Studying the lives of others has been a fascination for scholars and students for as long as mankind has focused on communicating through the written word. What is it about others' lives that drives us to study them? It is as if through the study of past lives that we seek to discover something magical or insightful about our own, as if others' lives hold some secret, some unknown key to our own happiness, to our own success. From the Bible to Barack Obama's
Dreams from my Father
, an endless supply of biographical subjects touch on virtually every aspect of our lives. And so we seek to learn from others; from both the subject of the biography as well as the biographer. I myself remember, as a young child, wanting to read nothing but biography. By the age of eight or nine I knew about Helen Keller, Alexander Graham Bell, Sitting Bull, Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Edison and countless others. I could not get enough of the reading of biographies as the lives of others simply fascinated me.
But what of writing biography? How many of us who read the lives of others have ever ventured to write about them? Reading a biography and writing one are two very different endeavors. Many of us have written about ourselves, and have had some experience writing about others using primary and secondary sources. But what of the middle school student in this age of "press a button," this information at your fingertips world in which we live? How far will an 8
th
grader research the life of an assigned subject? How many sources will the student examine? Where will the biography start and end?
Often students writing biographical reports will try to tell the entire life story of the subject when that may not be needed. The writing could instead zero in on that short period of time in which the subject became famous, that unforgettable moment that made them worth writing about in the first place. This is what I want to show my students how to do in this unit on the lives of Civil Rights leaders.
We all know much about Martin Luther King, undoubtedly the most famous of Civil Rights leaders, but when was Dr. King at the peak of his soul searching, of the molding of his legendary personality? Was it when he wrote his letter from the Birmingham jail, when he marched on Washington with so many other activists or in the days leading up to his assassination? Malcolm X may have had an exciting and sordid past, but some of his "moments of glory" occurred during his travels to Africa and the Middle East as his religious pilgrimage changed his message and his personality. We all have moments in which we make discoveries about ourselves and our world. Using biography to look closely at such moments will lead students to make discoveries and reach realizations about themselves.
The unit I plan to write will be a part of a larger Civil Rights unit that I teach connected to the reading of
Getting Away with Murder; The True Story of the Emmett Till Case
by Chris Crowe. This book will help students to see what I mean by "biography of the moment" as it covers a very short period of Emmet Till's life – but that moment would shape the Civil Rights movement and change US history forever.
Drawing on this example, my students will discover moments that changed other lives, as opposed to the simple telling of a life story. They will begin by discussing biography and autobiography, memoir and anecdote, before writing about themselves and their classmates. Having become both biographers and "biographees," students will then explore the lives of the Civil Rights leaders. Finally I will ask them to work in pairs to role play an interview with a Civil Rights leader of their choice. Students will film the interviews, creating a documentary that will connect events, leaders and players in the Civil Rights era.
