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https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/229/Gandhi_Statue.jpg
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Statue of Mohandas Gandhi
Text
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TAC
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Rick Parker, Middle School Social Studies Teacher
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September 2018
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Statue of Mohandas Gandhi
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In front of the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta you’ll find this statue of Mohandas Gandhi. For years I have used a photograph of this statue to introduce our Indian Independence unit to my 7th graders with the prompt “Why is this statue of Gandhi in front of the King Center?” My students are already familiar with the American civil rights movement, and this inquiry was always a great hook to learn about Gandhi’s system of nonviolent civil disobedience, which Dr. King utilized so effectively.
Recently a substitute teacher asked a question that made me re-evaluate this prompt and the lesson I’d been teaching. During a casual conversation at lunch she asked me, “Why is Gandhi’s statue in front of the King Center?” I started to talk about satyagraha and how King found inspiration from Gandhi’s methods of protesting injustice, when she stopped me. “No, why is a statue of a racist in front of Dr. King’s museum?”
I was taken aback. It’s true, Gandhi’s racism toward people of African descent is well documented. He wrote about the black people of South Africa using derogatory terms like “Kaffir” and lamented the indignity of being imprisoned with native Africans. He spoke out against forcing Indians to share the same communities with Africans and condemned the denigration of Indian genes through marriage with black people.
Without realizing it, I had been teaching a sanitized version of Gandhi’s legacy. This moment opened a whole box of questions. For example:
- Surely, Dr. King knew about Gandhi’s views. Yet, he chose to ignore these for the sake of what he could accomplish by using Gandhi as a role model. What does that say about Dr. King? Was he selectively ignoring the racism or was his character so strong that he could look past this?
- Who “owns” history? Historians who seek to paint the clearest, most accurate record of the past? Or people who use those lessons for their own purposes?
- Was my pride in engaging students with history in a way that was easy for them to digest misplaced? Have I been doing them a disservice all these years?
So, I’m embracing a new approach. History is messy and needs to be taught that way. Exposing students to all sides of a story gives them a better chance to explore the nuances and form their own opinions. It can also give them a deeper appreciation for figures like Dr. King.
Title
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An epiphany over a statue of Gandhi
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epiphany-over-gandhi
Atlanta, Georgia
Civil Disobedience
Gandhi, Mohandas
History
History Education
King, Martin Luther
Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change
Memory
Racism
Statues
Teachers & Teaching
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https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/7/100/298d45c12d154180a8bea1243f1e48d7--india-style-vintage-stamps.jpg
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Vintage stamp from India
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#Humanitiesinclass
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This collection includes contributions from members of the National Humanities Center's education project Humanities in Class. The project aims to develop a deeper portfolio of curricular materials and help set standards for humanities education that highlight differences among humanities disciplines.
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
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Abu’s Afsanas
Description
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My Abu (‘father’ in Urdu) is my favorite storyteller ... I grew up with stories of his childhood in India and later in his life: he and his best friend, Shafi, climbing neem trees in Puna; them trying to get back at a bully, but having their elaborate plan—with one of them crouching behind the bully while the other pushed him over—completely backfire (getting beat-up for a second time!); them tapping people’s heads from atop a wall as the clueless souls walked by not knowing what just happened; traveling by boat from India to Zanzibar, where my uncle was stationed on the hill opposite from the Sultan’s palace; stories of my grandfather, a famous detective who headed up the investigation of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi; my father coming to ‘America’ in 1959 as a Fulbright scholar to study engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and witnessing the burgeoning Civil Rights movement ... These were the stories that shaped me, my worldview, and piqued my interest in studying history ... And I haven’t even gotten into my mother’s stories of growing up in Peru! (N.B.: ‘Afsanas’ are short stories in Urdu.)
Subject
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Oral history—one of the oldest humanities.
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Oral history—one of the oldest humanities
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Abu
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Over the course of our lifetimes
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<a href="http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/humanities-in-class-guide-thinking-learning-in-humanities/">Omar H. Ali</a>, 46, Historian
Identifier
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abus-afsanas
Civil Rights
Fathers & Sons
Gandhi, Mohandas
Historians
India
Oral History
Storytelling