This Friday morning, thirty-four Brownsville Middle School students came to the Wolfsonian with their social studies teacher for tours of our galleries and a library presentation. As the students were studying civil rights, we had laid out a wide variety of materials of the subject in advance of their arrival. When queried about what they knew about the civil rights movement in this country, most of the students quite naturally talked about the struggle in the 1960s and mentioned Dr. Martin Luther King. My own presentation and display of materials was intended to introduce them to the earlier struggles and much longer history of civil rights agitation in America set against the background of the First and Second World Wars.
Although we might have begun earlier, our own discussions of civil rights began with the First World War and the campaign to recruit African Americans as soldiers. Woodrow Wilson’s administration…
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