“When we tell a complicated story about the civil rights movement, we refuse to sanitize the past. Students learn about the realities of racism, systems of racial control and racial violence that prompted the civil rights movement and persisted after 1968. Showing students that racism wore both institutional and individual faces will help them understand just how large the achievements of the movement were and see the work that remains.”

from “Practice 4. Resist Telling a Simple Story.” in The March Continues: Five Essential Practices for Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance program