Chavez and the United Farm Workers.
I was never told the story of César Chavez in my high school, middle school or elementary school history lessons. Every year on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, starting in kindergarten, our school would listen to “I Have a Dream” play over the loudspeakers. We performed skits about Rosa Parks and read books about Ruby Bridges. The civil rights stories we were told reverberated with ideas and ideals: Justice. Tolerance. Civil disobedience. Love. Freedom.
Everything about the civil rights movement seemed heroic, and distant, not only in time but in miles. We didn’t have segregation where I’m from, I assumed. Seattle never saw lynchings, I thought. Washingtonians never owned slaves, we reminded ourselves. A white middle class kid from the Seattle suburbs, my world was seemingly unplagued by racial and economic injustice. Poverty belonged to older generations and to faraway nations. Racism belonged in Birmingham and in the words spoken by a few elderly folks who “didn’t know any better—they’d grown up in a different world after all—it’s not their fault really—who can blame them.”
This was the single story of the civil rights movement I heard in school. The story left us feeling good about ourselves. Freedom triumphed. The boycotts and sit-ins succeeded. The legislation was passed. “We know better now. We’re equal now.”
We need to teach the history of MLK and Rosa Parks and Ruby Bridges. But when this is the only story of civil rights we tell, we foreclose the path to progress.
When Jim Crow is the only history of racism we learn, we systematically ignore the many histories of violence, oppression and prejudice from our own hometowns. White Seattleites might not have killed Emmitt Till. But when we face our own history, when we ask our Chinese or Japanese or Native American friends the stories of their parents’ or grandparents’ or great grandparents’ lives in Washington State, we can no longer feel so distant from racism and racial violence.
If I had heard the many undocumented students in my high school tell their stories, I would have realized that freedom has not yet triumphed, despite what we learned in history class.
Civil rights is not a single story. It is not a single man or woman, a single race or a single speech. “I have a dream!” has been shouted and sung by many Americans. There are DREAMers today shouting those words, students who are struggling to be heard and seen, fighting for the right to an equal education, a reflection of everything Ruby Bridges stood for.
Telling only one story of civil rights marginalizes the voices we ignore. It also prevents us from doing exactly what the story of civil rights is supposed to teach us to do―fight for justice in our own communities as those before us did.
Because how can we fight against injustice when we don’t even acknowledge its existence? How can we fight racism when we think it’s something our parents took care of? How can we fight poverty when we only see it as their problem, not our problem? How can we fight discrimination when we don’t call it that if the victim doesn’t have papers?
By teaching Viva La Causa at Lincoln High, we acknowledge that racism is not and never was just in the South, and that black is not the only color of civil rights. Walla Walla is an agricultural town in Eastern Washington. Much of the labor in our fields is undertaken by migrant farmworkers, most of whom are Latino, and many of whom are undocumented. The struggles of Mexican-American farmworkers in California in the 1960s is a story that in many ways is close to home, even if it takes place far away.
The Lincoln High School students heard one story that day we visited. But there are many stories they didn’t hear. They heard little about the heroines of the United Farm Workers. They did not hear how Dolores Huerta’s arrests and leadership brought women into the farm labor movement, or how Helen Chavez was the one who persuaded César to become a full-time organizer.
They didn’t hear the stories of farmworkers still fighting for their civil rights today.
Telling a story is an act of shaping reality. Whether or not the Lincoln students learned the proverbial lesson that day, I hope they at least remember the story. But more importantly, I hope their own stories are never ignored.
For more information on teaching the civil rights movement, check out The March Continues: Five Essential Practices for Teaching the Movement.
Angell is a senior in politics and environmental studies at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Her academic career has focused on the intersections of social justice and the environment. While at Whitman, she has conducted research on social exclusions in urban space and the racialized rhetoric of environmental food movements. Angell is also a news writer for The Whitman Pioneer. She is passionate about the power of education and storytelling.
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