Teaching Resources
Lesson Plans for Elementary, Secondary, and Higher EducationLesson plans to support teaching the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom as the most effective action taken during the long civil rights movement.
Teaching The March as a Film
Lesson plans and resources that use the 33-minute film as a rich visual and aural illustration of the long civil rights movement (1939 – ) and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (August 28, 1963).
Combined Teaching Packet
Lesson plans than join instruction on The March as a historical event and The March as a representative example of the Long Civil Rights Movement. These provide lesson plans for two to three 50-minute class sessions.
Teaching The March as a Film
James Blue’s 1963 film The March offers an artistic and humane depiction of the August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. 240,000 marchers descended on the nation’s capital to demand equality for its Black citizens. Blue’s film features the most significant and effective action taken by the long civil rights movement, which historian Jacqueline Hall suggests begins in the late 1930s, the same period that A. Phillip Randolph and others envisioned blacks marching on Washington to demand equality. [1]
Themes & Student Learning Outcomes
James Blue’s film is an artistic masterpiece.
Developing the skills of film criticism and appreciation of historical documentaries of the civil rights movement.
James Blue’s film depicts a radical historical event.
Understanding the March on Washington as the critical event within the history of the long civil rights movement.
James Blue’s film visualizes the civil rights movement’s commitment to nonviolence.
Appreciating the philosophy of nonviolence.
James Blue’s film climaxes with Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” public address, which condemned American apartheid and set the agenda for the long civil rights movement.
Practice the art of rhetorical criticism.
James Blue’s film captures the most effective antiracist action in the US 20th century.
Identify antiracist strategies and tactics that make racial progress.
Theme 1
Learn More About Film Criticism of Civil Rights Cinema
The March reflected the influence of Pare Lorentz’s film The River and other social documentary films and photographs of the Thirties, Blue’s education in film studies at L’Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris, and the directorial skills he had grown during his time in Algeria, where he directed a Cannes Film Festival award-winning feature. Blue directed a team of 13 camerapeople to film the marchers. We first see them in separate streams that merge at the Lincoln Memorial. The film was designed, as Blue stated “to lead up to and give King’s [I have as Dream] speech [the film’s climax] as much power as possible.” The film is laced with six freedom songs and bound to a minimalist narration written and spoken by Blue.
“[The March is] probably the finest argument for peaceful petition of redress of grievance that has ever been put on film.” [2]
Blue’s film received five international awards for its artistic and humanistic merit:
- Grand Prize in Documentary at the International Ibero-American and Philippine Film Festival in Bilbao, Spain (1964).
- Diploma of Merit at the 14th Melbourne Festival in Australia (1965).
- First Prize at the Cannes Youth Festival (1966).
- First Prize at the Netherlands Film Festival (1966).
Blue’s film was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2008 because of its “great cultural, historic” and “aesthetic significance to the nation’s cinematic heritage.” The film was restored and preserved by the National Archives in 2013.
Theme 2
James Blue’s film depicts a radical historical event
James Blue’s narrative for the film, the marchers, and Martin Luther King Jr. in his “I have a Dream” public address forthrightly condemn America’s legacy of slavery, ongoing segregation, failure to treat blacks as equals in The March. The revolutionary agenda King and the leaders of the march set forth to work through America’s racial trauma had never been presented to a national audience and the government at one moment in American history.
More than any other event in American history, the March on Washington focused the nation’s attention on civil rights. [3]
Gain Historical Appreciation of the Long Civil Rights Movement
Theme 3
James Blue’s film visualizes the civil rights movement’s commitment to nonviolence
Learn More About the Philosophical Understanding of Nonviolence in the Long Civil Rights Movement
- King and the Long Civil Rights Movement’s Nonviolent Strategy vs. American Apartheid
- Assessing Nonviolent and Violent Responses to American Apartheid
James Blue’s film visualizes the March on Washington’s success: disciplined nonviolence, the civil rights movement’s counterintuitive response to hate and violence with love and nonviolence, and the construction of an inclusive community in direct physical contact with others.
African Americans, as James Blue observes in the narrative he crafted for The March, suffered under the violence of slavery and Jim Crow. King and the civil rights movement confronted Jim Crow with disciplined nonviolence and an ethic, derived from the principles of prophetic Christianity, that violence and hate should be met with nonviolence and love. Blue’s film documents the discipline and focus taken by those who participated in the march on Washington and the long civil rights movement.
Theme 4
James Blue’s film climaxes with Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” public address, which condemned American apartheid and set the agenda for the long civil rights movement.
James Blue’s camera, which centers King in a long shot and medium shot, was ideally positioned to record King’s speech and the reactions of members of the crowd to his words. Filling nearly 7 minutes of the 30-minute film (roughly half of the speech’s total length), King’s words include condemnations of the “vicious racists” in Mississippi and call out George Wallace for his support for state’s rights and the policy of nullification.
Engage in Rhetorical Criticism of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” Address
- Listening to King’s speech in the context of the film
- The argument in King’s Speech
Theme 5
James Blue’s film captures the most effective antiracist action in the US 20th century
Identify Anti-Racist Federal Policies Resulting from the Long Civil Rights Movement
- The Conflicted Legacy of the Long Civil Rights Movement and the March on Washington
- Policies Enacted as a Result of the Long Civil Rights Movement and the March on Washington for Jobs and Justice
The March on Washington helped give birth to three specific Presidential and Congressional actions: The War on Poverty, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which:
-
-
- Reduced poverty
- Ended legal segregation
- Created the conditions for a multiracial democracy
- Improved the material well-being of Blacks and whites
-
President Johnson’s War on Poverty, which he announced in his January 8, 1964, State of the Union address, helped reduce poverty by 50 percent by 1973. [12]
Clay Risen holds that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is “the bill of the century.” With its 11 titles, the act, according to one assessment, “changed the face of everyday life . . . and employment” in the United States. Hersch and Shinall observe: “The repercussions of the 1964 Act have been so great over the past 50 years that it is difficult to imagine what the United States would look like in its absence.”
The Justice Department reported that in some 53 cities in 19 states, approximately two thirds of hotels, motels, chain restaurants, bars, and libraries had been desegregated within four months after the June signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.108 Title VII of the Civil Rights Act “had a dramatic effect on regional labor markets, breaking down segregation barriers and opening a wide range of job opportunities to blacks for the first time.” [13]
Between 1964 and 1968, the southern states covered by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 saw a black voter registration rate increase of 67 percent (from 33.8 percent in 1964 to 56.5 percent in 1968). While only 6.7 percent of blacks were registered to vote in Mississippi before the act was passed, by1967, the percentage climbed to 59.8 percent. By 2012, 73.1 percent of African Americans were registered to vote, 2 percent higher than the national average. [14]
According to a thorough empirical study conducted by Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen:
The United States has made tremendous strides since the civil rights movement, in both dismantling formal institutions that were barriers to the American Dream and promoting an American creed of equality. Rulings like Brown v. Board of Education and important federal legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has made great progress in eradicating unjust institutions [15]
Stanford’s Gavin Wright, the dean of economic historians of the American South, has confirmed that the civil rights movement improved the material conditions of both blacks and whites, and the successful integration of Blacks did not lead to the displacement or replacement of whites. The title of his book captures the evidence that both blacks and whites “shared the prize” of desegregation and integration. [16]
Further Resources
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (2005): 1233–63.
David Lucander (2014). Winning the War for Democracy: the March on Washington Movement, 1941-1946. (Urbana, University of Illinois Press).
Letter, Edward R. Murrow to Lyndon Johnson 1/17/64, WHCF, Box 5, LBJ Library.
Joseph, P. E. (2014). Stokely: A Life. (New York, Basic Civitas).
Murray Kempton, “The March on Washington,” New Republic, September 14, 1963, p. 19.
William P. Jones (2013). “The Forgotten Radical History of the March on Washington.” Dissent 60(2): 74.
William P. Jones (2015). “The Unknown Origins of the March on Washington: Civil Rights Politics and the Black Working Class.” Labor 7: 35.
Chenoweth, E. and M. J. Stephan (2011). Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. New York, Columbia University Press. 201.
Chenoweth, E. and M. J. Stephan (2016). “How the world is proving Martin Luther King right about nonviolence.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/01/18/how-the-world-is-proving-mlk-right-about-nonviolence/
Gary May (2015). Bending toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy. Durham (London, Duke University Press), 201.
Zeynep Tufekci, (2017). Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. (New Haven, Yale University Press): 171.
William Sullivan to A. C. Belmont, Federal Bureau of Investigation (August 1963)
William P. Jones, “The Unknown Origins of the March on Washington: Civil Rights Politics and the Black Working Class,” Labor 7 (2015): 35.
Council of Economic Advisers, “The War on Poverty 50 Years Later: A Progress Report,” Washington D.C.: Council of Economic Advisors, 2014.
Clay Risen, The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014).
Joni Hersch and Jennifer Bennett Shinall, “Fifty Years Later: The Legacy of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 34 (2015): 425.
Gavin Wright, Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 97, 10.
Elizabeth U. Cascio and Ebonya Washington, “Valuing the Vote: The Redistribution of Voting Rights and State Funds Following the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 129 (2013): 379–80.
Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen, Deep Roots (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2018), 75.
Gavin Wright, Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013).
