ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 11, 1996 TAG: 9602090027
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON
Susan Montgomery used to teach civil rights by the numbers.
Rosa Parks. Martin Luther King Jr. ``I Have a Dream.''
``I was one of those teachers that was married to the philosophy of `This is what we're supposed to cover,''' said Montgomery, a social-studies teacher at Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Franklin County.
Then she got together with a by-the-numbers English teacher at the school, Elaine Hawkins. Together, they developed a month-long interdisciplinary unit on civil rights, which they titled ``Man's Inhumanity to Man.''
Now, the way they teach is anything but by-the-numbers. They go much more in-depth, and as the title of their unit suggests, Montgomery and Hawkins do not shy away from the so-called ugly side of civil rights, the violence and hatred that some critics say teachers too-often ignore or sugar-coat.
They have their students prepare reports on 25 of the people who were slain in the 1950s and '60s fighting for civil rights. People who are not household names, like Herbert Lee and Louis Allen, William Moore and Lamar Smith. And they have their students research what happened to the people accused of murdering these civil rights workers, so they can learn that many of them never were properly prosecuted.
``After 25 reports, when they see that nothing was done, they realize that wasn't fair,'' Hawkins said. ``They see this trend, this perpetual trend, that people were hurt, killed, beat up. It appeals to an eighth-grader's sense of injustice, and it really opens the dialogue.''
From there, Montgomery and Hawkins move to other civil-rights struggles, like religious freedom and the Holocaust, women's rights, and the rights of the disabled.
``We try to get across that this is not just African-Americans this has happened to, but that at some point in time we have all been victimized,'' Hawkins said.
It is something to learn from, she said, not sweep under the rug.
``It happened,'' she said. ``We can't change what happened, but you can change the future.''
LENGTH: Short : 46 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: WAYNE DEEL STAFF color Elaine Hawkins (left) andby CNBSusan Montgomery