Even though I teach English courses, I always make sure that history gets included in whatever we’re discussing. I usually use Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow in my Composition I course, and one day when it’s safe to travel again, I hope to actually take some students down to Alabama to the Civil Rights Institute. I’ve written some posts about Birmingham from when I went in 2018 to a conference, so you can check those out here and here. I’d never been to Birmingham before and knew Birmingham was the center of a lot of civil rights movements, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how powerful that history can be felt in the city. In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I wanted to highlight my visit to the Institute.

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