Civil Rights Movements

Imagine that soldiers are standing guard to keep you from going to school. Then imagine that soldiers are called in help you enter your school. That's just what happened 40 years ago when nine black students wanted to attend Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. It was a crucial moment in the American civil rights movement, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. And it was one of the events that eventually helped bring greater equality for African Americans.

Imagine that soldiers are standing guard to keep you from going to school. Then imagine that soldiers are called in to help you enter your school. That's just what happened 40 years ago when nine black students wanted to attend Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. It was a crucial moment in the American civil rights movement, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. And it was one of the events that helped bring greater equality for African Americans.

"Students' Knowledge of Civil Rights History Has Deteriorated," one headline announced. "Civil Rights Movement Education 'Dismal' in American Schools," declared another. The alarming headlines, which appeared in newspapers across the country, grew out of a report released three weeks ago by the Southern Poverty Law Center, "Teaching the Movement," which claims that the civil rights movement is widely ignored in history classrooms. By not teaching it, the report claims, American education is "failing in its responsibility to educate its citizens to be agents of change.

The Rev. James Orange, who rose from foot soldier to leader in the civil rights movement and whose 1965 jailing set in motion events that ultimately led to the bloody Selma-to-Montgomery march in Alabama, died Saturday at Emory Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta. He was 65. Orange, who later became an organizer with the AFL-CIO and fought apartheid in South Africa, had gallbladder surgery last week, but the cause of his death was unknown, his daughter Jamida Orange said Sunday.

From "Do the Right Thing" to "Get on the Bus," director Spike Lee has made some of the most hard-edged and unsettling American films on racism and its effects. Yet none has been as moving as this, his first feature-length documentary, simply titled "4 Little Girls."

Octavio Gomez, a cameraman whose work put him at the center of the region's Mexican American civil rights movement and placed him by Ruben Salazar's side when the journalist was killed while covering a riot in 1970, has died. He was 71. Gomez, one of the first Latinos to work locally as a television cameraman, died of a heart attack Dec. 30 at a friend's home in Los Angeles, his family said.

A spirit of elation--that seems to be the best word--flows through a two-hour special Sunday (8 p.m., KCAL Channel 9) that tries to lay witness to the next steps in the march toward civil rights. "Legacy of a Movement" is edited from a discussion among a panel of children of "the Movement" during the National Youth Summit Conference sponsored last October in Washington, D.C., by the Congressional Black Caucus.

Ralph Johns vividly remembers the day 35 years ago when four black students staged a sit-in at a whites-only lunch counter at a Greensboro, N.C., Woolworth's store. For years he had been trying to persuade black students to commit such an act, recalled Johns, 79, a La Habra resident who then owned a clothing store in Greensboro, where he served as the first white vice president of the local chapter of the NAACP, organizing numerous demonstrations to promote human rights.

Joanne Grant, 74, who documented the grass-roots civil rights movement in print and film, died Jan. 8 in a Manhattan hospital of heart failure. Her 1968 book, "Black Protest," was among the first to detail the origins of the civil rights movement. The book remains required reading in many African American history classes. Grant's 1969 book, "Confrontation on Campus," described sit-ins and other protests at Columbia University and elsewhere.