My students are usually well-behaved and pay attention in class, but they have yet to really grab onto something and claim it as their own (although the letters to the superintendent complaining about the current - and completely bogus - grading scale really did great things for their teenage angst appeal among one another). They seem like they're completely content with just going day to day, learning their bit and moving on to the next grade. I needed something to get them fired up.
And thus it was...
His name was Emmett Till and he was murdered. In the summer of 1955, while visiting family in a small town of 500 called Money, Mississippi, he unknowingly committed a terrible sin that would prove to be the catalyst to his brutal death. He whistled at a white woman. He had grown up in Chicago - in the more moderate North where such behavior would have warranted a smack on the head and strong words from his mother - but he was now in Mississippi, deep in the Delta, embroiled in the racist South.
Two men - the woman's husband and his half-brother - kidnapped Till in the dead of the night, drove him 30 miles to a remote barn, and proceeded to beat and torture him until sunrise. They then took him to the Tallahatchie River nearby, tied barbed wire around a 130-pound fan and then around his body, shot him in the back of the head, and threw him in the river.
Two days later, the world witnessed the fruits of their labors.
The boy died in 1955 at 14 years old. It kick-started the Civil Rights Movement. It showed the nation what atrocities were happening at that time in that section of the country. It did all these things, but most important to me: it made my students realize that the world isn't perfect, but they can try their hardest to make it just a little better.
What's the terrible grading system?
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