The 2011 Southern Poverty Law Center education report graded the states on what they require public schools to teach about a nation-changing era—the Civil Rights Movement. Thirty-five states flunked.
After the report, titled “Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education 2011,” revealed the state of civil rights education, only one college contacted the author. That college—located in a state that received an F—is a small liberal arts institution in an isolated region of southeastern Washington, best known for growing sweet onions and having scores of wineries.
The upshot of the email exchange and follow-up phone conversations is a pioneering educational program that Whitman College launched with the local school district in Walla Walla, Wash. This February marked the third time that Whitman students volunteered in Walla Walla classrooms to teach the next generation about such historic episodes as the student sit-ins at a lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., and Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from the Birmingham, Ala., jail.
“Whitman was the only college that reached out in a very proactive way to say we are going to try to take the lessons in the report and try to find a way to practically apply them to make a difference in our community,” says Dr. Kate Shuster, the report’s author. “In that respect, I think they’re highly unusual.”
The “Teaching the Movement” report was published in September. Noah Leavitt, assistant dean for student engagement at Whitman, contacted Shuster in November. By January 2012, Whitman students were teaching civil rights lessons to Walla Walla students, relatively quick for ramping up a new program at a college.
“All that came together fairly quickly,” says Leavitt. “It seemed like doing something with the public school district would offer the chance for students in town to learn about the movement in a fun way, for our students to learn about it and for our students to have the chance to be off-campus out in the community.”
