Noah Lerner doesn't remember hearing much about the civil rights movement when he was in public school. Now a senior at a small liberal arts college in rural Washington state, Lerner aims to ensure some students learn more about a key moment in America's history.
Whitman College is partnering with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights organization based in Montgomery, Ala., to help its students teach schoolchildren about the civil rights movement in Walla Walla, Wash.
The small city known more for its sweet onions and wine in the state's southeastern corner might seem an unlikely place to engage students in the topic of racial justice: Blacks make up less than 3 percent of the population and even less at the college, and Washington State sits many miles from the movement's heated center in the Deep South.
But the inland Pacific Northwest has long garnered attention for White supremacist activity—just last year, police rerouted a Martin Luther King Jr. parade in Spokane after a bomb was found along the original route—and the rapidly growing Latino population has raised its own concerns about civil rights.
Nearly one-third of the 6,000 students enrolled in Walla Walla schools are Hispanic.
Washington also was one of 35 states to receive a failing grade last fall on a Southern Poverty Law Center study examining state standards and curriculum requirements for the modern civil rights movement.
Some states, particularly in the West, allow local districts to dictate curriculum, which could attribute for some of the low scores. But the findings are in line with weaknesses in student achievement in U.S. history overall, where just 12 percent of high school seniors showed proficiency on federal tests in 2010.
The farther away you get from the South, the greater the chance civil rights education will be lacking in the classroom, said Maureen Costello, director of the center's Teaching Tolerance project. But, she added, the irony is that civil rights violations happened everywhere and continue today.
