White Supremacy and Confederate Monuments Timeline Activity

This is an activity that uses data collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center tracking the use of Confederate symbols in the form of monuments, courthouses, schools, and other public amenities, including parks, highways and holidays.

The activity takes place in 3 parts:

The first part is that students assemble and label a timeline that tracks the rise of Confederate symbols from 1860 to the present day (2016.)

In the second part, students match dates to 10 different events in Civil Rights history, including the establishment of the KKK, the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and major court decisions (Plessy vs. Ferguson, Brown vs. The Board of Education.)

In the third part, students examine the timeline and and find the correlation between major events in the history of US Civil Rights and the use of Confederate symbolism.