Eagle Rock Students Explore a Half-century of U.S. Social Movements
This week, we highlight the fourth post in a series that is shining a spotlight on some of the classes here at Eagle Rock School. Today, I’m pleased to tell you about Then and Now: A History of Social Movements, which is a class I am co-teaching with Societies & Cultures instructional specialist, Cedric Josey.
I feel very fortunate to be co-leading this class, where we are exploring how Black lives have mattered to the judicial system and the American public at large. And we are doing this by exploring social movements for justice spanning more than 50 years. In the United States, this question is popularly and painfully analyzed via the image of dead and brutalized bodies in print or on a screen, and eulogized in hashtags in our social media feeds.
Whether by a private individual or a law enforcement officer, the cases and victims memorialized throughout the ages generally share similar features:
- A shocking act of dehumanization.
- Outrage boils to the surface as demands for justice.
- A nation is conflicted and brought to violence.
- Repair is rare.
Often, the state and the law shields the perpetrator from accountability; this was vividly evident in the blatant disregard for the loss of human life demonstrated by the Attorney General of Kentucky in the case of Breonna Taylor — a recent tragedy in a long history of names, known and unknown.
In some way, everyone reading this experienced the largest social movement in our nation’s history — the one that erupted earlier this year when at least 29 million people protested after the world witnessed the Continue reading…