Friday, February 24, 2012
Flickr
All, I linked our blog to Flickr and transferred the photos over to it. Everyone in the class has permission to join the group. To access the photos, you need to sign in. You can do this using your gmail, yahoo or facebook username and password. Once you join the group, you should be able to share your photos and post comments. I hope this works!
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AMAZING!!
ReplyDeleteI got flickr and saw photos!!! YAY!!
YAY is right! It's finally working - you can see the photos i've posted. now, the next step is to see if you & others in the class can post their photos to the same site.
ReplyDeleteLiz, I agree that the smiling faces are truly astonishing. I don't know if you can see it, but in one of the photos there are young girls standing next to and behind the victim's body. It's clear that these people never considered the moral and ethical dimensions to their behavior. To me, this says a lot about the power of social conditioning. The same mass psychology was at work in Nazi Germany. The worst atrocities can become socially acceptable under certain conditions.
ReplyDeleteI really think every American should see the lynching pictures, gory as they are. Then everyone would understand why we needed a Civil Rights movement. The pictures make clear that long after slavery was abolished, African Americans were still not free from terror. Something had to be done because, as I think I noted in one of the captions, crimes against African Americans were not seen as crimes and were not prosecuted under the law. Today this seems unbelievable - yes, it strikes us as unbelievable because we're living in post-Civil Rights Movement America.
I think the way we teach our children about Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement does not convey the horror of what went on before. Without a grasp of this horror - in other words, without being told the truth about the race situation in this country - it's hard for students to understand the urgency and necessity of the CRM. These students grow into adults who become politicians, lawyers, journalists, pundits on cable TV - and teachers. If teachers don't have a firm grasp on the pre-Civil Rights situation, they can't very well pass it on to their students.
We tend to think students can't handle the truth, yet we let them play violent video games, TV shows and the like. As you can probably tell, this bothers me a lot. It's just my perspective, though, and I realize it's a perspective not shared by a majority of Americans. I hope everyone in the class realizes that they are entitled to their own perspective and I do not expect them to agree with me just because I'm the teacher. But I do feel morally obligated to share lynching photographs with people who haven't seen them, since the fact that this even took place is an important part of American history.