MSadler_TestimonyProject

Bonnie Cochran, who lived during the Civil Rights Movement, shares her experiences as a teacher during that time. She taught in recently integrated schools and witnessed the impact of the movement on students and teachers. She recalls a particular event, the March on Washington, where she asked her students about its importance and saw their varying perspectives. Bonnie discusses how the Civil Rights Movement changed her approach to teaching and influenced her life in general. She learned to adapt her lessons to match the students' interests and abilities. Bonnie also reflects on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the subsequent riots and protests, highlighting the need for conversations and understanding in order to move forward as a country. Can you please state your name? My name is Bonnie Cochran. Great. Where were you living during the Civil Rights Movement and what was your daily life like? Well, the Civil Rights Movement was a long time, but let's just take the 20th century Civil Rights Movement from the 50s to the present. And I was living in, first, Pennsylvania at my college, and then New Haven, Connecticut, and then suburban Washington, D.C. And during that time period, I went from being a student to being a student teacher to being a beginning teacher to being a real teacher to being a retired teacher. So how did the Civil Rights Movement impact what you did throughout your daily life? Oh, it was fantastic. I was teaching in a junior high school and then a high school. I was teaching in schools that were recently integrated, first in New Haven, Connecticut, and then in Montgomery County, Maryland. Everything was impacted. Kids and teachers were experiencing changes that they had never had before as schools truly integrated. So can you elaborate a little bit more on how the Civil Rights impacted your job as a teacher? It's almost, it's just total, it's global. Kids are coming to school with kids they had never been with before, white kids and black kids. Or kids are coming to school with kids they had never been to school with before, but they knew from their neighborhoods that they had played with in their churches. Name any possible combination, and somebody exemplified it. My day was, and I was dealing with kids from beginning to end, and they were nervous or anticipatory or whatever, depending on what their parents were like. So some of them were uncertain, some of them ready for a fight, some of them were ready to do a very exciting thing that they had never done before. And some were uncertain and some were confident. That's really cool. Can you describe a particular event that you either participated in or found really impactful for you? Well, there are so many, Maddie. I really don't know what I could describe. The first one is dramatic because it was the first week of school. It was the first year that I taught in New Haven, Connecticut in a junior high that had recently integrated. So there were about half black kids, about half white kids. And the event was, that first week of school was 1968, and it was the March on Washington where Martin Luther King first gave the I Have a Dream speech, and I was teaching American history. You don't get closer than that. And I asked my classes, whose names I did not know yet and whose appearances I could barely distinguish because I had never dealt with black kids in my life, and I asked them what was important about that event and how was the history, and they just let it go. They just told everything they thought was important. Some kids were not very articulate, and they said things like, we could get our freedom. Some kids were extremely optimistic about how things were going to change and that their futures were going to open up. Other kids were a little more pessimistic, and some kids said, nah, nothing is going to change. I hope we get home before we have a fight. Not only was that all impactful to me, I had to think about how I was going to teach and what I was going to ask them to do to help them to bring out the optimism and to control the pessimism. What were some of the ways you did that when you were teaching? By looking at the kids' questions and abilities, I tried to figure out assignments that would match. Don't forget, I was a first-year teacher. I think I prayed a lot. I always tried to come up with classes that would be matching their interests, but also with assignments that they could do. Since I was such a beginning teacher, I didn't always know what they would be. I got a lot of advice from experienced teachers in my building, and I just did the best I could from day to day. How does your experience being alive and teaching during the Civil Rights Movement influence your life now? It really influenced every part of my life. I worried about it when I went to bed. I thought about it when I got up. Most of my ideas run through that as a background. I was teaching in New Haven, Connecticut, which is an industrial town. Yale is there. Yale is where I went. But Yale is not all Ivy and New Haven. It's certainly not all suburban. So I was always trying to figure out ways to make the Civil Rights Movement in the big world relevant to what they were understanding, which was not hard because they were seeing it in the news and taking part. Let me hear that question again. So how does your experience being alive and teaching during the Civil Rights Movement influence your life today? It changed the way I looked at teaching and the way I looked at students and how they could develop. And it changed really the way I read history in terms of the books I read, the colleagues I mixed with, the plans I made for the future, my commitment to continue to be a teacher. It really... It's hard to say it was 100%, but it was the single biggest thing. How are you going to teach black kids? How are you going to teach black and white kids together? How are you going to try to help them build sort of constructive future? And how are you going to have a good time? I was a young teacher. Was there any other moment besides the March on Washington that you specifically remember from teaching or a life lesson you learned from teaching during that time? One life lesson I know I learned from teaching and from that part of it was the old adage, if you first you don't succeed, try again. Because I learned, and along with that, I learned that students can be extremely forgiving if they trust you. So I would come in and I would say, okay kids, we're going to do this today. We'll have vocabulary words or we'll have events or we'll do something that's related to history. But if it didn't work, I would say, oh, I guess I had a good idea that I haven't figured out how to make the good idea work yet. What else should we do? And if you tell them that in an honest way, kids are almost always understanding and forgiving. And sometimes they even come up with a good idea. So that was both being honest with students and if at first you don't succeed, try again. And sometimes when you try again, it works. What does it work? When I say that as a teacher, it means that your goal in doing that lesson is for the kids to learn something. It might be the five characteristics of Abraham Lincoln or it might be one of the most important results of the Civil War. I mean, you have a history class. You can think of examples of what they learned. And if what I would try to do would help them remember those things, then I figure it was pretty good success. Do you still do things like that now? Like try it again when you don't succeed and being really honest with people? Yes. That's great. Well, thank you so much. Can you tell me about your experience of the assassination of Martin Luther King? Oh God, that was so amazing. First of all, it was five years later, April of 1968. If I remember correctly, the King was killed on my birthday, April 4th, 1968. I was a young teacher at Wheaton High School. And when we got home, the assassination was in the south. I lived in the district. I taught in Maryland. When I heard the news, it was already clear what was happening. I heard on the radio on the way home from school that's how far away technologically we are from present day. And already there was rioting and burning and protest. One of the places that experienced that tremendously was 18th Street and T Street in the district, right where U Street is now. And people were out doing all their demonstrating things, burning tires, making noise, rioting, and people were afraid. I think school was closed the next day. I think traffic was really, really stalled. People were having trouble getting home from school or work. And there were curfews because it was dangerous to be outside. That went on for several days, with all kinds of important personal, political, local leaders coming forth, church groups right and left, trying to bring order and peace to a very unruly crowd and to make things safe and peaceful again. And everybody then asked all the questions about why, why, why, why, why, why. Is this so dangerous? And why are they so angry? From the other side, the questions were things like, why are they so angry? Why are they so destructive? Why are they so unwilling to talk? And from the other side, the answer would be, or at the same time would be, one more person has been sacrificed to this awful circumstance of segregation and inequality. And it's one more answer to how long do we have to wait? Why we can't wait anymore? This is going to change. It's got to change now. And the riots and everything that happened afterwards just showed that many people were at their overflow point, and that's what we saw. One of the results, civil rights legislation, people who before just didn't see that there was an issue saw that, although to them it was peripheral, to many people it was central because it got in the way of achieving their hopes and dreams and potential themselves. And after that, there would be studies and books and conferences and groups and churches trying to meet together to bring about conversational pathways to find ways to go forward together as a country. In a lot of ways, it was very much like nowadays when people were saying, oh, we have to do something. Our country is just stood apart. We're self-polarized. Well, I hesitate to say the beginning of polarization, but it was like that, and many people who truly were patriotic and loved it here, and I put myself in that group for sure, wanted to foster democracy and a way of having conversations that people could talk and listen and understand the goodness that they had in common. Great. Thank you. It was really, really a constructive time at the end. Thank you so much.