Why students are ignorant about the civil rights movement

The civil rights movement was once a footnote in Mississippi social studies classrooms, if it was covered at all. Then, in 2011, Mississippi became a "model" for other states when new social studies standards set an expectation that students learn civil rights in depth.

But despite those new expectations, most school districts in the state where the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till mobilized black Americans still use textbooks that give local civil rights milestones short shrift.

An analysis of Mississippi public school textbooks by the Hechinger Report and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting shows that, for at least some grades, all of the state’s 148 school districts rely on textbooks published before the model standards appeared as part of their social studies material.