In the Northwest, Whitman College Answers Call to Improve Knowledge of Civil Rights Movement - Higher Education

In the Northwest, Whitman College Answers Call to Improve Knowledge of Civil Rights Movement - Higher Education: The 2011 Southern Poverty Law Center education report graded the states on what they require public schools to teach about a nation-changing era—the Civil Rights Movement. Thirty-five states flunked.

After the report, titled “Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education 2011,” revealed the state of civil rights education, only one college contacted the author. That college—located in a state that received an F—is a small liberal arts institution in an isolated region of southeastern Washington, best known for growing sweet onions and having scores of wineries.

The upshot of the email exchange and follow-up phone conversations is a pioneering educational program that Whitman College launched with the local school district in Walla Walla, Wash. This February marked the third time that Whitman students volunteered in Walla Walla classrooms to teach the next generation about such historic episodes as the student sit-ins at a lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., and Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from the Birmingham, Ala., jail.