Video Segment

Eyes on the Prize, Volume 165 Chapters 2 and 5

Table of Contents

Objectives
Connecting to the Past
Setting the Context
Evaluating Information
Profiles
Organizations
Using What We Know
Reflecting on Our Learning

Objectives

• To identify key leaders and organizations in the civil rights movement and describe the characteristics of their leadership.
• To describe philosophical and strategic choices faced by leaders in the civil rights movement.
• To examine how leaders influenced the philosophies and actions of the people and groups they represented.
• To explore what happens when organizations working toward the same goals develop competing strategies for achieving those goals.

Connecting to the Past

Ask students to think of someone they admire as a leader (locally or nationally). Ask them to jot down some of the traits of that leader--encourage them to think about the person's personal characteristics as well as his or her leadership style.

Make a list of some of the students' responses on an overhead projector or chalkboard. Ask students to look at the list and see if they can identify some different forms of leadership or different leadership styles. Ask them to think about some of these styles of leadership as you review some of the key leaders of the civil rights movement.

Setting the Context

Ask students to take a sheet of paper and divide it into four columns, labeled:

1. leader of organization
2. personal traits
3. ways of leading
4. organizational affiliation or leaders associated with the organization

Review the following profiles and organizations. As you show each profile, ask students to share what they recall about that individual or group from previous lessons. Ask the students to take notes on their chart during this review.

Profiles

• Daisy Bates
• James Forman
• Fannie Lou Hamer
• Lyndon B. Johnson
• John F. Kennedy
• Martin Luther King, Jr.
• John Lewis
• Bob Moses
• Diane Nash
• A. Philip Randolph
• Malcolm X

Organizations

• Southern Christian Leadership Conference
• Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
• Congress of Racial Equality
• National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Evaluating Information

1. Tell the students that you will be showing them three short clips illustrating some of the policy choices made by leaders in the movement. Ask them to focus on the following questions as they watch the clips:

   What were the policy choices being considered? What leaders or groups supported each policy choice? Who influenced the choice that was finally made? How did he or she exert leadership? How was that decision made? Were compromises involved? What were the benefits of that choice? Were the goals achieved? If you were alive during this time period, with which one of these individuals or groups would you most have identified? Why?

   After each clip, come back to these questions and conduct a brief discussion with the students.

2. Show excerpts:

   Two assessments of the Albany movement. SCLC decides to leave Albany but we hear how Charles Sherrod of SNCC saw things and also the lessons that SCLC's Wyatt Tee Walker took from the movement.

   John Lewis speech at March on Washington. References A. Philip Randolph's proposed march on Washington in 1941 and shows the compromise SNCC struck regarding Lewis's speech, out of respect for Randolph and also out of a spirit of unity.

   Diane Nash on choices after the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Nash relates that many people in the movement considered retaliating against those who killed the children.

Using What We Know

Divide students into groups of four to six people. Ask each group to choose one of the incidents in which leadership played a prominent role. Ask the students to develop a short skit that shows what happened in the incident. Encourage them to focus on the role of leaders in the situation.

After the students have developed their skits and shared them with the class, conduct a brief discussion with the class to compare and contrast the forms of leadership in each incident. Pay specific attention to any of the inter-organizational conflicts that are portrayed in the skits.

Reflecting on Our Learning

Ask each student to look back at the list of leadership traits they developed at the beginning of the lesson. Encourage them to revise the list if they have new or changed ideas. Ask each student to write a letter to a friend describing a civil rights or other leader they admire.

 

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