Dr. Charles McKinney and Dr. Charles Hughes of Rhodes College are contributors to the new book Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement published by University of Wisconsin Press.
Editor Hasan Jeffries of The Ohio State University has brought together leading scholars to examine the broadly configured origins, evolution, and outcomes of African Americans’ struggle for freedom. Chapters provide strategies for teaching famous and forgotten civil rights people and places.
McKinney, associate professor of history and Neville Frierson Bryan Chair of Africana Studies, has written a chapter on how to place the life, thought, speeches and work Martin Luther King Jr. in a proper historical context for the purposes of teaching about him with accuracy and honesty.
Hughes, director of the Lynne and Henry Turley Memphis Center, discusses in the book the ways that music can be used to understand the Movement, its participants and its legacies.
Both McKinney and Hughes attended a symposium in 2018 at Ohio State to identify the key strategies for teaching the civil rights movement that would be published in the book. They will discuss their chapters at the 2020 Conference on American History in Washington, DC, to be held in April.