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...to have any real meaning. The subjects of our explorations are, therefore, almost unbelievable to the students. They simply shut down, or they become apathetic or alienated. (1)
As a labor historian who has taught at both large universities and small colleges in the South during my brief career, I occasionally have experienced this phenomenon when I discuss the rise of the industrial union movement in the wake of the Great Depression. This period typically occupies a key point in the American and African American history surveys that I have taught over the years. Yet, because the labor movement that rose in the wake of the Great Depression has been in steep decline for decades, most of today's students have little knowledge or understanding of unions or their important role in American history. Often, when I ask students if they have relatives in unions, for example, less than a handful of the 35 or 40 students in the class will raise their hands. Sometimes students who have relatives, even parents who are members of unions, are unaware of the ways that the labor movement has touched their lives.
Music has become an important tool in my efforts to overcome these obstacles. First, music allows students to hear people describing the world around them in their own words. This helps students understand how people in the past made sense of the times in which they lived. Second, music draws students into the subject in ways that typical lectures, and even other primary sources, cannot. It lessens the gulf between the students and the material and opens a window through which the students can gain a deeper historical understanding.
In the following essay I will describe how I use music in my discussions of the rise of the industrial union movement in Birmingham, Alabama. In this classroom exercise I play several songs written and performed by African American union activists in the Birmingham District from the 1930s to the 1950s. The discussions that arise from this presentation allow students to make important connections among the generation of African Americans who built the industrial union movement, the activists who later led the assault on Jim Crow during the civil rights movement, and themselves.
Though my discussion in this essay is focused on the labor movement in Birmingham and the classes I have taught in that city, the techniques I use in this exercise transcend geographic and topical constraints. Music, I believe, may be employed to help students understand other important eras and movements in American history. The discussion that follows suggests ways that teachers might adopt music to help students understand a wide range of topics and issues that are not limited to a particular historical context.
Since the fall of 2003, I have taught African American history surveys at Miles College, a small, historically black school located just outside Birmingham, in the industrial suburb of Fairfield. The formal titles of these classes are HI 308, African American History, and SS 101, the African American Experience. Mostly junior and senior political science majors make up the African American History class, while the African American Experience, a survey of black history in the United States, is typically filled with freshmen and sophomores. My discussion of the growth of the industrial union movement in the early 1930s focuses on Birmingham and the role that African Americans played in its dramatic success.
The centrality of Birmingham to the industrial union-building project during the New Deal era cannot be exaggerated. As the industrial center of the South, the city served as the union stronghold in the region. Beginning in the early 1930s, labor organizations identified with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) made inroads in the region's mines and mills. Because they were under the auspices of the CIO, these industrial unions were interracial organizations, welcoming both black and white workers into their fold. Typically, however, CIO unions followed a policy that left these unions in white control, regardless of their racial makeup. (2) Despite this fact, many of the unions--particularly in the coal and iron ore mining industries--had African-American majorities. In Birmingham, historians have argued, black workers made up the backbone of the industrial labor movement. (3)
Largely as a result of the success...
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