by Kristin L. Gustafson, University of Washington Bothell

When Sid Bedingfield moved from South Carolina to take a job in Minnesota, he soon realized that the students in the new state faced a gap in their knowledge of U.S. history, especially the African American history that was unfamiliar to him. Bedingfield had a tool to address this. But it needed to be adapted.

These were “smart, well-educated kids” who told him that they knew little about the Abolitionist Movement, Reconstruction, lynching, Brown v. Board of Education, and Jim Crow. “I think they thought that African American history was something that happened elsewhere,” he said of his students at the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication. They identified as progressive and felt immersed in a forward-looking community. This history, though, “was not a Minnesota issue.”

Bedingfield knew it was a Minnesota issue, both in the state’s past and in its present. African American history was especially relevant now because of changing demographics in the Twin Cities and statewide and increasing inequality in education and income. “The gap is growing and not shrinking,” he said. “There is great concern here.”

Bedingfield used these data to drive this point home for his students.

• Median income among black households in the Twin Cities declined from $31,500 in 2013 to $27,500 in 2014, which is close to the bottom nationally and compared to an overall median income of $61,400.
• Poverty rates among Twin Cities’ African Americans are estimated at 38 percent.
• The percentage of people of color in the Twin Cities is about 25 percent, up from about 1 percent in 1960. Statewide the percentage of people of color is 19 percent and projected to reach 25 percent in 2035.

So to help the Minnesota students connect the past to the present, Bedingfield redesigned a class that he once taught in South Carolina. Success depended on making it local.

Digging deeper
Bedingfield grew up in the Deep South. The majority of his students in South Carolina were African Americans. He and they shared base knowledge of Civil Rights history. He and Kathy Roberts Forde developed and taught a class for those South Carolina students. It built on that base knowledge. She taught it first; then he taught it.

They had developed the course during a 2011 summer fellowship they attended together at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, “African American Struggles for Freedom and Civil Rights, 1865–1965.” The National Endowment for Humanities Institute for College Teachers funded the four-week class that immersed them in history. Instructors included Waldo Martin, Patricia Sullivan, Eric Foner, Steven Hahn, Kevin Boyle, Leon Litwack, Gerald Early, Bettye-Collier Thomas, Dorothy Burnham, Margaret Burnham, Esther Cooper Jackson, Peter Guralnick, Raymond Gavins, Kimberly Phillips, and Paniel Joseph.

Bedingfield proposed revising the South Carolina course to fit the needs of the Minnesota students. It was “a way to help bring diversity to the curriculum in a big way in a sense that the whole course is about African American history and mass media.” He adapted the new class, “Case Study: The African American Freedom Struggle and the Mass Media,” within curriculum oriented toward media in American history and law. He took things out; he added things to fit. The idea was to have these students who had not studied African American history, and especially local African American history, to dig deeper, he said. The class also introduced mass communication to students outside the school who were interested in African American history.

His nearly all-white class of 48 students studied the “larger history” of African American and U.S. history and mass media. Students engaged each class period with secondary and primary sources. For example, the first week of the semester focused on popular culture and historical memory, using chapters from Patrick Washburn’s book on the early Black Press, clips from Selma, and an excerpt from two primary sources—the Appeal and Freedom’s Journal. Students studied the Abolitionist Press and slave resistance in Antebellum America, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow and the role of the press in the Wilmington Riot, lynching and media, W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, The Birth of a Nation and black protest, the Chicago Defender, the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Migration, the Communist Party, the New Deal, the Black Press, sedition and the “Double V” campaign during World War II, Brown v. Board of Education and school desegregation, Martin Luther King Jr., the Freedom Riders, and Times v. Sullivan.

Alongside this national history, students researched local issues. Focusing on national and local at the same time helped students see recurring historical issues.

Bedingfield’s students explored civil rights and African American history “right here in Minnesota” for their research project. They worked to explore a history they had not understood before and to drill down to what is happening today. He said that the students were “intrigued and surprised” by their local history.

One project focused on the Rhondo neighborhood and the destruction of this middle-class black neighborhood to make way for a freeway. The student studied it from the perspective of how mainstream media depicted this in the 1960 and 1970s, framing it as progress and replacing slums with transit. This was “eye opening to students,” he said.

Another project focused on a 1930 case of a black family who bought a home in South Minneapolis and were attacked by mobs of white people who rejected them. The students studied coverage of the battle to get this home on the National Historic Register.

Bedingfield used a two-part module to get them into primary sources. First a research librarian came and did a review of common newspaper and magazine databases. “I wanted students to see how easy it was to explore primary sources.” Second, students used the Minnesota History Center and its civil rights section as a leaping off point to look at how students could find primary sources concerning state and metro issues. This demystified primary sources for them “and showed that many useful ones are merely a click away—if you know where to look,” he said.

As journalism educators and media historians, we have excellent classroom practices and curriculum designs like the one discussed here to share with one another. As teaching chair, I continue to invite you to share your best practices that encourage pedagogies of diversity, collaboration, community, and justice. Send them to me at gustaf13@uw.edu.