Have the courage to speak for justice?
“That’s gonna make you tired, tired, tired.” — Rosa Parks speaking to EJI founder, Bryan Stevenson
The first year I taught Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in my freshmen English class (many, many years ago), my division head told me that he didn’t believe Atticus Finch, the attorney at the center of the novel, was a realistic character. “No one could be that good,” he said. It took me years to realize my division head was actually saying that he was not that good, that he didn’t believe he could be that good.
He was wrong. Plenty of people are as good as Atticus — better, even. But it’s easy to doubt or deny heroism, whether it exists in the pages of a novel or in the struggles of real life. If we don’t acknowledge courage in the face of injustice, we don’t have to live up to its expectations either. But without this courage, life’s most painful crises are without remedy. If it weren’t for the courage of people like Atticus Finch, we would have no chance of improving the suffering and degradation all too common in our world.
Luckily, thousands of people fight injustice courageously, steadily, and anonymously every single day. Bryan Stevenson, Adam Foss, Khin Omar, Claudia Samayoa, and Cecelia T.M. Danuweli are just a few examples of those currently devoting their lives to this struggle.
If you are a student in my class this quarter, you will have the chance to become acquainted with some of these people and with the causes that motivate them. Each of us can find the courage to speak for justice.
Step 1: Discover some of the most troubling injustices in the world today. We will begin by watching Bryan Stevenson’s TED talk, “We need to talk about injustice.” Use the work completion folder I have created for you on our Schoology page to become familiar with a variety of current problems and topics. Here is a link to a playlist of TED talks devoted to the topic of justice.
Step 2: Pick the injustice you would most like to speak for and learn everything you can about it. Begin your research by creating a Twitter account and using the “list” function to collect 10 people and/or organizations devoted to your cause. Through your Twitter list, you will be able to follow these organizations as they Tweet links to the most recent information about your topic. Next, create a Flipboard magazine in which you collect 15–20 articles and/or videos about your topic. For each article or video, include at least three notes showing that you have read and thought carefully about the piece. Turn in the link to your Flipboard magazine on Schoology along with a working bibliography listing your sources in MLA format. Here are instructions for formatting your bibliography according to MLA standards.
Step 3: Create a 5-minute video presentation in which you speak for justice. You can present a video of yourself giving a speech in the format of a TED talk, or you can use Adobe Spark to record yourself with music and images to support your speech, or you can use free online software like PowToons to creatively animate your words, or you can create an iMovie including video from other sources. As long as your oral presentation involves your own voice and communicates with knowledge, clarity, and feeling, you may use whatever presentation app you’d like. Here is the grading rubric for your presentation.
As you research and develop an oral presentation about your justice issue, we will be reading Harper Lee’s great novel about Atticus Finch’s struggle for justice — To Kill a Mockingbird. Here are the directions for annotating your book as you read, and here is our reading schedule, including quiz dates. Work completion folders are always due at midnight on the night before a quiz.
At the end of the quarter, you will write your final paper. Here are the prompts for which you will collect quotations and ideas as you work. Welcome to the struggle for justice!
“Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the back either. Just refuse to bear them.”
― William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust
