The focus title for our Black History and Civil Rights Movement unit of study is A Dream of Freedom by Diane McWhorter. This full-color nonfiction book traces major events of the modern civil rights movement from 1954-1968. The author was a white child who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, the most segregated city in the nation, during the 1960s. This background gives her an interesting point of view on the era.
So far we have learned about Plessy v. Ferguson (1892) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the two monumental Supreme Court cases that ruled on the doctrine of "separate, but equal." We have also studied the terms segregation, desegregation, and integration. Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are some of the key people whose stories we have read who each had their own "dream of freedom."
