Coming of Age in Mississippi –

The Laws that Have Affected Civil Rights

Susan Sullivan

Truman High School

Three students endure taunts as they stage a sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Jackson, MS in 1963 -- John Salter, Jr., Joan Trumpauer, and Anne Moody (Copyright 1997 State Historical Society of Wisconsin)

Introduction

You have just finished Part III of Coming of Age in Mississippi in which you have experienced the deplorable conditions that Anne Moody, her family, and other Blacks faced everyday in rural Mississippi in the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s, and early ‘60s. You can feel the frustration and anger that Blacks felt because of the racist society. You begin to see how the churches, the NAACP, and the media are working together to help get legislation passed to ease the suffering and the punishment of racial intolerance.

Photo taken in Leland Mississippi, 1939

(Library of Congress Digital Library)

Task

This will be a four-part web quest in which you will explore and summarize the various sets of legislation that affected the civil rights of Blacks during Anne Moody’s lifetime:

Part 1. What Constitutional Law should have protected Blacks from racism after the Civil War?

Part 2. What laws were passed in the post-Civil War era that created the climate of racism through the first half of the 1900s?

Part 3. What laws were passed in the 1950s and ‘60s that began to address racism?

Part 4. Write a three- to five-page report on the above legislation, including a graphic timeline, and a conclusion that relates your research to Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi.

Process

Civil rights in the United States have undergone radical shifts over the past 150 years since before the Civil War. You will be conducting web research on three key sets of legislation that directly influenced the shifts in civil rights. Based on that research, you will write a three- to five-page report that explains how these various sets of legislation affected the civil rights of Blacks. You will also include a graphic timeline that shows the keys shifts over the period from 1860 to 2000. Finally, you will discuss how these legislative changes relate to the situations described by Anne Moody in Coming of Age in Mississippi.

As you visit each web site, write down your answers to all questions in the web quest (they will be handed in for a portion of your grade), and keep notes on:

§ the various cases or laws you find

§ your thoughts on how these laws affected peoples’ behavior with regard to the civil rights of Blacks

§ the time span in which these laws were in effect. You may wish to print out important pages as you explore the various web sites.

PART 1 – Web Quest Research on the Fourteenth Amendment

After the Civil War, slavery was abolished. The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment should have provided equality for Blacks and Whites in the United States. By answering the following questions, explain why the Fourteenth Amendment should have provided the equality that many people expected.

¨ Why do you think Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment is known as the “Equal Protection Clause?”

¨ Should that “equal protection” have made all Blacks equal to Whites in the eyes of the law?

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.amendmentxiv.html

PART 2 – Web Quest Research on Laws that Undermined

the 14^th Amendment

Shortly after the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted, an entire class of laws was passed in the South that undermined the equal protection that should have been provided by the Fourteenth Amendment. Visit the two web sites listed below to find out about these laws and how they supported segregation.

¨ What were these laws called and why?

¨ How did these laws get around the Fourteenth Amendment protection?

¨ Do you think these laws were really fair to Blacks? Explain.

¨ How did these laws promote some of the situations described by Anne Moody?

http://click.hotbot.com/director.asp?id=3&target=http://www.blackhistory.eb.com/micro/303/18.html&query=%22Jim+Crow+Law%22&rsource=LCOSADVF

http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/plegal/Lessons/Epr/epr3.html

This second site in Part 2 is rather lengthy. You should concentrate primarily on the following sections within this site (in this order): Background, Plessy Takes a Ride, The Chief Justice Speaks, Harlan’s Dissent, and Handout 3C Equal Protection:Race.

PART 3 – Web Quest Research on

Laws to End Legal Discrimination

In 1954, the case of Brown v. Board of Education was one of the most critical cases in abolishing the “separate but equal” doctrine that allowed legal discrimination against Blacks from the 1870s through the early 1950s. By studying this case, you will encounter many of the arguments and reasoning that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other anti discrimination legislation.

This case gives you the opportunity to examine in depth and develop arguments on one or both sides of the case. Please complete as much of the material as you can. Of greatest relevance to this web quest (the sections from this site that you must review) are The Facts of the Case, the Arguments, the Precedents, and the Decision.

Here are some questions to answer with regard to this case:

¨ Do you think that the Brown family should/could argue that their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment have be denied?

¨ The Black school that Linda is supposed to attend is separate but is it equal?

¨ How does the situation in Brown v. Board of Education compare to some of the situations that Anne Moody described in Coming of Age in Mississippi?

http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/plegal/scales/brown.html

PART 4 – Summary Report and Timeline

When you have completed your web quest research, you should collect your notes and printouts, then construct a three- to five-page report that contains the following elements:

1. An opening statement that summarizes the scope of your report.

2. A description of each of the three sets of laws that you researched

a. The Fourteenth Amendment – what it was supposed to do.

b. The Jim Crow Laws – how they undermined the Fourteenth Amendment.

c. Brown v. Board of Education – how it began the trend to end legal discrimination.

3. A timeline that shows the relationship of the above laws to how the treatment of Blacks changed throughout this period.

4. A conclusion describing how these laws relate to the experiences of Anne Moody.

Evaluation

I will evaluate your web quest in two ways:

¨ First, I will grade your answers to the questions that I asked about the research in Parts 1, 2, and 3 of this web quest. I will evaluate you on how well you explored each web site, and how well you stated your findings and opinions.

¨ Second, I will grade your report. I will evaluate it based on how well you used the information gathered in your research, how convincing you were in the way you stated your recommendations, and the extent that your writing is well organized, grammatically correct, and written in proper standard English.

Conclusion

This web quest was designed to help you explore and understand the effects of legislation on peoples’ everyday lives especially with regard to the civil rights of Blacks. It is intended to help you see that laws are not just something that lawyers and judges argue about. Laws can have a dramatic impact on how you live. Likewise, any citizen (such as Linda Brown and her family) can have a profound influence on how laws are made.

Civil rights rally held at the Wisconsin State Capitol, June 1961

Standards

By completing this web quest, students will have met the following ELA Standards:

STANDARD 1: Language for Information and Understanding

STANDARD 3: Language for Critical Analysis and Evaluation

STANDARD E1 & 2: Reading (Read public and functional documents)

Writing (Report of information)

STANDARD E6: Public Documents (Critique public documents with an eye to strategies common in public discourse.)