This digital collection presents primary sources from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries and the Wisconsin Historical Society that provide a window onto Milwaukee’s civil rights history. During the 1960s, community members waged protests, boycotts, and legislative battles against segregation and discriminatory practices in schools, housing, and social clubs. The efforts of these activists and their opponents are vividly documented in the primary sources found here, including photographs, unedited news film footage, text documents, and oral history interviews. This website also includes educational materials, including a bibliography and timeline, to enhance understanding of the primary sources. The March on Milwaukee Civil Rights History Project seeks to make Milwaukee’s place in the national struggle for racial equality more accessible, engaging, and interactive. Project staff selected the primary sources included in this collection for their completeness, legibility, and historical importance. To the best of our knowledge, we included only materials for which we hold copyright, for which we have secured the permission of other copyright holders, or that we have identified as copyright orphaned works. The materials reproduced in this digital collection are only a selection of the primary sources documenting Milwaukee's civil rights history held by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Researchers should not assume a one-to-one correspondence between digital folders and their counterparts in physical collections.
Type of Material:
Collection
Recommended Uses:
The best use for the site would be to teach a social studies or history unit on Milwaukee's civil rights history as a way of making the point that northern cities had significant racial problems--that it was not only the South that needed reform. Teachers could design a number of different kind of assignments including in-class analysis of particular documents, a homework assignment requiring document-based analysis of several documents, quizzing on the timeline or key terms prior to other work with the documents, or even role playing exercises. Teachers could also use the photos, videos aired on the news at the time, or audio interviews as illustrations for lectures on the topic.
Technical Requirements:
Contains mp3 audio clips (transcribed to PDF. Otherwise the website can be accessed in any way.
Identify Major Learning Goals:
The purpose of the site is to provide a collection of digital materials about Milwaukee's civil rights history, particularly during the 1960s. It is trying to "make Milwaukee's place in the national struggle for racial equality more accessible, engaging, and interactive." Most of the site is primary sources, although it also provides a map, timeline, key terms, and bibliography.
Target Student Population:
• College
• High School
• Middle School
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:
Students would need to know in general what the civil rights movement was and approximately when it occurred. The timeline includes nationally important events as well as developments in Milwaukee, so detailed knowledge of the movement is unnecessary. Some knowledge of how to navigate in an Internet browser is required. For extensive use of the site, knowledge of the key terms (including important people involved) would assist in navigation.
Content Quality
Rating:
Strengths:
* The timeline includes national as well as local events, making it easier for users to put the events in Milwaukee into a bigger framework.
* The range of primary sources is extensive; even though it is not everything available on the topic, there are documents from the perspective of the mayor, other politicians, and civil rights leaders.
* The sources include video, photos, audio, and text, all well chosen to illustrate the subject.
Concerns:
* There are no lesson plans or suggestions for use directed at teachers.
Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool
Rating:
Strengths:
• Good resource for research assignments
• Ancillary to classroom learning
Concerns:
* No particular learning goals are stated, nor does the site make clear what individuals using it should know beforehand.
* Effectiveness really depends on the ingenuity of the teacher using the materials.
Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty
Rating:
Strengths:
* The interface is visually restful and appealing.
* The home page conveys the purpose of the collection.
* It has an assisted search feature on the home page that uses word cloud principles; those terms searched most often appear larger than others.
Concerns:
* The organization of the site is not intuitive to me. It seems to assume that those visiting will want to search or browse the collection, perhaps because there are a total of about 800 items.
* The links to the map, timeline, key terms, and bibliography are far less obvious than the rest of the site's features.
Creative Commons:
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