For Immediate Release: June 11, 2003
Further information: Ann Scanlon (617) 514-1662
BOSTON—Boston public school teachers will gather this summer at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum for a five-day institute, The Civil Rights Struggle Through the Kennedy Years, to enhance their understanding of this crucial time in the nation’s past so they may better teach students about it in the classroom. Made possible by a Teaching American History grant from the U.S. Department of Education, the program will run June 26, 27, and 30 and July 1 and 2, 2003.
The 35-40 teachers will hear first-hand accounts by five people who have played key roles in civil rights history over the past half-century:
- Myrlie Evers-Williams, head of the NAACP from 1995 to 1998, fought tirelessly for more than three decades to bring to justice the man who murdered her husband, Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers, slain in June 1963 on the same night that President Kennedy delivered his civil rights address to the nation;
- Bernard Lafayette, Jr., authority on strategies for nonviolent social change, was co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and a leader of the 1960 Nashville Movement, 1961 Freedom Rides, and 1965 Selma Movement;
- Vivian Malone Jones, one of two students whom Gov. George Wallace sought to bar from entry to the University of Alabama in his notorious 1963 “stand in the schoolhouse door”, became the first African-American to graduate from the university in 1965;
- Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, founder and president of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (1956 to1970), spearheaded the Birmingham movement in 1963, along with Martin Luther King, Jr., who called Shuttlesworth “the most courageous civil rights fighter in the South”; and
- Harris Wofford, former US Senator from Pennsylvania and CEO of the Corporation for National Service, worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1950s and served as President Kennedy’s Special Assistant for Civil Rights (1961-62).
Each morning of the institute will begin with a lecture by Gerald R. Gill, associate professor of history at Tufts University, co-editor of Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader, and twice-named “Massachusetts College Professor of the Year” by the Carnegie Foundation. Prof. Gill will also serve as moderator in discussions with the five guest speakers. Each afternoon, the teachers will have the opportunity to work with the Kennedy Library’s significant holdings of primary sources, including historical documents, photos, recordings, and film footage from the 1960s civil rights era.
The John F. Kennedy Library and Museum is a presidential library administered by the National Archives and Records Administration and supported, in part, by the Kennedy Library Foundation, a non-profit organization. The Kennedy Library and Museum and the Kennedy Library Foundation seek to promote, through educational and community programs, a greater appreciation and understanding of American politics, history, and culture, the process of governing and the importance of public service.